A miscellany of sports stories

Looking for their leaders

THERE WAS A moment of hapless irony after the last Olympics when Ken Egan, the silver medallist, woke up one morning. Dammit, Ken headed for New York instead of the National Stadium. He was supposed to weigh in and that night captain an Irish team to face the US in Dublin.

Egan’s no-show found the front pages of the tabloids and drew no small degree of opprobrium from the boxing dons, who felt he had besmirched the sport’s name. Many people agreed. Ken did too when he apologetically arrived home. After that episode Gary Keegan, who had devised the high performance structures for the Beijing Olympics, made an insightful remark. Paraphrasing, he said: It was partly our own fault. We’d prepared Ken for everything including the winning of an Olympic medal. But we didn’t prepare him for coming back to Ireland as a hero. That’s where we got it wrong.

Keegan spent some time in Beijing forlornly outside the Workers Gym looking in because of a confused fiasco involving a lack of accreditation. Keegan will be watching from the outside again and hold views as to who got what wrong. Not the boxers.

There is no high performance director in boxing. The European Championships in Moscow are scheduled for June and boxing has no one in situ because the Irish Sports Council (ISC) will not hand over the salary for that position and that of a chief executive. They are incensed with the way the Irish Amateur Boxing Association (IABA) handled the interview processes for both posts.

Billy Walsh, the successful coach who had been acting in the role, did not get the post.

The president of the association, Dominic O’Rourke, also a decorated coach, did.

Personalities are not the issue.

The ISC wouldn’t quibble if the combined cost of the two posts was to come to €200,000 a year or, if every five years the ISC would pay out approximately €1 million of taxpayer’s money. But for that cost the ISC want to see due process, transparent governance. A counter-argument is that they should not micro-manage federations. But if the best practice was not observed, don’t they have a point?

As the boxers look on in the hope of seeking guidance, motivation and a union coherently governed and capable of a level of leadership that will back them to more medals in London 2012, they see a Mexican stand-off. As in Irish athletics, they also depressingly see a gallery of lawyers on the horizon and the sport on a possible war footing.

To compound matters, this is also a lovers’ tiff. Boxing ticks all the ISC boxes and is historically the most successful Irish sport at the Olympics. They love Egan, they love Paddy Barnes and they loved the Darren “Dazzler” Sutherland.

ISC insiders anecdotally say that for ability and talent boxing is ranked at the top of Irish sport, in administration and governance at the bottom. Right now Egan will be wondering what all that fuss was about last year for his improvised trip to the Big Apple.

World Youth gold medallist Joe Ward may wonder who it is nurture his stunning talent from a 16-year-old world champion to an 18-year-old Olympic champion as his sport is set to self-implode.

Like Egan was a year ago, the boxers are again prepared for everything, except perhaps their officials.

Dubliner in main draw at junior slams

OVER-EXCITEMENT has rarely been a condition linked to Irish tennis. But Dubliner John Morrissey will provide Ireland with a player in the main draw at the junior events at Roland Garros and Wimbledon this year for the first time in the modern age (you want to know the most difficult question to answer at a tennis Grand Slam? “Where are all the Irish players?”).

Teenager Morrissey has been on the tour for the last few seasons illustrating, as Conor Niland has done since leaving college in the US, that the best way to improve is to live the life and learn how to win in places like Baku or Mumbai.

Currently ranked as the 36th best junior player in the world, Morrissey came to the attention of the International Tennis Federation, who invited him to take part in a development plan aimed at players who are inside the top 40 and from less developed tennis nations.

The top 40 is the cut-off point as the French Open, the hardest Slam to get in to, is unlikely to allow a player outside of that ranking to compete even if they are ITF approved.

The coaching they receive and the intense tournament play is designed to help the players make an impact internationally.

Morrissey also hopes to compete in the Youth Olympics next August in Singapore.

The team of 12 players consists of six boys and six girls and the run of tournaments listed include Santa Croce, Astrid Bowl, Offenbach and Roehampton, which are all Grade One events, the Italian Open, which is a Grade A event, as well as the two Grand Slams.

Sam Barry, who is also an Irish junior ranked inside the top 100, will have to go through the qualification process if he is to play on the red clay in Paris.

Ranked at 85, Barry is several hundred places higher than the next highest-ranked Irish player who is out at around 450.

Morrissey’s grind is paying off. He’s ahead of the Irish posse and this year has begun to play in senior ATP events, a significant step up.

He’s not yet challenging the precocious teenage golfing twins, 15-year-old Leona and Lisa Maguire. But he’s stepped on to a path.

Hockey association play hard ball

FORMER IRISH player and current English batsman Eoin Morgan might have hit 45 in the 20/20 World Cup but the Irish Hockey Association (IHA) is trying to avoid a similar embarrassment of being knocked around by one of their own.

The IHA is playing hard ball with Britain and in the process wrecking the heads of Mark Gleghorne and Iain Lewers, two wannabe British Olympians from Ulster. British officials asked the IHA to release the two players before their “decontamination period” of three years has been served. If a player jumps ship from one federation to another they must not play international hockey for a three-year period. A British requirement is that the two Irish boys get games for England, or, even Wales or Scotland, in a tournament such as the Commonwealth Games, before they swoop in. Otherwise it will be January 2011 when Gleghorne is free and July 2011 when Lewers is released.

The IHA are sticking to International Hockey Federation (FIH) regulations of three years’ compliance and despite a solicitors letter from one of the players they are not for budging. The IHA’s logic is simple.

They are upholding FIH law and from a competitive standpoint do not want to see the duo competing against an Irish team before they need to. Perhaps for the first time the IHA and not Ulster says no.

Rude lives up to his name

DURING THIS year’s golf tournament in Dubai, America’s Mark O’Meara noted that the swing of Rory McIlroy was better than that of Tiger Woods at the same age.

The comparison is tiresome now but O’Meara was the first. By the Sunday of that week, the then 20-year-old had won his first European Tour victory ahead of a world-class field.

It propelled him into the world top 20 prompting a columnist Jeff Rude in Golfweek magazine to write: “If long-time scribes such as myself haven’t even seen you, you can’t be in the top thirty in the world.”

Rude probably hadn’t heard of Ryo Ishikawa (left) either. The 18-year-old player, who is vying with McIlroy as the best young talent currently on the professional circuit, became the first player on a major tour to shoot a 58 on the Japan Golf Tour just hours before the Irish man shot a course record 62 to win the Quail Hollow Championship last Sunday.

But few are concerned with Rude’s blinkered view of world golf. Aside from the glaring pomposity to which “scribes” occasionally fall victim, he has since become the columnist known as “Rude by name, rude by nature”.

Greene goes for Games

CRIKEY, FORMER Leinster and Ireland number eight, television punter and Ryanair pilot Victor Costello is 40-years-old this year. Given he threw 17.15 metres in the first round of the Olympic shot putt event in 1992 in Barcelona, that seems just right.

The chances are Costello does not know Kris Greene, who until recently was a scrumhalf in the Leinster and Ireland under-20 rugby set-up. Greene was on the path towards becoming a rugby player, caught a glimpse of the Olympic dream as Costello did, and decided to chase it. Now he may go to the London Games in 2012 as an Irish weightlifter.

Greene, who studies at St Mary’s University College, Twickenham, was spotted in the gym by elite weightlifting coach David Woodhouse. Woodhouse saw something he liked in the way the rugby player was moving through his drills and convinced him to forfeit rugby for a few years and give the weightlifting a go.

Changes to Greene’s technique have already paid dividends, as he regularly completes clean-and-jerk lifts of 120kg compared to 90kg just a few months ago. With over two years to go to reach the Olympic standard, he is targeting another 30kg by the end of this year. By comparison, China’s Liao Hui took gold in Beijing with a 190kg clean and jerk, which we would venture is at least twice his own body weight. But Greene will be no pioneer if he makes it to London. Sammy Dalzell and Tommy Hayden competed for Ireland in weightlifting at the 1960 Rome Games while Frank Rothwell qualified for the 1972 Munich Games.