The Thunder Of The Gods

In the homesteads of the forties and fifties, ritual and reverence surrounded an O'Hehir performance. It was the centre piece of the day. The minute Sunday dinner - distinguishable by dessert - was over, you were warned not to stray too far if you wanted "to be called when Micheal comes on". Never "O'Hehir" or "Michael". Micheal was what himself and everybody else called him in those days.

The call always carne fifteen or twenty minutes before Micheal came on and these would be spent re-reading Fear Ciuin of the Sunday Press or Moondharrig of the Irish Catholic. Fidgeting and fighting never got far out of hand - "the whole lot of ye will go out if there's any more if it" was enough to quell them. Nicety of volume and tuning was often a matter for debate, and occasionally for ranncour. And then "Bail 0 Dhia oraibh go leir, a chairde ...

That clarion could, then across the airwaves, and can, even now across the years, bedew the eye a little.

O'Hehir's speed and fluency of delivery were unending wonders 0he never seemed to fall a scintilla behin d the play. With all that he also contrived to keep track of the doings of small dogs and great dignitaries. But the greatest wonder was his knowing all the players, even those of the humblest counties when their first round matches were featured. "He couldn't know all them; he's just making it up out of his head; who's going to contradict him?" ("Will ye be quiet or get out!") was a commmon response to an ornamental and unhesitating description of a fast passage between unknowns.

"Yerra, they couldn't be as good as that; he's just putting the exciteement into his voice!" ("Will ye be quiet or get out, ye won't be told again!") was another.

But he wasn't making it up, whattever about the excitement - and neither the one who could distinguish O'Hehir's real from his allegedly ersatz excitement, nor the means to do so, has ever been brought forward. To memorise the names and positions of thirty strangers, and to recognise them and describe their movements while they chased and contended in a kaleidoscopic swirl of ever-varying groupings of three or four or five, was, by any standards a formidable intellectual feat. To do it perfectly, many times over, as O'Hehir did long ago, was a feat not unworthy of Sequoyah.

After Confraternity on Sunday evenings, and in the tranquil afterrdawn hours of Monday fair days, it would be relived and prospects cannvassed, with the experts and masters of gravity weighing in. And even grandmothers and the ones who hadn't seen a match in twenty years and the youth who knew how to wait his moment had their way.

And this was the heart of the mattter - the miracle and romance of sharring with family and neighbours an event many scores of miles away. The quality of the match was not unimportant and O'Hehir's performmance could fascinate, but the ultiimate magic was of the medium.

And they would relive it too, after evening opening time, in Admiral Nelsons and Crowns and Spotted Dogs up and down the other island. And they would gaze out at the sunshine and wonder if their hearts would break.

The mealy-mouthed self-censorship: of that bygone age lives on, like many another canker, in 'the fabric of our society'. From sport it is, thankfully, ebbing unhonoured and unwept. That the names of players sent off were not given by the media .seerns quaint, in fact weird, to a geneeration who see "a cynical mob of Mafiosi" used - accurately and, at least to its author, unremarkably - as a description of the world champions.' And, of course, unless he actually took the frees himself, the referee was innviolable and infallible. That hasn't changed much.

But in those years of his greatness O'Hehir did not make the rules. His job as a 'commentator' was to be a reporter: of things deemed exoteric by his and our betters. If he felt fettered it didn't show. The play was the thing.

That hoarsened, sforzando "Ring has it" could, for an everlasting seccond, bring on caesura of heart and mind, tautening of throat and scrootum, and half a million sins of idollatry. O'Hehir was the echo and interrpreter of the thunder of the gods.

It doesn't happen any more. The conjectural reasons for O'Hehir's deecline are as many as his upward steps in status through the years. They do not signify. He potters in a haze of periphrasis and maundering excurssuses, and seems content.

Who is to succeed him? Hardly those who declaim that any stroke, other than a sideline puck or a free, is "doubled", and that solo running is the highest known skill. A little more of that order of revelation and there will be overtime for the 'crash ball' and 'second phase possession' luminaries.

Micheal 0 Muircheartaigh has never been less than splendid, and many of his tours de force in Irish, especially in the halcyon days of the Oireachtas tournament, have equalled O'Hehir's finest.

If there is one who can prove that the dear dead days are not beyond reecall it is 0 Muircheartaigh.