Here we are again. Back at the same writer’s crossroads. To use his own phrase, the cursor flashing at you on an empty screen and you without the slightest idea of how to even begin to fill the acres of blank white screen space in front of you.
In the first instance, this writer used it after seeing he who will be the subject of homage hereafter deploy it for the same reason about the same subject area.
The who? Local Godfather of the Press Box, Noel Coogan. The what? How to begin writing a piece when Sean Boylan stepped down as Meath manager in 2005. The only other occasion one was similarly stumped was at the time of my father’s passing which is rapidly heading towards four ago now.
So it is once again, with the old sage of the written sporting word in this locality having laid down the thick-rimmed, dark coloured optical assistants with which he ran the rule over so many of our efforts for the final time earlier this week. How do you write about the man who wrote about everybody else? By doing exactly as he would have done himself – call it as you see it.
Noel was always something of a mystery to me. My local media colleague Gerry Hand described him, as word spread with great sadness around the county of his death, as the local version of Con Houlihan, and while I can actually see and agree with, yet I think he was so much more than that too.
The similarities are indeed striking – the fondness for handwriting over use of a typewriter or computer, moreover, the need for his copy to be typeset and transformed so as to fit the tenets of modern publishing. Then there was also the fact that each could, with authority and confidence, scribe on a vast breadth of subject matter.
Where they did differ, though, is that, in all my years of reading Con’s material I never saw him write negatively about anything or anybody – even if it would have been merited – whereas Noel had no problem pointing out what he saw as being wrong. That experience, if you were on the receiving end thereof, was like being a sheet of paper, scrunched up in a ball and tossed, basketball-like, into the wastepaper basket.
However, in common with the two other individuals whose loss was mourned already in this space already this week, the bark was very much worse than the bite. The sheet of paper would, discreetly, be retrieved, smoothed out and you might even have got half a smile. Like a good pint of Guinness, Noel was an acquired taste, and absolutely took a while to acquire a taste for you as well.
In my case, I think the first time I got the ‘dressing down’ phone call over something I’d submitted was due to the format I’d used in doing a match report about some game or other in my role as P.R.O. of St Peter’s GAA Club in Dunboyne. Allow me to explain. Essentially, there are two different ways of listing the teams at the end of a match report.
You can either list the scorers for each side and the actual team sheet – what the starting team was and what subs came on – separately, or, you can just use the latter method and just include what a given player had scored in brackets beside their name. I’d sent my copy in with the former methodology – as I was used to reading the output of the likes of Eugene McGee and Paddy Downey and Sean Moran and Vincent Hogan.
All of that counted for diddly squat, mind you, when one was unceremoniously excoriated for “Not knowing the difference between tabloid and broadsheet journalism”. Every so often for years after he’d have a barb at ‘College educated journalists’ in his Sideline Cuts column which was, to all intents and purposes, the Sports Editorial of the The Weekender – of which he was Sports Editor from 1984 until its unfortunate and in my view unnecessary demise in 2005. You wouldn’t need to be Hawking to unravel what journalist he was getting at!
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That said, that little clash of styles, because essentially that’s all it was, Noel and I went on to have a unique, special and enduring friendship that meant more to me and did more for me professionally than he ever realised. Even though it took a while for our ‘relationship’ to get to that point.
I think once he saw I was genuinely interested in and committed to my role as PRO the dynamic changed. That was after I’d gone through a phase of pig headed immaturity after the style clash and stupidly boycotted The Weekender for a while until one day Jack White – who was his second in command at the time – rang to see what the story was and ended up brokering a peace deal of sorts.
Out of pure coincidence, either a day or two after Noel died, former Sports Editor of the Meath Chronicle Conall Collier posted a blast from the past on his Facebook page – an interview he conducted with Noel Meade back in the day. And of course it reminded me of my own interview with the affable Castletown handler and how Conall helped me out because, as part of my college course at the time, I had to get two bye lines in a local paper – my name under two articles in other words.
So that was one of them, though I knew asking the one paper to give me space for two pieces would be sticking the neck out too far. So a very tentative call was placed to Mr Coogan, though not a vast quantity of hope was retained that it would be a successful bit of mining. While one ended up pleasantly surprised in that regard, it was no surprise that there was a bit of back and forth required before a deal was done.
In all honesty, money wasn’t even on the agenda from my point of view. Just to be published in my own name would’ve done well enough for me. But, by the time we’d the deal done he knew he’d got the better end of it for himself!
Tom Dermody, our former Chairman here in Dunboyne, had brought me to what turned out to be the first meeting of Dunshaughlin and Rathnew in 2002 and, having also been at the first replay in Pairc Tailteann, there was no way I wss missing Act III, the senior scribe in the county knew he was sorted for someone to cover it and even promised me €40 “Diesel and fodder” to quote the faxed message directly.
Said fodder ended up being a pit stop in the famed Burdocks Fish And Chips, and, while the pay cheque did eventually arrive, it wouldn’t be involving Noel if there wasn’t a bit of story to it!
The match I covered for him was in the first week of November and to be honest the money had been forgotten about about. However, out of courtesy, when the time came to send out invitations for my 21st, one was sent to the staff of the sports department.
Now, in my heart, I knew none of the lads would ‘tog out’, but the entire local sports media squad were on the guest list. Lo and behold, about three days before my 21st, an envelope with a cheque for €40 accompanied by a ‘With Compliments’ slip which simply read “Better late than never! ” dropped through the letterbox. Classic Noel.
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You know, looking back on it now it’s funny, but, once the Weekender folded, he and I became closer than at any stage when he was the Editor and I was the contributor. He took his job with the utmost seriousness and perhaps there was a degree of pressure with that. Even if it was self imposed.
He was a stickler for minutae of detail. It recalled Con’s famous proclamation that “A man who can misplace an apostrophe could be capable of anything”. Again, at my own expense, for some reason, even with all the years I’d been writing and all the people who’d read and critiqued my work, I am 100% certain nobody prior to Noel advised me that there should be a space after a full stop.
Needless to say, the college educated journalist got a barb over that one. But once you knew what made him tick and/or thick, and were governed by those, he was an espouser of, to quote the poet Brendan Kennelly, Moll an oige agus tiocfaidh siad – cultivate the young and they will come through.
Aside from shoddy grammar, the one thing other than an empty stomach liable to force the pulling down of the dark rimmed spectacles was club PROs or representatives who didn’t send in material when their teams were beaten!
He didn’t suffer fools or bullsh** gladly either. Whether it was folk who supported, say, Manchester United or Liverpool or Celtic saying “If WE beat x or if so and so do abc against y then WE will be ok”.
That, and levels of competition which he described as “Micheal O’Luch (Michael Mouse)“, though the odd thing about it was, I genuinely believe he believed there was merit in things like the McDonagh, Ring, Rackard and Meagher Cup competitions. In fact, certainly in latter times, Micheal only made his appearance in relation to horse racing because “Any Micheal O’Luch Handicap Chase over three miles with a half decent sponsor is now called some sort of National or other”.
He wasn’t wrong. Though one thing I personally would have amended was, in his bereavement notice, it described him as a “Retired Freelance Sports Journalist”. For me, I don’t think writers ever retire. Nor should they. Perhaps change publication or even writing style, but, as the totem of all wordsmiths from Castle Island once put it, “I strive to write every day, to be gramatically correct and to maintain the reader’s interest”. The Bard Of Navan and the King Of Castle Island certainly hit the Bulls Eye on that regard.
What’s more, it was only in his later years that his content was discovered in Ireland’s Own and, seeing that it wasn’t sporting content, it just underlined the value of being able to comment on as wide a range of material as is possible.
Another invaluable lesson quietly imparted. Coladh samh mo chara.
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