A different game now

AN EDITORIAL in The Guardian in London is possibly the last place you might expect to find praise of the GAA but, yes, there it was on Tuesday morning: a fulsome piece lauding the All-Ireland Football Final.
Amateurism, the mixing of supporters and so on are unremarkable for any Irish person but one can see why they attract comment from people beyond these shores.
Particularly perhaps at a time when professional sport is under such a cloud. Recently we had the unedifying spectacle of Pakistan cricketers being implicated in manipulating games for betting purposes. And while the world Number 1 ranking snooker player John Higgins was sort of exonerated, the sport retains a seedy reputation.
His namesake, the late Alex, was a colourful chap who certainly played a big part in transforming the reputation of the sport in the 1970s from one that appeared to be played by Rex Harrison clones into one of the great television attractions. Alex looked and behaved like a lout, in fairness, but people liked him perhaps because he also seemed like a bit of an eejit really who was more of a danger to himself than others.
Despite wearing his Sandy Row loyalism on his sleeve to the extent of having a photograph of the ‘Queen Mum’ beside his triple vodkas when he was playing a match - and even threatening Dennis Taylor with murder by a unionist death squad! - Alex was popular throughout the island in his heyday. But even then he always seemed to be a train wreck waiting to happen.

He arrived in my uncle’s pub in Thomas Street around the time he was World Champion in the 1980s. I think he was over here from England to play in Goffs but this day he had spent drinking, and betting in the bookie’s across the road.
He was a disaster at the old gambling and apparently lost a right few quid before arriving in and holding an impromptu whip-round among the customers who were so taken aback by the exotic figure who was putting the hammer on them that they supplied him with his stake money.
Alex returned to the fray and had a better run of luck. It was enough anyway to make up for some of his earlier losses and to be able to pay back the lads in the Thomas House, who might have taken a dimmer view had he failed to return. He also stood a round of drinks and off with him to Goffs where I think he later got into a fight with Steve Davis. Oh, a comical man.
Snooker is a different game now. Even the ‘bad boys’ look like chartered accountants on valium. And the days when a chap might drink 16 pints of lager during a game are long gone. Only junior footballers might get away with that now.