AFTER THE FALL

Turf-cutter, rugby player and would be writer.

And a master of understatement, if that self-portrait is anything to go by. Con Houlihan, raconteur, fisherman, teacher, linguist, naturalist, chef (nouvelle cuisine, of course), international socialist, connoisseur of the four hand reel, writer and lover of words, is not a man given to self-promotion. And yet when news that this veteran of the Irish Press barricades had taken a tumble, ( in Cheltenham, not at Cheltenham , as the Big Man pithily remarked), the great cogs of industry (as well as those of polite and impolite society) ground to a creaking halt. Con s church is as broad as it is deep.

Journalists, sports fans, barmen (and women), neighbours, friends and lovers balked at the prospect that their infusion of Con s column (now weekly in the Sunday World, and monthly in Magill) might be stymied.
Many are those who bask in the reflected glory of Con. His sheer good-spiritedness, his lusty humour, his yeasty commentaries, his rapid-response missiles aimed at the absurdities of life are balm to moithered minds. Even a cursory read of his columns reveals gem after gem, fashioned and polished until they glisten.
And still, the essence of his writing is its vital transparency. Read one of his recent pieces on Sugar Ray Robinson, or on turf-cutting in Fahaduff and it s impossible not to be transported in both time and place. Read any one of his collections (particularly Windfalls) and you ll savour the manifold delights of a north Kerry childhood in Castle Island, a jobbing writer s exploits on the trail of the great and good of the sporting world, and a writer s exploration of poetry and prose that s given many a reader a second and third level education.
It s not hard to see why one of the great giants of journalism (or as Paddy Downey of the Irish Times describes him, one of the finest sports writers in the English language anywhere in the world ) inspires such heady devotion from his legion of admirers.
Taking a tumble in Cheltenham wasn t part of the grand plan when Con headed for the racecourse in March. Of course the man himself was a tad less perturbed than his friends and fans by the accident that landed him in a Birmingham hospital on the eve of the Gold Cup.
The second evening of the Races, I took a taxi in to the railway, he recalls. The trains go very regularly and there was no hurry home (to Birmingham SL) so I had two pints in a pub called The King s Arms. I was walking down to the station, within a hundred yards of it, where three roads converge, a very busy intersection. I had to walk across the road with extraordinary care and suddenly that left knee it s a rugby injury I got 30 years ago like the wheel of a bicycle, it stopped, and I fell. And that was it. I couldn t get up.
Con found himself surrounded by an audience, trapped by an incident not entirely of his own making.
D you know, I didn t panic, he continues, as though recounting the discovery of a hole in his pocket, or a button undone. I said get me a taxi that ll take me to Birmingham , and they did.
Safely dispatched to his hotel, Con made little of the fall, and proceeded to spend the night in his room with no mention of a doctor s opinion until the next morning.
I thought it was only a muscle injury, he adds, but I knew in my heart it was a broken bone.
One phone call home from Con the next morning and the wheels were in motion. A doctor arrived ("a lovely handsome young Jew of about 35 ), a tentative diagnosis was made and Con was whisked off to the hospital in an ambulance.
The whole thing wasn t happening to me, he declares. It was happening to someone else. Two lovely mad West Indians said: Come on, Irishman, we ll throw you into the ambulance . I d say they hit every pothole on the road to Birmingham Hospital, which was about three miles. I was in great pain, but I could last it too, it was so unreal.
The Houlihan psyche was ill-suited to the niceties of the medical examinations which ensued.
Interviews: some of them were crazy, Con proclaims. Now, Mr. Houlihan, this doctor asked, who is the Queen of England? There s no queen of England; she s the queen of the United Kingdom. O.K., he said. I said: I can even tell you her birthday because I was 74 in December and she s not 74 yet, but I know her birthday, yeah. So he said: that s enough .
The next day, he had pins inserted in the fractured hip. It wasn t the trauma that it might have been, at least for Con.
I woke up, he says, with a glint in his eye, to find about 50 lovely young women wearing blue gowns and wearing things on their heads like flowerpots. I thought I was dreaming, yeah. And then a little nun came to me offering me communion. I thought twas extreme unction! And I told her to go away; I wasn t ready for it yet! The rest was routine.
Con is a man not given to periods of fecklessness (unless in the right company), and he certainly wasn t accustomed to the confines of bed, a place inevitably inhospitable to the demands of pen and paper.
I was amazed at how well I settled in there, he remarks. I thought I d be very cantankerous and self-pitying. I wasn t a bit. They were doing their best for me, and I had to play ball with them. I thought I d feel very humiliated and embarrassed, but I didn t.
Undoubtedly the fall has slowed the big man s gallop, but it hasn t put a halt to it. While he may not be quite ready for the hurdles yet, he s been spotted stepping it out once again on the terraces of Lansdowne Road and Croke Park. If he s not quite making it to the back of the haggart yet, it only rarely shows.
Sure I d have more craic in Lough Derg! he declares, itching to return to his own haunts on the banks of the Grand Canal. He s not underestimating the comforts of home either, though.
Ah, sure, I ve come from log cabin to White House, he concedes. I ve television and radio here. I have my own food, my own bed. My friends are coming by every day. I can t complain.
I won t play rugby ever again, that s for certain, but I hope I ll go up mountains again. Physically, I suppose I ve a while to go yet, but mentally I didn t change a whole pile, only I became very humble. I learned about people, how when they re old and in poor shape, they hang on to life in a way that I thought I never would.
I was never sick of any account, except from drink. I never had a bad injury until this. Playing rugby and broken ribs don t count. I broke my nose twice; that doesn t count. Broken fingers; they don t count. This is my first major injury, and at 74 you can t complain.
Broken hips and anaesthetics were paid scant heed by Con, the journalist. He missed just one deadline and after that continued to file copy from his bed in Birmingham hospital, and later from Beaumont, with friends acting as scribes and runners throughout his incarceration.

Con s recovery from his Cheltenham hijinks has offered him ample time to reflect on an anniversary that might be better banished from the memory. Five years ago this summer, the final copies of the Evening Press were printed. It marked the end of an era in Irish publishing, and a chapter of Irish history to which Con was inextricably linked.
He has already written movingly of the effect the demise of the Press had on him and on his colleagues. It was, as he says, a community dispersed , reconvening these days mainly for funerals. Returning to Burgh Quay, he feels like Oismn returning to Tmr Na nSg to find all the Fianna gone.
Having debuted in 1967 (through the good offices of David Marcus), Con progressed from writing book reviews (his first being Solzhenitzyn s The First Circle) to hosting a thrice weekly column on the back page of the Evening Press, which was read by punter and jockey alike, by academic and naif, by sporting ignoramus and aficionado.
He supplemented his column with a fortnightly (on occasion more frequent) excursion into literary criticism. Tributaries was a peerless conception. It offered a window on literature, art, music, poetry and song, all coloured by Con s unique insights and quirky observations.
Despite the political allegiances of the Irish Press Group (Con has written that his father had as much love for Fianna Fail as Ned Kelly had for the New South Wales constabulary), it was a place which inspired ferocious and fanatical loyalty among its staff. Con was a wholehearted participant in this enduring love affair.
I suppose it s like a first marriage, he offers. If it s good, it s your best marriage. I was very happy there. Twas very easygoing there. You were expected to go to all the important matches, that s par for the course. But after that, you were free to go wherever you wished yourself.
Con had a deep appreciation for those good times long before they came to an end.
I knew then it was a great life, he nods. I knew that sincerely. I worked for some great people and a few bad people, but the good people always countered the bad. And of course there were some great pubs down there, that time.
My comrades weren t confined to the newsroom either. They extended to the printing room and over the whole place. Twas a great democracy. To me, if there was an ideal world, that was it. Ideal, that s with stones and all kinds of irks and frustrations, but if there was a better world, I never knew it. It s a rare thing to know when you re happy but I knew it then. And I kept asking myself: how long will it last?
This man of fine words had his talents honed by an eclectic mix of older writers including his predecessor in the Press, Joe Sherwood ( A model. Great man. ) and Billy George of The Cork Examiner.
Amid a plethora of disparate influences, Con also cites Paddy Downey (of the Irish Times), Frank Keating (The Guardian) and a rake of younger writers including Tom Humphries.
Frank has a great feeling for sport and a great feeling for people who make their living in sport, he notes. He d be a great poor man s psychologist. Again, a great writer, and a lovely man who loved to praise rather than to condemn, which in the modern age is rather rare.
Asked to recall his earliest sporting memory, Con responds in the blink of an eye:
My imagination.
Later he recalls an episode dating back to when he was a boy of five or six.
We were living in Molahiffe, which is back near Firies, he recounts, and one day my parents and brother were gone to a football match in Limerick. I wasn t taken because I was too young. A neighbour called Tadhg Kelly, whom I ll never forget, took me to the match. I can still see the players and the colours, but in a kind of clear blur. That s my earliest sporting memory. But if you grew up in Kerry in my time, sport was all around you.
Con stands firm against the full frontal assault of digital television, video recording, and action replays. Despite the proliferation of multimedia, he provides three-dimensional evidence that a good writer can still occupy a place of pride at the ringside or on the sideline. There are still some things that cannot be captured by the camera, he insists.
You know when you re reporting a game, he says, that it s been seen on television at three o clock that day, again at about ten that night in the summary. The central account will have been in all the morning papers, so come two o clock, you re writing around it, but of course about it too, knowing that your readers (whoever they may be) have almost certainly seen the game at least once, and often twice. You try to analyse and see why things happened, and what things happened that shouldn t have happened; and what didn t happen that should have. You re really analysing, without being too pretentious about it. And of course you have to try to see a thing that the television didn t see. If you re good enough, you can see those. You can hear remarks from the crowd that the television can t pick up.
With almost three decades of sports reporting under his expansive belt, Con s store of tales is as well stocked as the Feale was with trout during his fishing days. He picks through the psychic archives in search of a handful of highlights:
The most amazing night of all was in Las Vegas in 1986, he recalls, the night that Barry McGuigan met Stevie Cruz. The temperature was 1270 out in the arena, under the lights probably far more. They thought that in Las Vegas it d get cool at night. It doesn t, apparently. At least not where we were, out in the open.
The ground and the concrete and the steel and the glass accumulated the heat during the day and let it out at night. That night, now, of course I was prejudiced in favour of Barry McGuigan. It was a 15 three-minute round fight in terrible heat, and I couldn t believe that any two human beings could be standing up at the end, and Barry wasn t. He was gone at the end.
It told me something about the human spirit, he continues, about the extremes they had gone to to condition themselves. And I thought, the job I m working in is only a joke . They were making their money the hard way. Christ, they were.
Later that night, about three in the morning, I was walking around outside Caesar s Palace and I saw two men in deep conversation. Stevie Cruz sitting on a bench with Brian D Arcy. Steve Cruz was a very humane person, which in professional boxing is a rare thing.
Alas, Con Houlihan s impeccable coverage of sporting events such as this was prematurely muzzled by the closure of the Press. Although word of its demise had been greatly exaggerated on previous occasions, the Press finally met her Waterloo under extremely acrimonious circumstances. As a senior member of the Press staff, he blames himself for not intervening earlier, though he acknowledges that what was done could not be undone.
Con wasn t absent when the barricades needed to be manned. With the Xpress launched by a cadre of ex-Press staff, he found fellow spirits with whom he could work and play effortlessly.
Liam Mackey s people [who started up the Xpress] were so good and so gallant. They made me feel part of their team, gave me a great feeling. I knew it wouldn t last very long, but it was great while it did. It was like being part of the barricades of 1871. A great feeling of fervour and revolution and yeast and goodness. Total integrity. Twas like a honeymoon at the end of your life. A post-life honeymoon. I knew then that the best of my life was gone forever, in that sphere anyway.
The transition to writing for a weekly paper hasn t been an easy one, as Con readily admits.
Yerra, you re working in sport in a daily paper and you re in the heart of town. You hear the news before it s published, and the news that can t be published. You re an important person to your readers and you re important to the paper. You re working on a day to day basis, whereas working on a weekly newspaper: there s no comparison. The work is harder in a way.
The rhythm of his writing is utterly changed.
The difference is indescribable. And is it for the better? Well, I have far more time for reading and for writing, apart from the work I do for the Sunday World, but funny, when I was working for the Press, I probably wrote more. There was more of a dynamic.

As for the future? Well, Con s made it known that if the Press were to re-open, he d declare a national holiday. That optimism has long faded, but in its place is a healthy appetite for new beginnings. He s wary of forecasts though. Being the fisherman and turf-cutter that he is, he understands well the vagaries that fall outside the gabhail of any man or woman.
If you re forecasting the future of Irish journalism or politics, you re left open to making a fool of yourself. There s so much money around now, and there are plenty of enterprising people around I could see a new daily paper within a year. You see, printing technology now has made the whole thing so easy and so cheap. But when I think back now to the early days of Burgh Quay, there was a whole fleet of brilliant young people there. Totally underused. So much talent and genius very poorly availed of. Of course they re scattered all over now, like the wandering tribes of Israel. We were part of a lovely vanished world.
* Windfalls (1996) is published by Boglark Press. Other collections include: The Back Page Boglark Press: CON Now Read On Sportsworld.