FOR the past two years since I have had the pleasure of writing the Only a game column for The Nationalist, every Sunday night in the Lawrence household has followed the same routine.
Close to the hour of midnight the TV would be switched off, promises would be made to myself about doing the dishes in the morning, teeth brushed, reflection winked at in the mirror and then my beloved bed climbed into with notebook in hand.
A blank page would then be opened and the subject for that week’s column would be considered.
For a time in the early days the subject would be a sporting event from my youth. Later, my term as captain with my local Junior football team provided me with ample material and presently the various experimental sporting exploits have been filling the pages for me.
My wife would slumber deep beside me as line after line would be ploughed into the pages until sleep would get the better of me and I would set my alarm for 5am to arise and finish it on the laptop. Sadly last Sunday night was the final enactment of that routine because to pastures new I now journey.
So for this final Only a game I have decided to go with the looking-back-with-fond-memory theme where I will recall my own personal top five beauties in what is an unrepentant moment of the most awful self-indulgence imaginable.
Columns in general don’t really appeal to me personally. I find them ever so slightly tedious at the best of times, so when Terry Reilly put the question to me about penning a weekly diatribe, I approached the project with something close to dread.
You see I am not the type of sports fan who can list off the winners of various events over the past decades.
I couldn’t tell you who won the all-Ireland final in 2002. I don’t watch soccer and I’m no Eamonn Dunphy when it comes to controversial opinions.
Nor can I spout tripe about Carlow GAA and I barely peruse sports sections in the national papers so writing a sports column seemed about as plausible as me starting to build a house. It had all the makings of a disaster.
“What will I write about?” I asked the Mayo native in our rectangular, office canteen. “Anything you want, you’re funny, put it down on paper and try keep it sporty,” he answered liberally.
And so it began. Much of my youth, like the youth of multitudes of others, was spent enjoying various sporting exploits from boxing to tennis to athletics so I decided on that first Sunday night, with the deadline looming at 10am the following morning, that I would reminisce about my boxing adventure which included a promising career and a sleep-walking episode that led to disaster.
I will install the boxing column at number five in this random top of the pops chart mainly because it told the story of the end of my boxing journey.
After dreaming of our new school teacher one night when I was 11, I got out of bed, walked to the top of our very steep stairs, woke up and then fell down the ten steps.
Both of my wrists were broken, my skull was fractured and my plan of becoming the world champion was over.
It turned out the new teacher was only staying for two weeks as well so the dream was for nothing when all was said and done.
At number four I have selected another one of the down-memory-lane efforts that, strangely, had absolutely nothing to do with sport. It was a common remark made to me in the outside world over the past two years.
“Eh lad,” someone would say, “that yoke you write in The Nationalist, how come there’s no sport in it?” people would ask. Number four concerned my ill-fated running away from home when I was 13. Technically it was more of a driving and then walking away from home but after much research I have found that they all fall into the running away category.
Secondary school you see was the undoing of my good behaviour. In a desperate mission to impress in the new surrounds I started smoking with the cool gang. One day at home I sparked up in the bedroom only for my mother to catch me.
“When your father gets home he’ll kill you,” was the threat issued at the time so to avoid my approaching extermination I borrowed the neighbour’s Massey Ferguson in the yard, drove to Hacketstown, linked up with my bored friend Johnny, bought a five-pack of cigars and hit the road for Clonmore where we intended to live wild for the remainder of our puberty years.
About an hour later we were located and transported home. The tractor was also recovered. Number three was the entire series of columns dedicated to the 2009 Wicklow Junior A championship.
I had been given the captaincy of the team and Only a game became the diary of that momentous year where we reached the final and drew with Coolboy and where we lost the replay by a point.
It was heartbreaking stuff but a time that I will never forget and in 30 or 40 years’ time I’ll be able to look back over those columns and recall the different emotions and events.
Coming in at number two has to be the remarkable run of the Rathvilly squad during the Charity Bainisteoir tournament in Carlow.
I had been given charge of the u13 team from the village and after many nights of training and getting to know the squad of heroes over there we took the title against Fenagh in Tinryland.
At the end I wrote a poem for the boys and someone from Rathvilly said they were going to frame it. On a personal note that was the pinnacle of Only a game for me.
But I suppose for enjoyment and entertainment value the recent sporting adventure columns have to take the number one spot in my ridiculous top-five chart.
I give it to them because of the great people I met out and about over the past few months.
From kind-hearted swimming instructors to passionate cricket coaches I’ve encountered some fantastic people who love their sport and who love seeing new faces giving it a go.
My personal favourite was the bodybuilding with Gianni Guaca and Csaba Pal at the Olympia Gym on College Street.
Here, on a Saturday afternoon, I witnessed what it’s like to become completely immersed in your sport, to lose yourself to it, to sacrifice everything for that perfection we all seek.
Unfortunately though, both time and people move on and this is the end of the road for me.
So to finish, I think that instead of some soppy farewell, one you’d be expecting from a man with a hat like the one in the picture, the last words of Only a game should be borrowed from the comical genii of the Looney Tunes when I say, with fondness and gratitude, that’s all folks.