EVEN at this early stage of the year, Kevin Barry’s ‘City of Bohane’ would be an unbackable favourite in any race for the title of novel of 2011.
The titular city is on the west coast of Ireland, 40 forty years in the future, and Barry’s Limerick connections have led to a lot of conclusions being drawn about its inspiration.
Early on the main character, Logan, is described thus: "He had a fine hold of himself, as we say in Bohane. He was graceful and erect and he looked neither left nor right but straight out ahead always, with the shoulders thrown back, like a general."
Given that this reporter was reading City of Bohane when news came through of Alan Quinlan’s retirement, you can probably already see where we’re going.
Just as it would be gratuitously limiting to Kevin Barry to call his book a cult classic, it would be equally limiting to refer to Quinlan as a Munster cult favourite. There’s an implied narrowness in those kinds of labels, a short-sightedness, or maybe tunnel vision, that doesn’t take in the wider picture.
The lazy descriptions you can expect to hear about Alan Quinlan over the next few days will focus on his nuisance value, with the odd nod towards his playing ability: call it the rugby version of saying a big man is surprisingly good on the ground.
The main exhibit in that particular case is Quinlan’s goading of Fabien Pelous, that municipal monument of Toulouse, to a sin-binning in Munster’s second Heineken Cup win, as though provoking a kick in the rear was the sum total of his contributions over the years in a red jersey.
That would be unjust, particularly when the memory of Quinlan bursting his lungs (metaphorically) and banjaxing his arm (literally) against Argentina in the Rugby World Cup game of 2003 is a far more fitting memorial.
Though that particular tournament is not remembered as vividly as the meltdown in France four years ago, more than one player has testified to the near-unbearable tension of the Pumas game, and the mammoth pressure on Ireland to avoid what had happened in Lens four years earlier.
That Ireland survived is due in large part to Quinlan’s burst to the line and shoulder-damaging try. It put the men in green into credit, which is what he should receive now that he’s hung up his boots.
The Tipperary man’s retirement marks another well-rounded individual’s departure from the scene, by which we mean Quinlan’s life before professionalism.
Yes children, there was a time when the natural career path for a top-flight rugby star was not induction into an academy as a teenager and separation from normal life as a result.
Quinlan writes eloquently in his autobiography, Red Blooded, of working as an auto mechanic before becoming a full-time professional sportsman — and the natural appreciation of that opportunity as a result. Calling it a day means there are ever-fewer such players left, and you can’t help feeling that rugby is the poorer for that.
Still, that’s what time does. Quinlan is likely to be in demand from media outlets, particularly radio and TV, where the deadpan one-liners will play particularly well. This writer wishes him the best — he was a pleasure to deal with and unfailingly courteous.
The obvious pay-off sentence above would be something along the lines of ‘...which is probably more than a lot of his opponents would say’, but we’re above that.
It’d reinforce that cult status, and as a player he was a lot more than that.
Source: http://feeds.examiner.ie/~r/iesportsblog/~3/Z29JAxACvzU/post.aspx
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