Michael Moynihan
THE policeman in the lobby of the San Francisco Sheraton was making people nervous as he studied passers-by intently. He seemed to be paying particular attention to members of the All Star hurling party, who had landed the night before after a long haul in from Heathrow, and who were now blearily trying to adjust some obstinate body clocks to California time.
Eventually the policeman stepped forward and stopped one of the Irish contingent and asked if he was, indeed, with the GAA party.
He used the term GAA properly, but then again, why wouldn’t someone from Longford know that? Officer Kirwan certainly hadn’t lost his accent. He’d travelled out from Ireland a few years earlier and had eventually found his way into the navy-blue uniform of San Francisco’s finest, but he wasn’t in the hotel to provide charming local colour for a lazy reporter.
Readers may be aware that Tipperary hurler Patrick ‘Bonnar’ Maher, travelling as an All Star replacement, landed in San Francisco to be greeted by bad news: his grandmother, to whom he had been particularly close, had died while he was travelling, so he was going to have to turn straight around and put down another dozen or so hours getting back for the funeral.
Officer Kirwan wasn’t there to deliver the bad news, though. His sister had moved to Lorrha, in Tipperary some years before, and when you learn that Maher’s club is Lorrha, the pieces of the jigsaw begin to come together.
The GAA’s tendency to view itself as a family, or a family that knows how to behave itself, to be more accurate, can grate at times. There’s sometimes an unspoken suggestion that the Association does the reaching-out-to-stricken-members a little bit better than other sports bodies, though we concede the possibility that we may be overstating the case.
For all that, the sympathy for Maher was real in San Francisco. When the youngster from Tipperary came down in the lift there was no shortage of people to offer condolences to him, which was good to see.
It was also good to see Officer Kirwan introduce himself to Maher and shake his hand, and help his girlfriend with her bag as he brought the two of them out to his car to bring them to San Francisco Airport.
His sister’s phone call, asking him to help out a neighbour’s child in distress on the other side of the world, meant that at least the first step of a sad journey for Patrick Maher would be taken in the company of a friendly face.
Source: http://feeds.examiner.ie/~r/iesportsblog/~3/8wVnZup4KCA/post.aspx
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