They say one kind way to remember your heroes is not just the year they left this mortal world, but the year they entered it, which for Con Houlihan is now a century ago in the winter of 1925.
Con once said he was born on the night of a blizzard in Castle Island (not Castleisland, and God help the person who misspelt his part of the Kingdom), where he would always call home, even after he moved to Dublin to join the Press Group when already into his 40s.
By that stage he’d established himself as a sportswriter of promise, learning his trade in the Kerryman among other places. It was “where the first three days of the week are spent studying the racing sheets and in other nefarious activities, until about 10 o’clock on Wednesday – in the morning that is – all purgatory breaks loose”.
Con enjoyed a great affinity with all sports, though he once admitted “which sport I would pick if forced by a cruel master to confine myself to one – the answer is racing. That game abounds in stories, not all of which – I need hardly mention – can be published.”
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He described the 1985 meeting of England and the Republic of Ireland at Wembley Stadium as his first foreign mission for the Evening Press, apart from a National League game between Roscommon and Dublin in Dr Hyde Park on a wet Sunday in the previous November.
That 1985 game at Wembley was where Ray Wilkins seemed to be clean through to score the winner, if it wasn’t for for a young man named David O’Leary, who “saved the day with a clawing tackle”, according to Peter Byrne, formerly of this newspaper.
“In fact, he saved the night,” said Con, “but I wouldn’t quibble with the man from The Irish Times, that last bastion of the semicolon.”
Con would later travel the globe, covering the World Cup and the Olympics, including Barcelona 1992 when, in the sweltering heat, and dressed in trademark jumper and anorak, he began walking up Montjuïc to get a closer view of the men’s marathon.
“Then the Wall hit me,” he wrote, “and it never recovered.”
There is also his immortal line about missing Italia ’90 because he was away at the World Cup.
He loved athletics too, often writing about Jerry Kiernan – the “celebrated long-distance runner who grew up in Brosna, on the eastern verge of that great expanse of bog and little fields” – and John Lenihan, the farmer from Bearnageeha, who became World Mountain Running champion in 1991 and, according to Con “of all our unsung heroes, just about the most unsung”.
There were few subjects closer to his heart than Kerry football, and I know that because of the honour in sharing some special evenings at what he called his “harbour” in Portobello.
Events invariably began with Con pulling out an old £20 note from under the telephone next to his chair and politely insisting I go round the corner to Spar and purchase two bottles of Yellow Tail wine, describing it as “easily drinkable”.
In select moments he would reminisce about Kerry and the All-Ireland final, never losing his draw to the third Sunday in September, knowing that back in Castle Island the turf was already saved. This July final would be truly befuddling.
For him it all began “in the same year as an unsuccessful artist called Adolf Hitler had started a commotion” and Con was at an age “deemed fit to be unloosed on the good people of Dublin”.
[ Prose and Con — Frank McNally on the rise and fall of a famous local newspaperOpens in new window ]
“On that September long ago, I hadn’t been beyond Tralee; Dublin seemed to me a city of magic – as enchanting as Paris or Petrograd or Samarkand itself. Fuel was scarce and thus an institution known as the Ghost Train began voyaging to Dublin and into folklore.
“It departed from Tralee on the stroke of midnight (and if you believe that ...) and only God knew when it would reach Dublin – and I suspect that there were times when even He wasn’t too sure. Women wept as their menfolk set out from home, fearful (perhaps in some cases hopeful) that they would never see them again.”
It was also during one of his early visits to Dublin for an All-Ireland football final that Con recalled spotting a well-known delicatessen advertising a variety of “sandwhiches” and later feeling properly confused at a small restaurant that was offering the choice of three “deserts”.
Nothing dismayed Con more than the gradual decline of the English language. From his early days with the Kerryman the signs were there, when he once heard a certain sports reporter say to the editor, Séamus McConville: “You are capable of thinking that a colon is part of your backside.”
This remains right up there with some of Con’s own immortal words, “a man who will misuse an apostrophe is capable of anything”.
He considered himself akin to those who emigrated from Kerry to settle in places like New York and London, and the need to recognise some loyalty to the place you are living while never losing sight of the place you are from.
That was never better expressed more than after the 1978 All-Ireland football final when his “friend girl” Harriet Duffin, who certainly considered herself a true Dub, was in Croke Park to see a young Kerry team take apart Dublin.
When asked how she was coping with such a defeat, Con’s simple response became folklore: “House private. No flowers.”
This was the 1978 final where Kerry put five goals past Dublin, one of which came after Dublin goalkeeper Paddy Cullen argued with the referee over the awarding of a free. “And while all this was going on, Mike Sheehy was running up to take the kick – and suddenly Paddy dashed back towards the goal like a woman who smells a cake burning.”
Con always said the idea of a natural-born footballer or hurler was a myth, but sometimes myths are more powerful than the truth, especially when it comes to Kerry football.
