Sideline Cut:It seems longer than just last May since I sat down with Ronan O'Gara in a well-tended country house overlooking Douglas. The afternoon was dreamily warm and the atmosphere hushed and although tired from a late-night trip from Wales followed by a punishing early-morning training session, O'Gara had arrived early for our appointment and was sipping a glass of fizzy water, the regulation beverage for all athletes nowadays.
It was just a week before O'Gara would win his Heineken European Cup medal with Munster, not long after his defiant performance against Leinster in the semi-final at Lansdowne Road. Stung by the criticisms and the unfavourable comparisons to the eye-catching running game of Leinster outhalf Felipe Contepomi, O'Gara practically owned that occasion, with a customary display of precision kicking and a fine breakaway try which sealed Leinster's fate.
For 90 minutes, O'Gara chatted with disarming candour about his journey to that point. It surprised me that day to hear just how annoyed he was at the comparisons made between his brand of game and Contepomi's. This was, after all, a man who was well established as Ireland's first-choice number 10 and a man who had repeatedly demonstrated his verve and readiness for the big occasion, most dramatically through a monster drop goal against Wales in Cardiff a few years earlier.
He was not stung at the praise for Contepomi, but at the implicit and familiar criticisms of his own game. And he was big enough to admit it. Certain ball sports have positions that require incredible mental stamina and surely playing number 10 in rugby is chief among these. It is a role where there is no hiding place and every decision made carries a broader consequence.
O'Gara revisited that grim afternoon when, as a callow if cocksure choice for Munster, he watched four penalty opportunities tail away in the province's first European Cup final, against Northampton. He reviewed that old match with the true place-kicker's utter dispassion and faith in percentages. It did not matter what the masses had seen or that he had been mocked in the jacks of a local pub a few weeks later. He knew in his heart he gave those penalty kicks a good rattle and that his form was true.
They just didn't fall. Michael Jordan, the former Chicago basketball legend, developed such a fearsome reputation for nailing winning shots on the stroke of full time, it seemed like he never missed. But that was because, as Jordan once noted, he never felt fear in those situations as he knew that only two things could happen: "Either the ball will go in or it will not."
That seemed like O'Gara's attitude. A week later, O'Gara and Munster roared on to a famous victory and throughout the year, the Cork man maintained a formidable line of form, backing up his quietly stated credo of that afternoon to set himself against the best in the world, not merely in Ireland.
O'Gara is helplessly honest and it was that forthright attitude which prompted him to speak out about the over-hyped English (rugby) Premiership just before facing the madding crowd at Leicester this autumn, when he once again performed sensationally and handled a minor diplomatic incident with great tact afterwards.
And as we reach the last day of 2006, O'Gara's unblinking tenacity and composure has been one of the year's highlights. Although the lionisation of Munster since their great victory threatens to cheapen their accomplishment, the team is blessed with thoughtful and honest people. And we need that if professional sport is to matter.
One of the privileges of this job is that you get the chance to witness sporting occasions you otherwise wouldn't get within an ass's roar of. And I was privileged to see Argentina deconstruct not just Serbia &Montenegro but, for a bewitching 90 minutes, the game of soccer itself on a balmy afternoon in Gelsenkirchen. That 6-0 game represented the aesthetic high point of a World Cup which soared towards without quite touching greatness and all of us left the stadium feeling half drunk at what we had just witnessed. Months earlier, watching Russia's Evgeny Plushenko skating to gold in the men's figure staking in Turin was an unforgettable night. They say that, much like snooker, figure skating is made for television. That's not true.
What can look remote and dandified and boring on television comes across as savagely tough and unforgiving when you are in a tense auditorium and can hear the blades cutting through the ice. And it was the backdrop of Plushenko's story that made the night so fascinating. He made it from a pneumonic childhood in a trailer in Siberia all the way to this garlanded ice-rink in northern Italy, where his performance, to the soundtrack of the Godfather, rendered the competition little more than a gold medal coronation. Plushenko must have been a wealthy athlete by then but the lank blond hair and the severe, gaunt features held vestiges of a childhood devoid of luxury. And, just like that gilded Argentinian football team, the performance, the expression, was everything.
The big sporting event I wished I had seen live in 2006 was the All-Ireland football semi-final between Dublin and Mayo. In some ways, it was a shame that the season did not conclude with the glamour meeting of the cosmopolitans and Kerry, evoking the days so splendidly captured by Tom Humphries in his recent book about that enduring rivalry. But if there is any mileage left in the old philosophical battle between city and country, then Mayo struck a blow for the villages on that afternoon, even if it all went pear-shaped a few weeks later.
On the Wednesday night after that smouldering, emotional afternoon in Croke Park, I travelled to Ballyvary in Mayo, where the team were training. It was an abysmal night of soft constant rain and the pitch was down a laneway outside the village. There wasn't a soul around apart from the Mayo players and the management. The same faces who had starred in front of a packed and disbelieving Croke Park the previous Sunday trotted out in this pastoral scene in front of only a herd of cattle.
Of course, none of those Mayo players knew the misery the All-Ireland final would inflict on them a few weeks later. Early last January I drove down to west Kerry to meet Dara Ó Cinnéide, whose retirement had just been "revealed" by his colleagues in Radio Na Gaeltachta. Like O'Gara, the Gaeltacht man has the place-kicker's temperament and is a great conversationalist. Pondering Kerry's chances for the year ahead, Ó Cinnéide breezily played down the impact of his own farewell, noting that if three more Kerry forwards decided to call it quits in the morning, there would be plenty of worthy guys to fill their boots. Nine months later, Ó Cinnéide watched on from a commentary booth as his old friends reclaimed Sam.
And I remembered his reply when I asked him about how he would fill the long winter nights without Kerry football training. He said he would renew his interest in films, go for walks. "And sure, like Jake La Motta, we'll be getting fat." I reckon it will be well into 2007 before I hear a sportsperson declaring a better epitaph. Happy New Year.
