Gizzy ready to rumble in the park

Leinster SHC Semi-final: Tom Humphrieson how a revered and loved man of the past century will bring some inspiring relevance to a Wexford hurling field this evening

So summer begins. Gizzy Lyng teaches primary and his seasons have that divided feel to them that we remember from the classroom. Those dog days of June when the sun, pouring through the high windows, picks the motes of chalk dust that float in the still air and the greatest drama of a listless afternoon comes when a wasp trespasses and you all go a little crazy. You know then that the summer holidays are due.

He had this past week off. Taking the sun. Wooing his girl. Beating a ball in the handball alley. Just tuning to the rhythm of summer. Tonight Wexford play Dublin in Nowlan Park. The nation is less than transfixed. The Leinster hurling championship floats before our eyes as a beaten docket we keep fishing from our pockets.

Somebody is going home in tears from Kilkenny tonight though. How Wexford and Dublin do against each other will be a benchmark for their future. The winners can save their laments for another day. Nobody yet sees an ending for this Leinster championship that doesn't involve a man in black and amber wearily ascending the Hogan Stand. To think that! That would be foolhardy.

Still. Gizzy Lyng, lumbered with the nickname since he was imprisoned in small desks under high windows himself, Diarmuid ceasing to be his handle, the name of a Gremlin supplanting it, Gizzy Lyng thinks of Sonny. And of George. Big trees that toppled.

Kilkenny. He remembers 2004. Kilkenny blowing themselves out. Is that it? Watching as Mick Jacob scored that goal that sucker punched Kilkenny at the last bell. He remembers from the corner of his eye seeing the ruddy, beaten face of Brian Cody.

"I could see him up in the corner screaming when Mick Jacob scored the goal. He fell to the ground. I remember thinking, why does he even care that much. It's a Leinster semi-final. He was raging though. It hurt him.

"They were odds-on to go and win the All-Ireland anyway, but he was so genuinely sick in 04. All those Leinster titles. I was thinking why wouldn't he just give us the one!"

The worst about it is that Kilkenny always circle Wexford warily. Those occasional haymakers keep them dancing. Keep them alert.

"They should think we're nothing at this stage, but they get worked up for it. They think dfferent. They are ruthless. God, Charlie Carter would still be playing in the forwards and be captain for Wexford now regardless of what age he is!"

Kilkenny should feel entitled to swat Wexford away like a teacher terminating a wasp and hushing his class.

Sonny and George though. Deep down they were wary too. But the brain has its chambers. Somewhere else, on some other level, they were complacent. The feeling couldn't be evicted.

He explains the fascination, the wonder sometimes to his friend and team-mate Eoin Quigley. And Eoin looks back and shakes his head.

"Gizzy. No way was it David and Goliath. It was Muhammad Ali and George Foreman. Ali is Goliath."

And he explains it all. The Rumble in the Jungle. Ali v Foreman. Zaire. The fears for Ali's life. Foreman being a dark monster plucked from hoodlums alleys. Ali. Rope-a-dope. The greatest high wire act in the history of sport. The greatest exhibition of nerve and cool and tactical calculus ever. The greatest.

He can't remember when it started. With his brothers he grew up in the town, playing for Clonard, a junior club his dad had virtually founded and built up. The boys thrived on the field and with an odd singlemindedness, which still amazes Gizzy when he thinks of it, his father moved them on. When Gizzy was 14 his father decided it was time to move house, time for the family to be near a senior club for his sons. They looked in that area of hurling gold that houses Barntown, Oulart and St Martin's. Found a nice plot of land and the Lyng boys became St Martin's men. Their dad kept on coaching in Clonard.

He can't remember the beginning of the fascination with Ali. His dad was an admirer but had reservations about the entire Black Muslim thing. The boys heard the stories but at a certain age a father's stories all sound the same.

They got the movie though. When We Were Kings, Leon Gast's labour of love, his homage to the greatest fight of all time. Loved it. Moved on though.

Ciarán moved on to soccer. First to Preston. Then to Shrewsbury. He came home one memorable occassion for their dad's 50th birthday. The family escaped down to Dingle. Everyone back from England and America. Gizzy remembers, not wholly reliably, that at three in the morning they were dancing on the kitchen table. He remembers Ciarán lifting his shirt to unveil a tattoo. The word EMPATHY written across his back. The word ALI written downwards using the A from Empathy.

Three in the morning on a table in Dingle. Next day it was as if it had never happened. Nobody recalled through the fog of morning and early afternoon. Three months later the subject of tattoos happened to come up at home. Gizzy broke the news of Ciarán's tattoo to a couple of incredulous parents.

Ciarán was with Preston at the time. Before games he would watch When We Were Kings. When he came home with one of those personalised DVD players that soccer players kill time with he reignited Gizzy's interest.

Ciarán got a book. They shared it. They started chatting. Watched When We Were Kings over and over. Picked up three or four more different Ali DVDs. Then another few books.

Chatted about what relevance Ali had to their own lives. Found plenty.

So it started.

Last summer Gizzy and his girlfriend, Kristen, were headed to a wedding in Indiana. Up near South Bend, Notre Dame country. When he heard about the wedding, where it was, Gizzy had one thought in his head. Michigan is beside Indiana. Ali lives in a large house in Berrien Springs, Michigan.

They got to the airport. Gizzy said to Kristen, we're here. We're this close. We're not going home without trying.

So they drove down through Michigan. Two, three hours in a rental. Found Berrien Springs, a town which progress had determinedly bypassed.

Gizzy had expected huckster tack, had braced for Ali burgers and shops filled with useless plastic replica tat. Not a word. Not a sign though. They stopped a couple of places and the residents couldn't or wouldn't tell where Ali lived. Finally a barber shop. The man came down with Gizzy and Kristen in the car, down to the big estate two miles outside town.

"I'd just felt he'd be there. I'd had this feeling. He'd be there. We'd go in. Ali wasn't there though. I took a few pictures, tried to get in. But I didn't get a hold of him."

So they drove back through the state, went to the wedding. Gizzy preoccupied.

Next morning Kristen said, do you want to try again?

Gizzy thought for one quarter of a second and said "Here . . . yeah cmon" as he turned the key in the ignition.

Second time. Same gate. Same supplicant. Same thing. No Ali. Gizzy Lyng sat outside looking at the fruit farm on one side and the rolling planes on the other and wrote a note to Muhammad Ali. Wouldn't let Kristen read it. "I told him I had come from Ireland that I would love to have met him. I said he was an inspiration to sports people. To everyone really, but I said sports people. Just personal stuff."

He gave the note to a gardener.

This evening Wexford play Dublin. Ciarán is on the Wexford panel, home from soccer now and a dual county player. Gizzy starts at midfield. Before they go to take the team bus to the game there is ritual to be attended to.

The two brothers will sit down. Throw on some poached eggs. Watch the pictures from Zaire all those decades ago. In the dressingroom that night Ali's people were so scared for him that they shivered. Couldn't look him in the eye. He was going in to be killed by the baddest, meanest human being on the planet.

"This ain't nothing but another day in the dramatic life of Muhammad Ali." He told them: "Do I look scared."

And then he goes out and unfolds the most fantastic plan which he has kept incubating in his head for months. He doesn't dance. He doesn't float. He leans on the ropes and takes everything. He talks back. Hit harder George! Show me something! I thought you were supposed to be bad!

"The first and second rounds are fantastic," says Gizzy. "The punishment he is taking. Leaning back there. You wince. You go out and check the egg. By the fourth Ali is kinda coasting it. You can see George is blowing out."

The poached eggs tremble in the boiling water. In Kinshasa Foreman throws huge booming rights handers. Once a pug called Gregorio Peralta had tried to shield himself from Foreman's rage and Foreman had driven his fist into Peralta's defending arm, and broken the arm. People looked away. Ali leaned back on the ropes, in George Plimpton's memorable phrase, like a man leaning back out of his window to look up at the sky.

And then.

"In the fifth! Whatever is happening the poached eggs we don't care. They get into the fifth and for the last minute of it I just go crazy. The most amazing thing ever.

"Every time I watch it, the same feeling. It just comes over you. And Ciarán spotted a thing when he brought the film home to me on one of those mobile DVD players that soccer players have. Now you'll see it late in the round if you look. Where George has thrown everything and Ali senses it and says to him when Foreman has hit him with everything, 'is that it?'

"Once Ciarán said it I can see it. Ali saying, 'is that it?' That fifth round Foreman goes to town on Ali. Kills him. I've watched it a hundred times and every time I just totally come alive.

"You settle back down. Even when Ali knocks him out in the eighth it's not so good. Stuff like that. It never gets old. I always pick up something new from him or a different expression.

"I focus on Ali. The fifth round. It makes me laugh almost. The speed that Ali is working at. The memory of him out running on the roads in heavy boots at 3am two nights before the fight. Here we are wrapped up in cotton wool. He did everything his own way. He risked it all. Again and again. He was the man, no matter what Angelo Dundee said or Drew Bundini said. Ali was the man. He did it his own way. I think the same thing sometimes. With training say, I know my body better than anyone else. I think. I don't know that I'd risk everything like Ali did."

Sometimes Gizzy likes to sit and talk with Jim Sullivan. Sullivan is a Wexford man who did most things in boxing but mainly for Jim and for Gizzy he spent three weeks in Deer Lake, Pa. Once training at Ali's fabled camp.

"Jim has pictures at home. Just a small photo. I'd have it the same size as the wall if it was me. Jim Sullivan from Wexford and Ali. Ali is punching him and Jim has the fist in, punching Ali back.

"He tells me about it, Howard Bingham and Bundini collected him from the airport. Two boys and this other fella up to Deer Lake, the big stones at the front. The names of the greats that Ali painted on the boulders. Jim was staying down in these huts for 18 days. Ali said one day at training that he'd drop down to the huts. Ah yeah, they thought. A couple of days before they left, down arrives Ali and chatted and did the photos.

"Jim says that was the highlight of his career and Jim was a legend in Irish boxing. That sums it up. I couldn't name anyone in hurling or football, that meeting him would be the highlight of my career. For somebody who achieved what Jim achieved, for that to be the highlight, says it all."

He's convinced that the gardener never gave Ali the letter. Ali would have written back. Gizzy knows. He had written to him before.

A few years ago Ciarán was at Preston and struggling. His birthday was approaching in the summer. Gizzy had an idea. He wrote to Ali. "I said I have a brother over in England. He needs a few words of inspiration. Ali sent back a signed photo and he'd written a message on the back, 'Keep Strong'. Serious stuff man."

Wexford play Dublin tonight. The Lyngs travel to Nowlan Park nourished on the greatness that swept one man over every boundary, obstacle and prejudice. The most revered and loved man of the past century still brings some inspiring relevance to a hurling field on a sunny summer evening. Maybe Leinster hurling isn't a beaten docket. Ask the ghost of Sonny Liston. Ask George. Ask Ali. Ask Gizzy. Certainty doesn't exist. Sport is the art of the possible.

In The Last Episode . . .

Strangely enough it's their first championship meeting since 2002, when Wexford prevailed 3-15 to 2-12. Dublin haven't beaten Wexford in the championship in 17 years.

You Bet . . .

Fairly healthy odds for anyone who fancies Dublin causing the upset: Dublin 4/1; Wexford 1/5; Draw 12/1; Handicap betting: Dublin (+6) 5/6; Wexford (-6) evens; Draw (+6) 12/1.

On Your Marks . . .

Dublin captain Philip Brennan has highlighted the importance of his team contesting the full 70 minutes, that if they can stay in touch with Wexford long enough they won't be too far away come the final whistle. That's really the challenge, though, as Wexford still have the ability to put this game out of Dublin's reach before the end.

Gaining Ground

Nowlan Park on a summer's evening is as fine a venue as any in the land for championship hurling, and if the supporters show up in numbers this has the makings of a fine contest. The teams are equally familiar with the pitch, especially having met there so many times at underage level.

Just The Ticket

Cash on the day: Stand - €20. Terrace - €15. Usual concessions apply.

Crystal Gazing

Dublin were widely applauded for their progress in the league, but that will count for nothing if it's not transferred to the championship. They definitely have the ability to press Wexford, but still look a year or two off beating them.