Hope springs perennial even in Babylon

Locker Room: There's nowt as queer as folk. No doubt about it. Nowt. It's strange the things which irritate folk, the things that get folk riled up, writes Tom Humphries.

In the nine years or so that this particular column has been squatting on this particular back page in this here newspaper it has delved into the world of underage camogie about three times. Maybe four. Certainly less than half a dozen, your honour.

There was a piece on the Féile during the summer and before that the last extensive, full and unexpurgated underage camogie festival to take in this space was in order to celebrate a landmark game between the St Vincent's under-11 Bs and Round Towers of Clondalkin. Let's just say that folk still have bees in their bonnets about the business.

For most of the St Vincent's under-11 Bs it was a first exposure to competitive victory. It was their fifth ever match and their first ever win. I remember the sequence well because I missed the season opener when the poor Bs were coldly crushed by Whitehall Colmcilles. That day I was depending on update phone calls from abroad, being at the time in Cyprus for the World Cup qualifier played there in March 2001. The historic Round Towers victory took place in early May 2001 on the same day as the FA Cup final - of which I have absolutely no memories.

That was quite some time ago, yet the mad-as-hell folk who write in to complain often take time out for a sidebar to express lingering annoyance and disgust with the self-indulgence involved. They prescribe spending far less time chronicling underage camogie and more time writing about "things that matter". OK. So what matters? The more you write about sport the more you appreciate that the past requires revisionism extensive enough to make The Gentle Black And Tan look like hard documentary evidence. The more you invest in following big-time sport the more emotionally bankrupt you will be at the end of the day. Life's short. Does it all matter? Does any of it matter?

Take me. I am among the most wretched of the earth. I am a lifelong apostle of Leeds United and the other day I found myself startled to see the Leeds crest reproduced in full colour on the inside page of a newspaper. What took me aback slightly was the fact that the crest appeared on a sports page instead of a news page.

I found myself reflecting that it was a good job that Leeds had ditched the old smiley badge crest they wore in the mid-to-late seventies. It would look impossibly ghoulish appearing beside the stories of racial assault, sexual assault and common bankruptcy which keep us abreast of happenings at the club.

In the sense that sport should matter, do Leeds United matter anymore? Not really. Morally and financially bankrupt, with a string of on-loan players who mean nothing to the people they play in front of, Leeds are nothing more than a cautionary tale. There's no sporting ideal which you can apply to the club; there's nothing commendable that they represent anymore. For the long-time fan the only excitement left is wondering which alien state Leeds will reach first, financial administration or Division One?

Leeds are an extreme case but the moral failings of the Premiership Babylon are well documented. The whole business is grotesquely over-hyped and almost everything you know about it has been filtered through PR people or police reports.

So what else matters? Rugby, with its socially stratified membership criteria and its ridiculously bloated Made-For-TV World Cup, the first half of which consists of old blue bloods shooting little fish in a barrel?

Rugby. When it comes to the notion of shooting fish in a barrel you just know that rugby is going to be the next great battleground in the anti-doping war. When the money came in, the boys got too big, too quickly. Now the blazers have a choice. They either shut the barn door like the top American professional sports have done or they start getting busted in greater numbers, forcing them to strip back the sport a little. We'll call it a choice. In the end they'll do what TV wants them to do.

What's left? Athletics, of course. Athletics matters only because of the canyon that exists between the ideal and the reality. One human racing against another to see which is the fastest should be the purest form of sport. One human seeing if he can throw an object farther than another - well, that should be clean and pure too. Yet, we don't even have words to describe what's wrong anymore. Just letters. THG. EPO. HGH. IAAF. WADA. USADA. USATF.

Cycling is gone over the cliff of course. Swimming takes one stroke forward with an Ian Thorpe and gets swept several strokes backward by the current of drugs from China. Boxing? Whatever happened to boxing? Basketball? We were in love for a while. Now Jordan is gone and Kobe Bryant is up on sexual assault charges and we don't understand any of it.

Maybe golf is clean and if you can just swallow the chaps-only business, the racial imbalance, the obscene money, the tantrums and the fashion deficit you'll be fine. Just learn to concentrate on the merits of a Padraig Harrington or a Notah Begay and you can get along. You need to turn a blind eye to the ridiculous hype which accompanies the Ryder Cup and maybe 20 other Tour events on each side of the Atlantic and just get your kicks from the four majors.

Does it matter? Not much but you don't feel as dirty as you think you might.

You can look at it all in another way of course. Modern sport is our equivalent of the last days of the Roman Empire. There's plenty to write about if you have the phrases "tut, tut", "shambles/fiasco" or "bah humbug" on the save-get keys of your laptop.

Looking back over the last few years there have been staples which have merited several columns a year. Drugs. Keano. The Bertie Bowl. Michelle. The FAI. Rule 21. Rule 42. Keep churning out the disapproval, keep tabs on the misdemeanours and you've got yourself a sportswriting career.

That's what we do by and large and we drag the readership with us. There are so few great stories now, so few big, innocent, open people to write great, uplifting stories about.

When the old sportswriter Heywood Broun noted that sport should be a laboratory demonstration of life, he was thinking of a different, less complicated kind of life. Now sport imitates life a little too faithfully and from Rio to THG it wears you down. That's why occasionally you get a little kick out of the small things.

Somebody sent me an e-mail last week asking whatever happened to the St Vincent's under-11 Bs. They'd hoped for an amusing, uplifting series which would chronicle their ups and downs.

So we rooted out the names and looked at the photos and figured it all out. One kid went to Australia. Five others quit. Twelve were still young enough to be on the under-11 panel which completed the county league and championship double the week before last. Two others are on the under-12s. Three are on the under-13s and one of those three won an All-Ireland under-14 Féile medal this year.

Looking back was the best part of a sporting week filled with THG and Balco and Jody Morris.

Seventeen of those girls still play. We see most of them around every week and they're as happy as larks in the sky. We all can get back to the depressing forensics of modern sport next week, but for now - call it self indulgence, call it sentiment, call it antidote - that seems to matter.

So no cranky letters for now please.