Sportswriters defer to men in box seat

Sideline Cut:The last column of the year brings the sound of trumpets and an unmistakable sense of triumph. Maybe not the sort of dreamy elation that must have been Pádraig Harrington's after his nerve-jangling "will I, won't I?" flirtation with the history books on the last day of the Open at Carnoustie this summer. And nothing that could, in all probability, hold a candle to the feeling of actually being Colm Cooper or Kieran Donaghy for the duration of last year's football final.

On reflection, triumph might be overstating it when you remember the mien of those Kilkenny men rampaging across the sacred turf in Croke Park after yet another perfect summer of hurling. And in fact, when you imagine the rush of pride and emotion felt by John Duddy as he limbered up in the sweat room on a raucous St Patrick's eve in downtown Manhattan while 6,000 Irish fans gathered around the ring and chanted his name in the Garden, you fast come to the conclusion that celebrating your last few paragraphs of 2007 must be a fairly hollow and even pathetic type of thrill in comparison. But you take what you can in these dark days. It is a strange business, following the elite winners of sport and then writing about it. Occasionally grim, lonely, abuse-laden, drunken and demoralising too. But they say that most office Christmas parties are like that.

They say also that everybody wants to be on television nowadays. Certainly, all kinds of Irish people who were perfectly content to merely watch the idiot box for the last 20 or 30 years now seem convinced that television cannot possibly continue to prosper unless they become the new Seoige or O'Shea. This is far from an original observation but television has fairly changed the ancient and perpetually unfashionable lark of sports writing.

Much as with men or women of the cloth, there has been a stunning decrease in the number of people who have heard the sweet, summoning air of the Sports Editor's whistle, that piercing dog whistle that serves as a calling to the long and endangered tradition of inky shirts and greasy notepads that has been the lot of sports writing.

And in fairness, it is easy to understand why. For young people intent on a life working in journalism, television must seem altogether more glamorous and fun than the prospect of a lifetime watching grown-ups playing sport and then fending off frostbite as you write about it. And let it be placed on the record here: it is. It has to be.

Because it is hard to fully convey the full power of despair that can grip you at around six o'clock on a rainy Sunday night in Birr or Tullamore as you find yourself inching, through pitch blackness, along the old stand in search of the gate that the groundsman faithfully promised to leave open.

"The green gate. Just lift the latch," were his final, merry words as he left you to probable death by exposure.

And it would be foolhardy to even attempt to try and explain the aching sense of loneliness that comes with being the last man in the press box. You always feel like the very last person on earth when you look around an empty stadium and down on the dark field where hours earlier the heroes had played to the gallery and then finally you ponder the abandoned detritus of the press area, a mess of ruined seats and scrunched-up match programmes, Styrofoam cups of Joe and, finally, on a cheap tray touchingly adorned with a fake lace doily, a lone ham-sandwich triangle wilting in its own universe of despair which you inevitably - and shamefully - eat.

Not that it would be accurate to overstate the collegiality or the sense of dynamism that floods the press box when we are there in our full glory either. No, squeezed into a confined space, elbowing one another to make room for our unwieldy note-taking style and scavenging like shanty town beggars for the only working socket often makes the sportswriting fraternity volatile and mutinous, particularly on hot days.

That is why, on baking days in Páirc Uí Chaoimh, you can see Frank Murphy orchestrating the groundsmen as they direct the water hoses up towards the gantry where we are suspended for seven and eight hours at a time. Much like family, we understand that we are locked together in this thing and there really is no backing out.

Sometimes, the senior generation of sportswriters regale the underclasses with the years when they lived the high life. You can always tell the senior generation by distinguishing characteristics - they wear ties, have excellent shorthand and are born raconteurs; they have something of the fallen aristocrat about them. Listening to their stories of the grand days when they were regarded as part of the sports fraternity is tantalising, like an East Berliner hearing about the city before the Wall. We listen to the tales of those long-gone days when the man with the notebook and biro was received gladly by the great sports people of the day for talk and merriment and can all but taste the champagne.

Nowadays, sport mirrors every other aspect of existence in that it is about instant gratification and reaction. Television is, unquestionably, the place to be: the medium through which the action is delivered live and from every conceivable angle into every home. It is to the tanned, smiling men and women wearing headphones and carrying microphones with logos that the heroes and managers are ushered afterwards to give their immediate thoughts. In some godforsaken box room we, the great unwashed, will wait, often for hours, for the heroes to arrive and say it all again but with none of the same emotion. And then the story is written up and printed and a full night passes by before it reaches the public, and by then it is already prehistoric news about an event that has already been played and replayed on the bright, flat screens.

Television is winning hands down, no question. No wonder everyone is flocking towards it. It is hard, sifting back through the blur of sporting achievement and disappointment and outrage that framed the seasons of 2007, to single out any way in which the fading game of sportswriting gets to come out on top. Except that maybe the rewards are oblique. I got to witness a fair number of spectacular plays first hand over the past year but the memory that is leaping out at me now occurred when the whistle had sounded and the director had declared, "it's a wrap".

On an awful day in Tullamore, Birr had beaten Ballyboden in a thrilling Leinster club hurling final. As I made my way back across the field having listened to the Birr manager, Pad Joe Whelahan, talk delightedly about wringing another great and defiant win out of a proud club, I saw his son and team captain Brian standing in front of the stand. He was with one or two friends and his family and there was virtually no one around as he made his way to the shower room. Half an hour earlier, Whelahan had created a goal of ingenious simplicity but now the years were beginning to show. He hobbled a little. "I'll be fu***d tomorrow," he groaned happily to no one in particular.

And boy, he was delighted. This was one of the hurlers of the millennium with all that achievement behind him and here he was, still delighted - and unconquerable - as a 10-year-old. It was as good as it got, standing there - at least for a few minutes until I realised it was almost dark and I wasn't certain which housing estate I had abandoned my car in and that anyway, as I frantically rooted through my pockets, I had left my keys up in the press box. Which was now locked up for the night.

Happy Christmas.