It sounds impossible, absurd. But if Colm Keane says it, then it must be true: Micheal O'Hehir did commentary on 99 All-Ireland finals. In Irish radio, that's as big as it gets, arguably bigger even than Gaybo - though that may depend on the sex of the person doing the measuring.
Radio Days (RTE Radio 1, Sunday) started with the glorious sound of O'Hehir's voice describing the glorious sight of a Christy Ring goal for Cork, and it was immediately obvious that we were in the company of legends, of "Ireland Gaelic and Ireland free".
O'Hehir's career, unlike the sports and pop stars Keane more often profiles, didn't trace a roller-coaster line of rise and fall, of triumph and tragedy. Injury, addiction, loss of form or muse - the occupational hazards of the careers Keane chronicles so well in his documentaries - aren't generally relevant in the story of a Radio Eireann sports commentator. Particularly one who achieved pre-eminent status when he was still a teenager and retained it into old age.
Which is not to say his life was untouched by tragedy. Indeed, for many people who speak of him, O'Hehir's latterday illness, robbing him of the mastery of his famed vocal instrument, is the defining fact of his life. The silent, wheelchaired figure cheered by the crowds is the only image of him for fans who came of age after he was cruelly deprived of his "century" of finals - only 23 days before he was to reach that milestone. So maybe he's a classic Colm Keane subject after all.
Keane himself largely stepped aside here. The excerpts and interviews in Radio Days concentrated on O'Hehir's rather reedy-voiced match commentaries and his iconic status for mid-century listeners, in particular. "I've often thought of it, Colm, as sitting down with good company, a good pint and listening to Micheal O'Hehir," said one. "We were millionaires for a couple of hours."
Another old listener compared the appeal of O'Hehir's voice to John McCormack, but it was hard to believe that the attraction wasn't what he said, but rather, the way he said it. He was a master of conjuring visualisations, the colours of Croke Park, and conveying the details of the games and their players, right down to the townlands they came from. But he was no less a master of creating for listeners a sense of the global community of Gaels tuning in to these matches from the Congo to the Bronx (and with a special mention from Micheal for the bishops and priests).
Yet, just maybe, if it hadn't been O'Hehir, it would have been someone else. That is to say, perhaps this wasn't a magic man but a magic moment, a congruence of technology and sport and nation-building - whoever voiced it was bound to be a legend. For the generation of men eulogising O'Hehir here, radio was still an occasion, perhaps demanding a trip to the pub to listen with mates or at least to the creamery to get the batteries charged, and O'Hehir embodied that excitement.
For a later generation of women, for whom radio became a daily domestic accompaniment, there would be the far more conversational companionship of Gay.
To be sure, the Irish audiences of the new millennium need scarcely rely on Micheal or Gay to tell them about the wider world. On the contrary: been there, done that, bought too many embarrassing T-shirts. Adventures in the Tourist Trade (BBC World Service, Thursday) began to tell the amazing story of just how much the world's people are travelling. Check it out: "According to the World Tourism Organisation, 635 million people travelled to a foreign country last year. Between them, they spent $439 billion," making tourism the world's leading export earner.
With the rise and growth of affluent minorities in Europe and in Asia, the number of people visiting foreign countries is expected to double in the next 15 years.
Adventures in the Tourist Trade, a four-parter which started this week, isn't so much interested in what drives the tourists as in what happens to the people and their environments at tourist destinations. One in eight of the world's jobs are directly or indirectly linked to tourism, but what sort of jobs are they, and what sort of lives can these workers, their families and their neighbours live in the presence of tourism? Presenter Susan Marling visits Kenya, Jordan, Goa and Rome to find out.
Kenya's Masai are a natural starting point for a critique of third-world tourism. While many of Kenya's tourists stay in foreign-owned accommodation, consume imported luxury goods and are served by Kenyans who come from the cities, many Masai people have been displaced to allow "conservation areas" that the tourists can enjoy. But Marling - who couldn't resist some brochuresque rhapsodising about the Kenyan countryside and its wildlife - found Masai who were not too inclined to complain.
There are so many Masai nowadays that all of them couldn't live by cattlegrazing, and in this day and age they want cash anyway. Marling sounded impressed with an eco-tourism partnership project from which they get some of that money - and which, by the way, offers a more truly "wild" experience of Africa than the conventional parks (including "real" touristic displays of Masai rituals and music). In fact, the programme turned into a bit of an ad for this project, and didn't raise the questions of sustainability that inevitably rise with the spiralling demand for this sort of anti-theme-park tourism.
Sustainability is the question that plagues the Internet - where money goes in, but it doesn't come out. I don't know if any of this column's readers have checked out liveatlunch.com, plugged here a few weeks ago and the world's very best music radio show not-on-the-air-but-on-the-Net. I'm kind of hoping you haven't, because in the bizarre world of Netonomics, the more listeners the show has, the more bandwidth it uses and, therefore, the more it costs to transmit and the more money it loses!
"Legendary" DJ Vin Scelsa (that's what Luka Bloom called him on Philip King's RTE show recently, and really, O'Hehir has nothing on Vin), no longer to be found on commercial radio, is physically hosted by J&R Music World, a prosperous New York shop. But his cyberhost, delivering the best sound quality I've heard streaming on the web, is Artistent.com, for which the word "unsustainable" might have been coined. (Exhibit A: Rosanna Arquette's asinine "online journal", untouched since August, but still prominently flagged on the homepage.)
Anyway, it seems Artistent is going down and, without serious financial intervention, liveatlunch is going with it, and soon. Thus Vin has dubbed March "the Month Of Living Dangerously . . . I'm playing Sigourney Weaver". His on-air behaviour and online notes reflect this, in inimitable self-mocking style, written "in the hills, with the rebels": "Day One: I defiantly smoked a cigarette at the beginning of today's show, and not just any cigarette - a Camel! Unfiltered! With my sunglasses on! Indoors!
"I played Electric Light Orchestra! And liked it! "I played Bridge Over Troubled Water! And cranked the studio speakers up real loud!
"I even played Patti Smith, who I vowed to never play ever again because she dissed me one too many times on the air! Yes! Piss Factory . . . With all that cussin'! So there!
"I twisted my back taking an air guitar solo to Dan Bern's Estelle . . . And I'm proud of it!
"I defy Fate! I thumb my nose at the Gods! I laugh in the Face of Adversity! I mock the Marketplace! I ignore Demographics! I deplore Economics! I cross against the Green! I strut my `id' with no restraint! I drive through E-ZPass on the New Jersey Turnpike at 20 mph! I guzzle Swedish vodka straight from the bottle! If you torture me and pull out my fingernails with a pliers, I'll spit on your shoes and sing `shoo-fly pie'! You'll never make me name names! I won't tell where the treasure is hidden! I don't care what anybody says! Make a fool of myself - I don't care! Flirt with disaster - I don't care! Steal `I don't care' from a kid named Pierre - I don't effing care! I'll put my head in any mean old lion's mouth any old day!
"When I left J&R after the show I bought a bag of honey roasted cashews from a peddler on Park Row who clearly had a cold! And I ate 'em! Yum yum! I yam what I yam! Sail on, sailor man! You ain't seen nothin' yet! Ba-ba-ba-baby!"
Celtic Tigers, while there's still time, save this man for the sake of radio, or just for the sake of a laugh. You gotta hear Vin's laugh . . .
Harry Browne can be contacted at hbrowne@irish-times.ie