An Irishman's Diary

LIKE many an elite sportsman before him, Con McCarrick will miss the World Championships because of injury. Not that he would have been competing himself. Going on 81, he is a few years past his best as a draughts grandmaster. His main role in the sport these days is coaching.

When I dropped by his Dundalk home the other night, he was helping with the last-minute preparations of his protégé Garret Owens, one of four Irish players flying out to Beijing this week for the first World Mind Sports Games. Con would have been flying out with him until he fell and broke his hip in July. For the moment, he's not going anywhere except in a zimmer-frame.

It's only a temporary setback for a man who, 60 years ago, shot himself in the knee accidentally while out hunting pigeons and defied medical advice that his leg should be amputated before training himself back to full fitness. Even with his current disability, he remains a ball of energy, mental and physical.

But he deserves to be in Beijing if only because he has spent the past 30 years campaigning to have the game he loves recognised by the Olympic movement.

This is the nearest it has got so far. Along with chess, bridge, Go, and xiangqi (Chinese chess), it will showcase itself in the Chinese capital, site of the summer games, as a further nudge to the International Olympic Committee. In proof of its commitment, competitors will even be dope-tested.

The tests are a cause of some mirth among draughts players. Nobody is quite sure what drugs you need to take to improve your performance in a mental game with 500 billion billion permutations. But physical fitness is certainly among the requirements. A self-employed builder, Owens's regimen includes gym work preparing for the 14-hour days of tournament competition.

That draughts remains an under-appreciated sport in Ireland is no fault of Con McCarrick. After years in England - he used to sell Socialist Worker on the streets of London, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Paul Foot and John Pilger - he came home in the mid-1970s and founded the Irish Draughts Association.

In 1982, he helped heighten its profile by setting a world record for simultaneous games, playing 154 people in Dundalk, with 136 wins, 17 draws, and one defeat. (The record now stands at 306, set by Mississippi's Charlie Walker. But Owens will try to reclaim it for Ireland next year when he plays 500 people in Dublin.) McCarrick is not just a giant of Irish draughts, however. A mark of his international reputation is that he was chosen to referee a famous match in 1992 between his friend, the then world champion Marion Tinsley - still the greatest player the game has known - and a computer called Chinook.

Chinook is to draughts what Deep Blue is to chess - except that in 2007, after 18 years of development, Chinook's programmers went further than Deep Blue's ever could and declared it unbeatable. It would not necessarily win every time, they said, but could not lose even to a perfect game. As one computer scientist commented: "This programme could play draughts against God and it would get a draw." (McCarrick disputes this.)

But in 1992, Chinook was still learning the ropes and Tinsley - a US maths professor - beat it in a series 4-2, with 33 draws. McCarrick retains the handwritten score-sheets form the event (as in chess, these are analysed minutely). And, his excitement undimmed, he shows me the sheet for game 39: "In my opinion the greatest ever".

With only two of the maximum 40 games remaining, the computer was by then playing to keep the series alive; and the contest hinged on an unexpected move that Tinsley took 26 minutes - an eternity in draughts time - to study. During that period he visualised 46 moves ahead and outwitted the computer to take an unassailable lead.

In a rematch in 1994, Chinook was leading when Tinsley had to withdraw because of ill-health. He died several months later, to his Irish friend's great grief.

Draughts may have been "solved" in mathematical terms. But human supremacy at the game remains much prized and, drawing on the tradition set by people such as McCarrick and the former world number two Pat McCarthy, Ireland still looms large in the competition.

Of the four players going to Beijing, says Owens, "one of us should get a medal". Unfortunately, they may have to beat each other to do it. Owens's first game is against Patricia Breen from Carlow: Irish women's champion since the age of 12 and world champion in her gender from 1993 until she was beaten by an opponent from Turkmenistan last year.

Con McCarrick had a stroke seven years ago, but you wouldn't know it to look at him. Were it not for the hip, he could probably still demonstrate how he won several cups for ballroom dancing, if not how he set an unofficial Irish record for running the mile while a student at St Nathy's College, Ballaghaderreen (he was born in nearby Sligo) in 1946.

His mental sharpness is a testament to a lifetime playing one of the world's oldest board games. He can still recall all the moves from matches of 30 years ago. But he credits sobriety as well as draughts for his condition. "I never drank," he says.

"That was a blessing. You can achieve so many things when you don't drink."

fmcnally@irish-times.ie