Ó Muircheartaigh prepares to take his bow

SIDELINE CUT:It is hard to define what sport commentary even is. It is not strictly necessary, but it is essential, writes KEITH DUGGAN

I DON’T know if Micheál Ó Muircheartaigh has heard of Johnny Most, or if Most learned of Ó Muircheartaigh. They were born on different sides of the Atlantic but they had the same stardust: the ability to make a radio transmit clearer images than a television ever could or ever will.

What is it that makes a sports commentator great? It is not a skill that can be learned like most professions or trades. In fact, it is hard to define what sport commentary even is. It is contradictory in that what ought to be simple – literally calling out the names of the players with the ball – is notoriously difficult.

It is not strictly necessary, but it is essential. Why is it young children, left to their devices with a football or hurley or basketball, will mimic the radio and television men to accompany their private games? How quiet – how desperately incomplete – all sports would seem without the men behind the microphone.

Much that can be said about Mícheál Ó Muircheartaigh has already been said. When Ó Muircheartaigh broadcasts or, as the Americans say, “calls” his last All-Ireland final tomorrow, he will draw the curtain on a glorious contribution to Irish life.

Ó Muircheartaigh is a skilled linguist and he is sharp as a tack. He researches thoroughly, has immersed himself in Gaelic games and has an instinctive feel for sport. He has an effortlessly distinguished bearing that helped, over the leisurely span of 60 years, to create a status within Irish society – here and abroad – that can rightly be called legendary.

All of the above qualities involved practice and work, constant refinement. But his voice was his blessing.

It all comes down to the voice. I am thinking now of the men whose voices became indistinguishable from the sports they were tasked – often through sheer happenstance – with covering.

Of Peter O’Sullevan, another Kerry man, taking up the closing stages of the Grand National. Or of Dan Maskell at Wimbledon. The most common Maskell impersonation is a simple “Oh, I say”, the most English of phrases evoking both the camp theatrics of Kenneth Williams and the inscrutable politeness with which affairs of the All England Lawn Tennis Championship were conducted. Or the wintry clarity of Bill McLaren on muddy Six Nations afternoons.

John Arlott, the great cricket commentator, offered the following advice to all would-be sports commentators: “Talk to the blind man who once could see.”

It was Arlott who described watching England captain George Mann bowled out by South Africa’s Tufty Mann as “Mann’s inhumanity to Mann”.

Or Kenneth Wolstenholme, whose plummy “Some of the crowd are on the pitch”, has transcended the World Cup final of 1966; it is arguably becoming the most famous aspect of that match and is destined to be sampled and used for generations to come.

Or Johnny Most, who spent his career broadcasting Boston Celtics games from a perch high above the Garden on Causeway Street. Anyone who heard Most’s commentaries could not imagine any other voice “fitting” either the Celtics or the dingy tip of wonder that the Garden was then. He sounded like he had just smoked his one-thousandth roll-up of the day, was nakedly sectarian in his home team favouritism and spoke as fast as Jimmy Cagney.

But he was unforgettable and that is why, some 17 years after his death, they are posting his highlights on YouTube. (One is titled “Johnny Most coughing in postgame”. “I cough my approval,” was Most’s elegant recovery). When Most bowed out, they retired his microphone and gave it a permanent residence in the Garden; after the place was razed in 1995, it was reinstated in the new arena.

In the old Croke Park, Mícheál Ó Muircheartaigh and his colleagues used to broadcast from a green gantry with a low ceiling. If the hatch was open, people could see in as they passed by. It was tiny, as cramped as the cockpit of a wartime aeroplane. But it was like peering into a magic room.

To think that from within this wooden closet in the Hogan Stand came a flow of words that held people’s attention throughout Ireland and, as technology progressed, throughout the world. Many people brought headphones to listen to Ó Muircheartaigh call the game they were watching in the stand. But that was never really the point about Ó Muircheartaigh.

The farther from Croke Park or Clones or Thurles or Killarney the listeners were, the more real and vivid the experience. If the All-Ireland finals are sacred dates in any Irish year, then Ó Muircheartaigh’s gift was to make Croke Park feel like the still point of a turning world. It did not matter where you were. From down the road in Marino to Ealing, from Broadway to MacLean Avenue, Ó Muircheartaigh brought tens of thousands of strangers into the same room for a couple of hours on a Sunday afternoon.

For expatriates, tuning in to RTÉ Radio 1 for the game live must be like a long phone call home, but without the arguments. Little wonder perfect strangers greet Ó Muircheartaigh like a dear relative on his trips abroad. The are entitled to say they know him.

“Summer beaches will never sound the same,” was the perfect tribute from John O’Donnell of Dublin 8, which appeared in yesterday’s letters page in this newspaper. And it is true: even when people weren’t consciously listening to Ó Muircheartaigh’s charged radio broadcasts, they were as much a part of the Irish summer air as pollen.

Ó Muircheartaigh’s one-liners have given fuel to amateur impersonators all over Ireland and they are being rolled out again in appreciation of his retirement. But his best moments came when a match – a truly thunderous, high-summer match – had reached its apotheosis and the broadcaster’s voice was in perfect synchronicity with the rhythm of the game.

It was then, if you were riveted to the match, that game and voice became blurred; you could easily convince yourself that the players were performing these feats because Ó Muircheartaigh was calling them.

In 1993, in the dying minutes of the soaked Ulster final between Derry and Donegal, Derry were leading by a point in the rain and the Donegal men were desperately scrambling for an equaliser. Ó Muircheartaigh described the action: the referee checking his watch, Coleman and McEniff on the sideline, and you could hear the crowd baying for a full-time whistle. And Ó Muircheartaigh ended each sentence with the refrain: “And Donegal are still All-Ireland champions.”

To anyone listening from Donegal that day, it sounded as if Ó Muircheartaigh was trying to slow down time itself and you might have believed that, as long as he kept saying it, then it would so remain. But the whistle went anyway.

Sometimes in the press box you might see him an hour or two after big games, the stadium emptied and cooling. His sleeves would be rolled up and the hair slightly tousled. Only then would you consider how exhausting the whole business must be.

Only then would you realise that it must be like being on stage for 70 minutes except you have no lines to learn by heart. Instead you must make them up as you go along.

It was a performance all right.

And tomorrow, encore.