He was disdainful of fame in all its full-blown absurdity, something that made him different around the shallow, hierarchal world of TV.
Michael Lyster cared not a jot for the idea of being recognised, never mistaking a day in the studio for something vital or, heaven forbid, profound. As he saw it, he wasn’t a surgeon scrubbing up or an airline pilot wrestling wind-shear.
Michael’s world was a place of simple stagecraft mainly. Of people talking about games, sometimes vainly and melodramatically. Occasionally rippling with hysteria. And he’d be at his measured best when they were at their worst, bickering like toddlers on a sugar-rush.
A “safe pair of hands” everybody agreed. Calm and unobtrusive, the puppeteer behind the curtain.
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I always felt that his gift was an echo from another place. He knew the power of a quiet voice growing stern, you see. He listened well. He was, in essence, an easy conversationalist, something increasingly rare in today’s dystopian, eyes-down TikTok addiction.
To some degree, the empty snobbery of TV was no environment for someone who so palpably saw through it.
With a pint in front of him and friends around, he almost never spoke about work, never fell into the trap of imagining his days as deeply fascinating to others. We shared a Killiney house in the early 1980s when he wasn’t long out of the Tuam Herald, where he’d had the benefit of a journalistic apprenticeship under renowned editor, Jarlath Burke.
Whenever he and a fellow past Herald man, Martin Breheny, talked about Burke, the picture they’d paint was of a lovable if mildly fearsome stickler for quaint matters like grammar and spelling and fact-checking.
[ ‘Magic in human form’: Michael Lyster funeral hears of a devoted family manOpens in new window ]
It’s clear that Burke took great pride in the rise to national prominence of both, not to mention another Herald graduate – Jim Carney – before them. But honestly I sometimes struggled with the idea of Michael ever being reconcilable with a disciplinarian boss.
You see Michael met life on his own terms. He couldn’t be rushed or panicked.
When in 1983, RTÉ Radio decided at short notice to send him to New Zealand for the Lions rugby tour, Michael essentially had to make all of his own travel arrangements. After more than a month away, we were hungry for detail on his return and I was especially intrigued to hear how he’d navigated the two islands from outside the official World Cup bubble.
“Hitched lifts,” he replied flatly. “Might take me three or four for a single journey, but someone was always going in the general direction!”
We covered a lot of the same markings back then, one of which – the five-day Circuit of Ireland rally – pitched us headlong into passion for a sport that would forever remain mysterious to our circle of friends.
On a high stool every evening while covering the rally, the conversation would inevitably turn a little fanciful. “Christ, wouldn’t it be magic to have a crack at this?!”
Drink talk.
Except of course he duly rang me one day in February of 1990 to announce that he’d managed to tie down a rally car, a sponsor and – most controversially – two international competition licences. “Keep Easter free!” he said.
“Because we’re doing the circuit!”
And so we did – him driving, me navigating – both absolute impostors in one of sport’s more forbidding environments. The bug bit deeply, too, and we became regular competitors in events like the Circuit, Galway International and Killarney Rally of the Lakes over the next 12 years, endlessly drawn to an adrenalin rush our friends – without exception – considered eccentric.
We were the ultimate odd couple, me – anxious and tight, routinely retching in the toilet on the morning of competition; him – devouring a great, greasy lake of a fry while running endlessly late.
How our union lasted as long as it did is, frankly, still a mystery to me. Because we argued incessantly, his timekeeping a navigator’s nightmare. I eventually declared myself done with the sport after a sequence of non-finishes in 2002 and, when anybody asked the reason, I’d tell them our parting of the ways was due to a combination of illness and fatigue.
Translation? We’d become sick and tired of one another.
To some degree, rallying was Michael’s real passion.
For sure, he became the summer face of the GAA through that 35-year stint of presenting The Sunday Game. It was a role he took to majestically because he understood implicitly what he was good at. But post-retirement, I never got the impression that he unduly missed the energy of the studio either.
When he’d moved to Dublin first in 1979, most people at home believed that he was heading east as a DJ to work on RTÉ’s fledgling Radio 2 station. Rock music was in his DNA.
Yes his devotion to Galway GAA ran deep, but he was a big Manchester United fan too and, whenever at home alone in Cabinteely, he’d play Led Zeppelin at a volume endangering the house windows.
He was in other words, far more than just the job he did.
It was, of course, there in Cabinteely that we nearly lost him in June of 2015. Having dropped him back from a game of golf in Portumna, he rang from the house phone to say he’d left his mobile in my car.
[ Michael Lyster had the skill and talent to make his job look effortlessOpens in new window ]
It took me maybe seven minutes to return, by which time he’d had a massive cardiac arrest and was lying unconscious on the hall floor. His wife, Anne’s knowledge of CPR duly averted catastrophe, as did the heroic refusal of the ambulance staff to concede defeat when, to me, my friend was clearly gone.
And that heroic stubbornness bought Michael another 11 years.
He liked to be matter-of-fact about it all afterwards, but he did tell me of the strangeness he felt when returning to the presenter’s chair for a Connacht championship game in Roscommon six weeks later.
Maybe 40 minutes before the broadcast started, he remembered thinking “This is just too unreal. I shouldn’t be here. I should be in a grave!”
The acceleration in his physical decline became awful for family and friends to witness this last year, Michael essentially slipping away in front of us.
He knew it too, but would not countenance self-pity.
You could detect an almost uniform affection in this week’s tributes not to mention, in some cases, a sadness for what has gone, specifically the light touch of his presenting style, the apparent ease with which he could moderate an over-heating conversation.
This generated a narrative declaring things simply better in the past.
No question, The Sunday Game doesn’t quite have the freewheel flow today that Michael seemed so accomplished at fostering. If anything the programme has become a little rinsed of personality, too much focus on statistics, systems and coaching dogma, too little on people.
And, of course, that kind of argument demands a scapegoat.
Joanne Cantwell is a wonderful broadcaster, fair-minded, rigorous and admirably unafraid. But she has found herself an unfair victim of the heightened sentimentality triggered by Michael’s passing.
Trust me, nobody would have bristled at that more than Lyster himself.
Because The Sunday Game is not the same production now that he had the privilege of safeguarding through three and a half decades. It feels hamstrung by an editorial culture now running through the whole of RTÉ eschewing on-air spontaneity.
Careful stage direction has become the template, mischief turned away at the door. That’s not the presenter’s fault.
On Thursday, Lyster’s youngest son, Jack, spoke beautifully in Mount Jerome, recounting: “I remember the stories he would tell over and over again at the dinner table and still find a way to make them funny every time.”
And that was so quintessential Michael. Laughing before a punchline. Swept up in the lightness of the telling without for a single second feeling any compulsion to take himself seriously. The best quality in anyone.
We’ll miss him.
