All sport is local - or at least the best of it

LockerRoom: New Year's Day is just forming itself. From one end of the street the sun is setting out its stall, but it's still dark up where we are and the trees in the garden behind us are purple veins on a dark-blue sky. The branches are stripped naked though, and when I peer out through the inky air I can see the great comforting bulk of Croke Park a little distance away. Croker sits there like a sacred rock awaiting the stories that the year will bring it.

And this page sits before me, equally blank, but without equivalent reason for such optimism about being brought stories.

It would be nice at this point to announce that at the breaking of this New Year morning I have just barrelled into the house looking a little guilty as herself says half-accusingly, half-fondly, "Have you been snorting coke out of that Samantha Mumba's bellybutton again?" Too old for that though. So stop bugging me, Samantha.

Just off the plane, in fact, from the USA. Flying home into another year was more grand and more splendid even than it sounds. The only thing Aer Lingus didn't do for us was write the Monday column. There was half a solution to that bleeping in my brain way back in JFK. I'd sit up all night on the plane turning random thoughts into disparate notes which, when transposed on to a computer by the light of morning, would make an epic but also timely column.

Ah well. There's something about reconnecting with the national airline when your away that feels like getting in and shutting the hall door behind you after a night out. Home.

So I sat for six hours and stuffed my face instead. Choosing to pass the journey in this way provided easy winnings, of course, for all acquaintances who had wagered on the short life-span of LockerRoom's New Year's Resolution Number One (aka, the No More Stuffing the Face Resolution). Bad cess to ye.

It's been a few years since I was last in America, and what surprised me most about being back was that a sporting scene which once enthralled me felt stale and listless.

When you write about sport for a living enthusiasms wane sometimes, and you go off and flirt for a while with something else hoping that it will freshen up your own game a little bit. This time everything available in the all-you-can-eat buffet that is American sports seemed a little congealed.

The flavour is best summed up by NBA "star" Latrell Sprewell, who announced sometime back in 2004 that his family "couldn't live" on the three-year, $21 million contract his employers were offering him. He hasn't played since. Who cares?

I did come across a story, though, which warmed me. Alex Wolff is an old acquaintance who writes for Sports Illustrated and who once, by way of a joke, sent out Christmas cards featuring a picture of himself and legendarily controversial NBA player Charles Barkley under the legend "Merry Christmas from Alex and Charles". Sadly, Barclay's fame hadn't carried across the Atlantic quite as surely as it had around the US, and the following conversation ensued more than once.

"Did you get a Christmas card from Alex Wolff?"

"No?"

"I never knew he was gay."

"Go on."

"Yeah. A card came with this picture of Alex and his partner, this big black guy called Charles."

"Wow."

Anyway, many years later it seems that Alex is determined to kill off our European picture of him as a flamboyant gay icon who dabbles in basketball writing. He's happily living in Vermont with his wife.

Alex is apparently feeling a little of the disaffection and disconnection many people feel towards big-time sports. In fact, he's just bought his own professional basketball franchise. Alex bought the franchise rights to an ABA club for the going rate of $10,000 and christened his club the Vermont Frost Heaves.

The idea of the Frost Heaves and of the ABA in general is gorgeous. Set a player salary cap of $120,000, play your leagues in small local halls, make sport relevant to the community again, make it some way interwoven with the fabric of the community.

Alex plans to run the Vermont Frost Heaves for a few years and then let them evolve into a community-owned team. You hope that TV and big media just stay away. The ABA is a great and romantic idea.

It's a great and romantic idea which some men in Hayes Hotel in Thurles effectively came up with too a long time ago.

Thus, LockerRoom's New Year's Resolution Number Two is to appreciate the local stuff more. Home.

This year the Winter Olympics and the World Cup will be presented to us as grand but remote spectacles of the television age. We'll enjoy them as a simulacrum of real sport, but we should be off our couches and down at the local field. We should be out and about rubbing shoulders with other people.

That thought kept coming back to me on the plane last night. The stuff which lasts longest in the memory isn't experienced through the TV. The stuff which makes Ireland special isn't in the brochures. Even the big stuff. Looking out the window here as the detail of Croke Park becomes clearer above the reddish-brown rooftops of Marino, I just got this sudden and clear image of a day 30 years ago this year. We were in second year in Joey's in Fairview, and it was probably early October and the word came that we were to evacuate our classrooms and go down to the yard.

We flew out the doors as if the building was on fire. We knew. We knew what the story was: the Dubs were here. Sure enough, about six Dubs duly appeared on the parapet above the main school door. The Sam gleamed in the autumn air.

Speeches were shouted down and songs were crowed up. We were delirious. We got a half day. We were more delirious.

A year later, not long after that epic Dublin and Kerry semi-final, myself and my pal were on the Canal End to see Cork beat Wexford in the hurling final for the second year in a row. That year we had a plan, though, which worked perfectly. At the final whistle, we climbed out over the rolls of barbed wire and down on to the pitch. Up to the middle of the Cusack Stand side and down through the wired-off tunnel to the Cork dressing-room, at the door of which we played our trump card. We pretended to be Tom Cashman's cousins who'd got separated from our parents. We were ushered in.

We were initially distracted from our main mission by the sight of Gerald McCarthy lying on a wooden table getting his lip stitched up in a compulsively gruesome manner, but we soon found our quarry, and by the time Jimmy Barry Murphy found his way to the seat in the corner we were ready for him.

"Give us your hurl would ya?"

"Gwan, give us your hurl."

"Give us it. Jaysus. Go on. Please."

We badgered him for 20 minutes at least and he was as nice and gracious about it as only JBM could be, but we got no timber from him. So we went about gathering autographs before everyone left. Cork had back-to-back All-Irelands then, and I'm sure by the time they left the dressing-room people were talking about three-in-a-row.

All this time later Cork find themselves in the same place again. Isn't it wonderful that the current team are shaping to be as iconic as their predecessors? Watching Seán Óg interacting with people this last year or two has been an extraordinary antidote to the depressing homogenisation of our culture.

I had the privilege of seeing him in action at a presentation recently, and it was extraordinary and it was moving to see him speak to kids in a mix of Irish and English and to see rapt faces gazing up at him. Then kids queuing to speak to him in Dublin school-Irish and to get his name scribbled on something, young fellas just lurking in the background gazing in wonder.

When a Fijian-born Irish speaker who hurls for Cork is the coolest attraction in an entire Dublin postal area, you know there's some hope for the country.

When I think of Cork's contribution in 2005 as a city of culture, I think of that. Seán Óg's contribution to making Ireland somewhere different and distinctive to fly home to.

Next resolution then is to enjoy the differences more. The more welcoming we are to people from everywhere else the better. The less we are like everywhere else, the better too.

Thirty years since we milled in the school yard? Twenty-nine years since we pestered JBM and the Dubs came back around with the Cup? Since then only twice have we had fiesta with Sam. That's a lot of kids who haven't known the feeling.

This decade is growing old and the Dubs haven't been to an All-Ireland final yet.

When I look out the window into the horseshoe stands of Croke Park, there's a sudden yearning for summer and the sight of the Dubs in Croker. It's a cliche that the game in the capital needs the Dubs to win an All-Ireland. Probably it doesn't.

The game is doing well. Even hurling is starting to thrive without the benison of success, but the feel of the city in a summer when the Dubs are rolling is so magical that it would be sweet to crown it some September soon.

Thirty years since that September of 1976? Thirty-two years since the break-out in 1974? LockerRoom's New Year's Resolution Number Four is to make the new years come around a little slower and to write a column next January reflecting on whether Dublin's surprising domination of football and hurling in 2006 is a good thing or a great thing (with apologies to Seán Óg and JBM).

Happy New Year from the home office!