Downey and his pals started something special

SIDELINE CUT:The All Stars tours allow players to drop their guard for a few nights and really talk to one another, writes KEITH DUGGAN

THE GAA All Stars: for 40 years now, the concept has proven a strange, messy and wonderful way to bookend yet another season.

It began as an idea conceived by four comrades in arms: Paddy Downey of this newspaper, John D Hickey of the Irish Independent, Mick Dunne of RTÉ and Pádraig Puirseal of the Irish Press.

Like many bolts of genius, it probably occurred in some salon or other and the four horsemen could never have guessed then that what seemed like an Americanised idea would result in decades of black-tie functions, exhibition games played in the most unlikely outposts, the occasional hissy-fit, bumper till receipts in Irish bars from Kuala Lumpar to Buenos Aires and, for respective players and GAA presidents, a sense of pride that the Irish games could take place thousands of miles away from Clones or Croke Park in front of a crowd who might be seeing the best players that Gaelic Games had to offer for the first and only time.

The matches themselves were rarely important or heated, although the hurlers of Galway and Kilkenny reputedly carried the heat from the 1979 All-Ireland final into the exhibition game the following spring and the Toronto Skydome also played host to some earnest exchanges in the early 1990s.

But in the main, the point of the All Star tours has always been as symbolic as planting a flag on the moon. It was the GAA’s way of saying: we were here.

It is difficult to decide upon the most significant moment of the first All Star tour to Argentina: the match in the Hurling Club in Buenos Aires or the sight of a Cork man, bolting on to the soccer pitch during a tour of Boca Juniors stadium with a hurl and exuberantly striking the first and last ball ever hurled in the ground.

Tomorrow’s game in San Francisco marks the 40th anniversary to the host city of the first ever All Star tour, when the 1971 All Star hurling and football teams travelled here in the spring of 1972 to play exhibition games on consecutive Sundays. That tour enhanced the GAA’s long tradition of travelling to the United States but the fact that those games took place on the West Coast rather than the traditional calling point of New York was significant.

Carrolls, the cigarette company, was the inaugural sponsor of the tour. Among the journalists travelling that year was Jim O’Sullivan of the then Cork Examiner. He was back two years later when the day of the match coincided with Mother’s Day in Ireland.

The matches took place in Balboa Stadium and to send reports back to their office, the print journalists had to telephone Telex who in turn would connect them with Ireland. But O’Sullivan and the other press men discovered that every available line to Ireland was busy throughout the evening with homesick emigrants making long and expensive calls back home to teary-eyed mammies.

From the beginning, there was a degree of controversy about the suitability of a cigarette manufacturer sponsoring a scheme that represented the cream of Gaelic Games talents and they stepped down in 1979. Prior to that point, the arrangement was that players would stay with host families – the United Irish Society had played a big role in hosting tours in the American cities.

Only after 1979 did the luxury of hotels become part of the equation. In the mid 1980s, the tours stopped and apart from two visits to Toronto, there were no tours abroad throughout the 1990s.

But by then, the idea and tradition of the All Stars had firmly taken route. There was a time in Ireland when you couldn’t walk into a pub without seeing a selection of All Star posters on the wall. Some, dating back to the early 1980s vintage, still survive. Selecting the 15 “best” players in hurling and football in any given year was, by definition, bound to be controversial and it gave rise to frequent complaints emanating from counties who felt that their players had been overlooked.

There have been scandalous omissions over the years and while some players place a high premium on the worth of an All Star, others have made the point that the awards are hollow because they are bestowed upon recipients in the sober (ish) confines of a meeting room rather than earned on the field.

But they always generate discussion and debate that is not always confined to Ireland. During one tour to New York, a banner was hung in Gaelic Park bearing the question: What does Charlie Nelligan have to do to get an All Star?

The same question has been asked in dozens of counties about dozens of players. There is no question that many excellent players who belonged to counties whose championship seasons were mercilessly brief would have been in the running for All Star awards had they played on teams which got more exposure. The innovation of the qualifying series offered counties who had been virtually oppressed by the old knock-out structure to make unprecedented leaps and since then, the allocation of All Star awards has become more democratic.

Nonetheless, All Star teams inevitably revolve around players who have featured in the latter stages of the All-Ireland championships. Many have testified down the years that the All-Star awards night and more so the tours represent the only opportunity they have to meet one another as people rather than opponents on the field.

Players who engage in fiercely competitive summer duels can remain perfect strangers off the field.

When the tours resumed in 2000, they took place in December or January, the sleepiest time in the GAA calendar and therefore sufficiently far enough from the neon championship dates to allow players to drop their guard for a few nights and talk to one another.

More often than not, the exchanges amount to no more than a night or two of fun but the All Stars also enabled players to maybe learn a thing or two about their opposing numbers in a way that they only begin to appreciate after they have finished up and have time to take stock about what the whole furious business of training and competing was all about.

Although the GAA has always been capable of drawing staggering numbers to its games in Ireland, the attendances at All Star games have never been much to boast about.

Irish fans in host cities turn up along with a handful of curious locals but the attendance rarely exceeds a couple of thousand and, in recent years, the exhibition games have been precisely that and are always light-hearted in nature.

But apart from those players who finish as league or championship winners, the All Stars remains one of the only true treats that the most prominent players in a given season can enjoy for their endeavours.

As it moves into its fifth decade, the All Star tradition will continue to provoke debate about its merits and imperfections. But what started as a conversation between four friends has survived against the odds and has given a lot of people many good memories and laughs.

The All Star match is the rarest thing: a GAA fixture where nothing is at stake. It was never about the game or even the ornament on the mantelpiece. It was always about showing up somewhere – be it the desert in Dubai or in Arizona or back in San Francisco where it all began – to say: this is us.