Fabulous odysseys of the ultimate fan

Locker Room:For a few weeks a clever Madison Avenue-style tease campaign of emails has been alerting us to the imminent publication of "Ryano's new book". There was a pre-launch announcement concerning the pending actual announcement of the launch. Then what seemed like a launch countdown.

Jim, being a garda in his not-too-distant heyday, had evidently hoped to avoid the scenes of desperate chaos which marked the arrival of fresh bread or vegetables to state shops in Leningrad or Kiev in the bad days. We were duly calmed by news there would be a launch announcement soon. We went back to our homes and prepared ourselves.

No sooner had we been calmed than we were curiously excited. A further press release promised details which could conceivably involve Jim in some sort of tribunal of inquiry. "Jim Ryan pulls no punches in telling what life was like, how he was moved from station to station and how he enjoyed cups of tea in houses while on duty."

This is of course an old trick of publishers, pulling out the most sensational nuggets from a soon-to-be-published tome and trailing them in front of us slavering media hounds. Cups of tea? Harmless at first but a gateway drug. Had our friend Jim been doing buttered scones?

Last week fate was busy being as cruel as fate always is. The actual launch of A Sporting Beat by Jim Ryan took place on a work night. Jim, being as Cork as Jim always is, chose to hold the launch in Cork. An email came to reassure us if we missed the launch Jim would be doing signings in various locations.

We missed both the launch and the signings but we were pleased on Saturday to spot a large and excitable crowd in front of the Just Published section in Eason's at the Pavilion. We stood on two small children as we made our way ruthlessly to the front and grabbed a copy still hot from the presses.

I should explain about Jim. When we the wretched of the earth (Hello, by the way, to the nice man who took the trouble to slow down outside my house recently to congratulate me on being an "effing scumbag like the rest of them") or the sporting press assemble to travel away on trips with the Irish soccer team we have very few friends. We know if the plane goes down the old system of women and children first immediately becomes players and officials first, then airline staff, then fans, then duty-free trolleys. After that there may be attempts by the authorities to recover laptops or camera equipment. That strange glug-glug noise they hear in the life-rafts is the sound of the last journalist drowning.

But Jim and his various travelling companions are immune to our toxicity. Jim entertains us with stories, and fills us in on local colour and we're always pleased to see him anywhere we go because the first topic of conversation is how did he get there and it always strikes us that although it may have taken Jim many more hours and many more flights and ferry crossings and donkey rides and crawls through tunnels to get to where we are standing he definitely had more fun.

For instance, we last met in Rimini on the night of the San Marino match. Jim was exasperated. He had flown to some point well to the south in Italy and, feeling flush, had hired a car. Possessing the same sort of sense of direction as this column has, Jim bought himself a road map just to be on the safe side. He located San Marino and drove there, hour upon hour. Only when they arrived in San Marino and made inquiries did they discover they had located the wrong San Marino on the map and were in a dusty little village (whose footballers might nevertheless have given Ireland a decent game).

In the scheme of Jim's sporting life this was such a minor misadventure as to be scarcely worth a mention. This is a man who casually describes going to Brussels for a game in the following terms. Bus to Rosslare. Boat across Irish Sea. Down to Dover. Ferry to the Netherlands and so on.

He can casually toss in a sentence or two like the following in describing Euro 88. ". . . to the left was a brothel and to the right a transvestite club. It was the first time we had come across transvestites and we had great fun with them. They did not know what to make of us."

Jim makes Shackleton look timid and unadventurous. He almost capsizes in high seas off Cagliari. He actually capsized a pedal boat and almost drowned off Palermo. He gets to Riga by taking a flight to Moscow and a 16-hour train journey. A man who knows how to organise a party in a brewery, even if it is in Nigeria. A guy who has survived sharing a Japanese love hotel with six other sylph-like cuts of men. A man who travels the world giving soccer managers and foreign dignitaries Watergrasshill Hurling Club ties.

He's been shot at. He's defused a difficult policing situation by handing his infant son to one of the participants to hold. Before a tense game in Bursa, Turkey, he inspected the nets and goals. He's survived a mini-earthquake. He's had his ingrown toenail treated in Tehran. He's attended 19 matches in a single weekend. Much, much more. Oh, and he's drunk tea wantonly and mainlined fried breakfasts wherever he could.

Jim Ryan's story is in one way an odyssey down memory lane. All those matches, all those trips. Why didn't we ever think to travel with Jim? The long way and the interesting way. And all those stories about Watergrasshill. How many times did we speed through the place on the way to or from Cork not realising here was a little piece of forgotten Ireland.

And for those of us sometimes ashamed of the strained nature of our sporting ecumenism, Jim's happy embrace of just about every code of sport known to man is a tonic. His curious nature is a rebuke to all those beery fans who travel thousands of miles only to then hole up in an Irish pub telling themselves they are the greatest supporters in the world. Jim may hold that title on his own.

A Sporting Beat should sell a million or two but with any luck the riches won't change its author or his travelling habits.

A Sporting Beat is published by OnStream at €14.99.