Everyone has their own connection to the grass arena and for John Healy, it was a small London park which was the haunt of mostly Irish and Scottish vagrants, a usually deranged and unpredictable place of crime and frequent punishment - and where a history of confrontation always beckoned.
It was in or around Kentish Town, where Healy was born and still lives, and ended up a wandering alcoholic, living rough for 15 years, typically “lulled, dulled (and) skulled” out of his head, at a time when under the London Vagrancy Act begging carried a three-year prison sentence.
It’s also the title of his startling autobiography The Grass Arena, published in 1988, Healy’s sweet prose and poetic turn of phrase gently disguising his treacherous life - both on the streets and behind bars. Born to poor Irish parents, his father already a violent alcoholic, his once promising boxing career quickly hit the canvas when he started to enter the ring drunk, having turned to booze to relieve the tensions of his day.
His life was only saved by a strange intervention - a fellow prisoner introducing him to chess, which Healy soon found more addictive than alcohol. He left jail and re-emerged sober and for the next 10 years became a champion chess player, capable of conducting several games at once.
Healy’s work, like Orwell and Kerouac, should be rediscovered in every age: it was republished as a Penguin Modern Classic in 2008, and in the foreword Daniel Day-Lewis writes about Healy’s grass arena as one we pass many times in any given day, averting our eyes, “into whose violent clutches we might descend more easily than we dare to contemplate”.
For most of us the grass arena invariably has some sporting connection or context, although it doesn’t have to be all grass. This week my brother sent me a photograph of the new running track not far down the mountains at Fernhill Park and Gardens, the magnificently elevated 34-hectare site dating back to 1823 and acquired by Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown in late 2014, the fear at that time being it might be sold for yet another property development around Stepaside.
The new track is actually round and not oval, although it is exactly 400 metres, freshly surfaced in red rubbery tartan - and the next step is to layout a playing field on the grass arena it surrounds. The real test will come next week with my old Nike spikes under foot, although it certainly looks the part for training anyway, and credit due here to all those who saved paradise and put up a running track.
Among my earliest memories of distance running - and they are many - is sitting on the fringes of the grass arena that is College Park watching our dad racing laps of the track with some steely look of determination. He was past his prime then, over the hill too, only he didn’t easily let go the chance to run on what he considered hallowed and historic ground at the very heart of Trinity College.
He still talks about how much he loved to run there: in July 1963, he took down one of his 14 Irish outdoor records by breaking his own two-mile mark at the Civil Service Sports at College Park, and there was something about that grass track and grass arena which helped bring out his best.
There are plenty others who agree: in the decade before, Ronnie Delany broke a series of Irish outdoor records at College Park, twice lowering his own 800m mark there 1954, and in the summer of 1956, recorded 400m, 800m and one-mile victories at College Park, serving well his Olympic 1,500m win in Melbourne that December.
Such was the fame of the Colleges Races they were often graced by the top-hatted presidential presence of Seán T O’Kelly and Éamon de Valera: it was also here the first recorded athletics meeting in Ireland took place, on February 28th 1857,and similarly the first Irish Championships, on July 7th 1873, now the longest consecutive running athletics championships anywhere in the world. By then College Park was already steeped in cricket history, the first match traced to 1820, and from 1870 to 1963 hardly a summer passed without a touring Test side or English county playing Ireland or Trinity here.
On November 29th 1883, The Irish Times published a report of the first soccer match at College Park involving Dublin University AFC, and as a training ground too it was championed by many and none more so than Noel Carroll, whose urbane ability for mid-race machination was once described as “like a scene-shifter at the Abbey Theatre”.
Against that microcosmic backdrop a lengthy meeting of the Trinity College Board on Wednesday heard several dissenting voices to the proposal to erect an interim exhibition pavilion on College Park, connected with the Old Library redevelopment project.
Ahead of the meeting three of Trinity’s largest and oldest sporting clubs - athletics, soccer and cricket - had already raised their objection over the proposal that names College Park as the preferred site to build the temporary two-storey pavilion while the Old Library undergoes a major refurbishment, beginning in early 2023, expected to cost €120 million.
According to the three clubs, this will effectively render College Park useless as a training and match facility, while also depriving the wider college community the sort of green space it increasingly craves. The Old Library refurbishment is expected to take between three to five years, which means it could be 2028 before the space is restored, if at all.
A College email sent to affected clubs last month said “based on early discussions Trinity has had with Dublin City Council (DCC), the location with the best opportunity to secure planning permission is College Park.” Indeed it was DCC who proposed the site, and instead of balking at the idea, Trinity are digging in: in an email earlier this week, Provost Linda Doyle told sports clubs that conversations surrounding the use of College Park remains a “live” one.
All sides are agreed on the importance of the Old Library redevelopment, only there’s a short history of confrontation here: without the intervention of the late Trevor West, who sent many thousands of letters on Senate writing paper to Trinity graduates seeking their opposition to a similarly desecrating proposition, part of this grass arena would now be a car park.
Both the Students’ Union and Graduate Students’ Union have made their opposition known, and at this point Trinity would be best avoiding further confrontation which might ascend more easily than they dare to contemplate.
