Respect to some genuine heroes

Sunday morning and time for the column ideas to take the floor. The usual line of rogues come to audition. Drug cheats. Greasy suits with greasy tills. Sporting lowlifes. Samaranch and his $200,000-a-year voluntary job. Rix and his numbskull employers. Fowler. Hoddle. Collymore. Is there a section of society that soccer hasn't offended? Murdoch dances past. Don King too. You shiver like someone has run over your grave. Where are the heroes?

We were 12 when we first went down to St Vincent's. I joined from Raheny, my mate joined from Na Fianna. Not poached. Given refugee status. I remember the first night in the shadow of the casino in Marino. Lar Foley was there. Mark Wilson was there and old Tom Walsh, who passed away just recently, was there.

You get older and you forget what heroes were. Time passes and the perceived quality of heroism alters. You can't be a hero now unless you are on TV. You can't be a hero unless you've got a deal. You can't be a hero unless you have people who trim your image.

But where I grew up the names that mattered were old St Vincent's men, fellas who played when Dublin people followed the club or loathed the club like people love or despise Manchester United today. My grandfather talked about O'Tooles. My parents talked about Vincent's. Kevin Heffernan, Lar Foley, Mark Junior Wilson and so on . . .

Last Saturday night, in St Vincent's in Marino, some men were honoured by their own. It's 50 years since St Vincent's first won the Dublin football championship. So? Well, it's reasonable to argue that if that team hadn't been born, hadn't created their daunting legend, then there would be no GAA on the landscape in the capital today.

They won in 1949 and didn't stop winning until 1956, when Erins Hope beat them. Then they came back and won from 1957 to 1962 and tagged on one for luck in 1964. Thirteen championships in 15 seasons, during which time they found the space to win seven county hurling championships too. As Tony Hanahoe said, their likes won't be seen again.

They created a standard and a rule (Dublin players for Dublin teams) which profoundly influenced the GAA in this city.

It is hard to explain the scope of their legend to those who are indifferent to it. The county team was born again. In 1953, Dublin won a national league with 14 Vincent's men playing in their club jerseys. In 1955, Denis Mahony's team lost a famous All-Ireland; in 1958, Kevin Heffernan's team won one after 18 years. The club provided 12 of that panel.

That Vincent's team planted the seeds of what would become the All-Ireland club championships by playing celebrated challenges in Croke Park against Glen Rovers (Ring and all), St Finbar's and the footballers of Tuam Stars. They beat them all.

So on Saturday night, 15 of the survivors of 1949 were quietly honoured. They deserve more general tribute, but it was a privilege to be there to see them. Mahony. Ferguson. Lavin. Heffernan, et al. Big, straight, strong men who pulled legendary deeds out of their hearts and heads.

There was a special presentation for Kevin Heffernan. What that meant to him, coming from among his own people, was evident in the cracks in his dauntingly private face. Heffernan would as soon have root canal surgery performed by his worst enemy as have sloothery mention made of him in this column, but, seeing as how he has no editorial control here, he'll have to put up with it.

I've argued this point with a few people now and as yet am undefeated. If there has to be an Irish sports person of the century, someone whose contribution to his or her sport has the qualities of excellence, endurance, influence and love that make greatness, well then, Heffernan is that man.

He was central to the Dublin revival of the 1950s, at the core of the drive to make St Vincent's a great club. If those things hadn't happened, and if Heffernan hadn't imagined it and worked for it, the 1970s wouldn't have happened. No Dublin. No Dubs. No All-Ireland brought to this city since the war (and that includes 1995) has been free of his thumbprints. That's why there is a GAA in Dublin today. And because there is a GAA in Dublin, there is a GAA. The last and greatest amateur games in the world Many of us not born into the heritage of the place managed to pass through without ever feeling fully part of it, yet walked away without being able to leave it fully behind. Choosing journalism as a trade doesn't help to close the distance, of course. There's nobody in Vincent's who is easy with publicity or keen to see media folk about the place. Their privacy is a spikily guarded thing, and, frankly, it would be more comfortable not to write about them at all. But . . .

Someday the whole world will be all grey homogeneity. We will sit on our couches and Murdoch will pump Manchester United, the opium of the people, into us all day. Everyday. Samaranch and his friends will provide their perversions of fun. Golf will come always from some remote and sunny fairway and boxing will unfold as TV pantomime.

That dead-world will be what passes for sporting culture, and we will forget what it was like when we had flesh and blood heroes, people we could reach out and touch, measure ourselves against, fall out with and be friends with. Real names to still our childish play.

On Saturday morning in St Vincent's, 20 little fellas all eight or under came streaming past us in the spring brightness, all out for their first game in the jersey. The pitch dwarfed them and the sight of them jarred me. All those mentors moving busily among them, the pure excitement written on the kids' faces, the future stretching ahead of them. The wondrous clubhouse standing solidly behind them, inviting them to be part of St Vincent's, a line in their own history.

It would be more comfortable not to write about St Vincent's, not to slyly insinuate myself into their achievements. Yet that thread of continuity from the grand old men of 1949 to the shining eight-year-olds of 1999 is a wonder to behold, something gifted to our culture from the imaginations of our own, something so commonplace in the GAA now that we take it for granted. For one Monday morning at least, it's worth banishing Rupert, Juan Antonio and Michelle for, worth sweeping away the remote distractions of Old Trafford and the Babylon that is English soccer. Just to pay respect to some real heroes.