Sonia will bring out the Irish in New York

Sideline Cut/Keith Duggan You have to hand it to the girl. After an entire season dominated by the male ego, with half the country now under water and the traffic in chaos and darkness closing in, Sonia can close the sporting year with a big, bright exclamation mark.

Let hers be the finest sports story of 2002; a big, open-lunged run, flushing out the poison for the rest of us! Let it be about endeavour and talent and celebration! Let there be smiles again! Let there not be so much as one Ole!

The M--- and R-- soccer saga has left us tired and emotional and no wiser. Personally, I got lost when it left the airwaves and went hardback. I half-heard a literary person talking on the radio the other day about a poor, innocent, religious lad set adrift off a remote island after a confrontation with a horrible tiger and actually thought Keane: The Autobiography had swept the Booker prize.

The whole thing has left us all confused and disorientated. I don't think I am alone when I say I am not sure who is running the Irish soccer team anymore. The name Pat Rabbitte rings a bell but I wouldn't swear on it. I was glad to hear poor Richard Dunne has returned from a state of dishevelment, but have to confess I wasn't really aware he had ever made the visit. I vaguely remember Richard wearing the green of Ireland and making some incredibly important interventions that helped us become, briefly, a really strong team. But that was a lifetime ago.

I know that months and months lie ahead before "Ireland" actually get to play soccer again. By then, we may have a whole library of caustic literary classics, with M--- and R-- penning barbed fictions about each other, the way Tom Wolfe and old Norm Mailer do across in New York.

Ah yes, New York. It is perfect that the great city should provide the setting for what will, hopefully, be Ireland's true feel-good story for 2002. In fact, New York is half the story. There is this scene in Washington Square by Henry James where one of the characters, Mrs Penniman, is wondering where best to secretly meet an acquaintance.

"Then she thought of the Battery but that was rather cold and windy, besides one's being exposed to intrusion from the Irish emigrants who at this point alight, with large appetites, in the New World."

That was written in the 1870s, but how little anything has changed, except that the new Irish now flock through JFK instead of Battery Park. Of course, many of the descendants of those wide-eyed arrivals have since joined the heirs of the staunch middle classes, the lives of whom James chronicled, but many more foundered.

It was always those that struggled against the might of the city that fascinated me. For years I wanted to walk along the Bowery after hearing stories of an old relative that spent some bleak days there back when it was a notorious last haven for those shortly to check out of the world. When I eventually made it there a few years ago, it was well on the way to being reclaimed and refashioned, but parts of it were still derelict and the buildings were still the original, and if you tried hard enough you could just about imagine what life was like when it was lawless and desperate and teeming with people.

Similarly, all the tenement buildings on the East Side which are now prime real estate but which just 100 years ago were catacombs for all working class nationalities still bear the hallmarks of that recent past. There is a tenement house perfectly preserved near Delancy Street, and to take a tour there is about the quickest and most pleasurable ways of getting to understand New York. Many of the great New York sports writers with Irish heritage, like Jimmy Cannon, emerged from those narrow and never quiet townhouses.

HOW alien tomorrow's marvellous scene, with an Irish girl the star attraction, would look to those pioneers. This year's marathon will have a green hue at many levels. It is probable that the Irish-American aristocracy and political movers will feature prominently. It will be a point of reunion for the strong US-Irish athletics fraternities which have been built up through the ages. It will be a good excuse for some Irish to take a weekend trip and revisit the hot spots from their fading J-1 visa days.

But it is primarily, I think, a day for the hidden Irish in the city, the people who work hard and make good dollars but have no plans to come home unless it is to come home for good.

Among the whatever-million spectators that will take the subway or drive in to the various vantage points along the marathon route will be many, many Irish and Irish-Americans. And I would bet that for many, the sight of Sonia O'Sullivan gliding by just inches from where they stand, performing and excelling, will be quite a moment.

Last summer, an Irish guy exiled in New York told me that whenever he went to the dry cleaners to pick up shirts for work, the first generation Korean owner would engage him in a full-blooded debate about the R-- and M--- fable. And it was funny and in a strange way it seemed like a great thing, but ultimately it was about something that was happening very far away and, once he was back out on the street, nobody cared about R-- and M---. This guy was a keen sports fan and had been to the World Series and US Open and had seen Michael Jordan play in the flesh.

But he hadn't witnessed a real live Irish sports event for quite some time. So I reckon for him and thousands more like him, this race will be as precious or more so than the World Cup.

Because rising early and paying 20 bucks into the local to see the All-Ireland is better than nothing, but it always leaves you feeling slightly empty. And going out on Friday night and staying out until it is 9.0 a.m. on Saturday and you are still swigging Bud and watching Ireland v France in the Six Nations is fun, but sooner or later it loses its novelty. Every so often, you hanker after the real thing.

Tomorrow, if only for a few minutes, it will be right there. She will stride gracefully past the doors of the countless Irish booze and restaurant joints that have been the salvation of many New World arrivals over the decades. Shiploads and shiploads of Irish have trampled through and been trampled upon the same streets as Sonia O'Sullivan will majestically navigate tomorrow. The applause that will undoubtedly and deservedly ring through the chill as she moves through will be about that as much as anything.