TIPPING POINT:We've become so obsessed with extracting asinine quotes from athletes selling wares, we're in danger of ignoring a true genius in our midst, writes JOHNNY WATTERSON

BRAY NINE days ago was a nostalgic bit of buzz. The Royal Hotel was a trip. Like the Tardis in Doctor Who, it wasn’t great from the outside but jeez once you got in there . . .

These days the active ingredient if you wish to talk to a rugby player, soccer player, hurler, or Gaelic footballer is one of three things – their requirement to get out a specific message; controlling the information to suit their organisation; or product placement.

Most things in sport are measured and held up for reflection in the commercial world, the payback to sponsors and the preferred image of the game. Events that involve athletes giving their opinions or attempts to get close are stage managed, timed and manipulated just as carefully as the athletes do themselves in preparing for competition.

Year by year the rules have narrowed, the distance increased and while it makes the life of writing about sport less colourful, or charged, sports organisations sleep well in that they know their employees are largely singing off the same hymn sheet.

Associations and unions understand that the players who take their pay cheque are on message and are rarely exposed to anything other than a controlled environment, unless they’re on Twitter, comfortably the darkest nightmare for PR gurus across the globe.

To think a professional athlete should be allowed to communicate thoughts and opinions directly to the public gives rise to endless opportunities for them to sink the ship. It is a novel way of melting the minds of information spooks the world over.

Twitter, in the hands of the wrong bantamweight, openside flanker or full forward is the most subversive weapon since the invention of television, as well as a platform that highlights how sinfully dull any ‘A’ lister can be. There are no parachutes.

That aside there is a discomforting routine about sport in 2012 and a recognisable homogeneity about what people see and read. A player comes out. A posse gathers and asks questions. The injury, form, past results, home advantage, competition for a starting place or qualification into a tournament are the bases. They are asked for a response.

Some can’t remember their middle name. Some remember every play of every match. Rarely does any one person get the chance to ask three questions in succession and two of those answers could be “no” and “not really.” It means any answer will do.

Interviews by scheduled team rotation can be toxic too. Forced out of their comfort zone, athletes are asked to explain issues that they have never really had to think about, break down processes that they could never adequately put into words. They are not stupid so they learn stock answers making reflective players appear thoughtless and uncomplicated players averagely articulate.

Some confront reporters and throw junk back at them. Others have side bets on what unusual words or phrases they can get printed in the next day’s newspaper. Occasionally athletes are sarcastic, give monosyllabic answers or are openly hostile. Some just let it wash over them. Others appear uncomfortably humble and seem bemused about why anyone would be interested enough to ask questions and write down the responses.

That’s where Bray nine days ago departed from the present and somehow placed itself in a different era, with different guiding principles, created a different complexion, promoted different attitudes and motivations.

The Royal Hotel was out of time, misplaced and dipped in a less hostile wash. It inadvertently rediscovered one of the verities of sport, which has something to do with relationships and the emotional connection between the athlete and the observer as much as the game itself.

Katie Taylor took her modest show to the people and, as she has always done, reinforced an authentic brand of understated awe. She settled for less when she could easily have presented bigger and brasher. The one-man show turned the volume of the occasion down, not up, and shredded the marketer’s commercial bible and its first commandment – that exposure should equate to euro signs.

Her stage was a ballroom with a table inside the door and a man, who put the takings into an empty biscuit tin. You paid, you sat where you wanted and you saw the best boxer in the world against the number five boxer in the world. You could pat Taylor on the back as she walked up to the makeshift ring. No safety issues. No creepy entourage.

At the end of the night when she posed for photographs and signed pictures and spoke to whoever wanted to speak to her there was a nagging suspicion. This athlete has been commissioned to win a gold medal and only then, when national pride has been inflated in London, will there be a real swing to recognise a talent that won’t be seen again in this country for another lifetime.

Taylor’s greatness has been taken as the bench mark, the expected and that could be the sport’s biggest failing, that it is allowing that to happen when the message should be she is a one-off rarity.

And still, and still, with her three World and five European Championship gold medals has she not yet delivered enough for more than two national newspapers and one radio station to rock out to Bray and watch the boxer that the world governing body, the AIBA, have twice said is the best pound-for-pound fighter on the planet?

The nagging suspicion doesn’t stop. It lingers. It asks if a grubby, low-level misogyny is at play and if, in a male-dominated industry, it is Taylor’s gender that is so unconvincing and inspires subtle, deniable indifference?

When an Irish media group travelled to London before Christmas to have a tour of the Olympic site, the man on the tour bus with the microphone was Sebastian Coe. As an Olympic track champion, we might have felt he would have spoken about the great runners who would colour the city in July. Instead he plucked Taylor’s name out of the air as the possible ‘poster girl’ of the games.

More recently she and some other selected athletes have been asked to take part in a film on London 2012 directed by Danny ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ Boyle, an Olympics for which she hasn’t yet qualified. The movie makers are paying attention to her even if it’s no interest to them that when Taylor hangs up her gloves, there will be no one to pull them on.

She will be gone and as we give some muscle-building drink a free plug in the paper to earn five minutes of a soccer player’s time or stand in the rain waiting for a rugby player to come back from a corporate meet and greet. We might remember Taylor like some great curiosity, a woman we should have celebrated more.