A harvest of gold from Con's rich pickings
When my son was 11, he asked me to read him Lord of the Rings. He loved the part where the wandering hobbits encounter the windswept figure of Strider in a remote inn.
Strider is a mysterious, nomadic figure who underneath his tattered, mud-caked travelling cloak is revealed to be Aragorn, the uncrowned true king.
That same week -- my son sharing my interests of literature and sport -- we watched Shelbourne play Bohemians in Tolka Park. The atmosphere was intense, fuelled by local rivalry.
The late Ollie Byrne glowered at stewards to patrol the pathway behind the goal and prevent anyone from leaning on the handrail to observe the game at close hand.
Like everyone else we were ushered up into the stand, but my son's attention was taken by the presence of a quiet figure, his hand half covering his face, leaning undisturbed on that forbidden handrail behind the goal to intently observe the action.
Anybody else who dared pause there was bustled away, but no steward had the audacity to approach this man to whom ordinary rules obviously did not apply.
"Who is that, Dad?" my son asked.
"That," I replied, "is true nobility, the uncrowned king of journalists. You're looking at Con Houlihan, son, you're looking at Aragorn".
The metaphor might have been obscure, but he instinctively understood my meaning.
Behind the false glamour of instant celebrity, there is a different type of fame -- a true, lasting respect. Today, when the word "fame" is debased, many are famous but only a tiny handful of people are legendary. Passing fame may be rewarded with baubles, but when match stewards recognise an aura as being too special to be disturbed, that is the best example of genuine respect that I can think of.
The positioning of Con Houlihan at that match seemed appropriate. He was not up in the press box, nor among the crowd with their tribal chants. Instead he occupied his own space, utterly engaged and yet utterly apart, standing -- as the Greek poet Cavafy said a poet should stand -- at a peculiar angle to the universe.
But people speak of poets differently than they speak about journalists. Poets are deemed to be the unacknowledged legislators of the world with an eye permanently on immortality: journalists are deemed to be hacks with an eye permanently on expenses.
Yet good journalism can be just as incendiary on a young mind as any poem, in opening up new ways of seeing things and for many people who dip into the pages of A Harvest (a new collection of rare and uncollected pieces of Houlihan's journalism) the experience is like walking into a roomful of old friends.
But it was long before his heyday with the Evening Press that Houlihan's name first appeared in the national press.
In the 1930s, a flying circus visited his native Castle Island in Kerry, and Houlihan won a competition for flight tickets by guessing the height at which a plane flew over the town.
Today anyone stuck in the permanent traffic jam from Castle Island might suspect that a plane remains the best way to traverse the town. But the sole joy of Castle Island's daily bottleneck is that it gives visitors a chance to survey -- in all its craggy glory -- Hugh Hanratty's superb bust of Houlihan that now adorns the main thoroughfare.
If it seems extraordinary that a sportswriter should be so honoured in his own life-time, what is more extraordinary is that this was the fourth bust of Con Houlihan to be unveiled -- the others exist in Dublin hostelries which he frequented, including the Palace Bar.
Yeats coined the inscription for AE, but the term a "myriad minded man" could apply equally to Houlihan. Because although Houlihan is best known for sports journalist, he has the gift to contextualise sport within the wider tapestry of the human condition.
Great sport -- like great art -- is about moments when time stands still. Such occasions are not a mater of life and death, but more important because they transcend life and death, making us forget everything in the magic of being enraptured by an extraordinary passion.
Houlihan has always possessed that passion, with his uncynical enthusiasm for paintings and novels, his way of making them come alive for readers.
I first read many of the pieces in A Harvest in my formative years. I recall my excitement at opening a newspaper and finding amid the contemporaneous news that would grow stale, Houlihan's commentary on "the news that stays news" -- great literature and art.
I remember reading him on Francis Ledwidge when few people discussed Ledwidge, and Houlihan's encounter with the paintings of Ferdinand Hodler while visiting a gallery in Berne after having watched the Irish and Swiss soccer teams clash "with all the force of two pillows colliding".
I recognised somebody who took the privilege of writing for a national newspaper seriously and who wished to engage the imagination of readers and share his boundless enthusiasms.
Houlihan's range was always wide -- from Knocknagow to Van Gogh and Cezanne to Hopkins -- but he made each one come alive. You felt his enthusiasm and wanted to read the books he loved, not as rarefied mysteries but as everyday wonders to be discussed in a Kerry or Dublin pub, no more ordinary or extraordinary than any other aspect of life.
To find those fugitive pieces harvested together by Liberties Press is like stumbling into a gathering of old friends in the company of a master storyteller with a wry eye and a sharp wit. A writer not blinded by fads but with that Kerry ability to see everything with both an innocent and knowing eye and to cut to the essence of it in a way any reader can understand.
Next time you are stuck in Castle Island, look out for his bust -- it may turn the experience from a penance into a pilgrimage.
A Harvest is published by Liberties Press, priced €14.99.
- DERMOT BOLGER
