By Paul Healy
Different days meant different expectations, different treats.
Saturday morning/afternoon? That, once we escaped two-channel land and discovered the seductive UK stations, meant Dickie Davis and his World of Sport (ITV). Anyone for wrestling?
Saturday night meant Jimmy Hill (later, Clare-born Des Lynam) on the unmissable Match of the Day.
Sunday night, 11 o’clock, meant Sean Og O’Ceallachain. RTE Radio 1, the seemingly ageless broadcaster reading club results from all over the country.
Other days and times are imprinted in our minds. I see images from the past now…Liam Nolan, Mick Dunne, Brendan O’Reilly. Michael O’Hehir on sunny summer Sundays.
And then there was Monday, Wednesday and Friday evenings. The Holy Grail.
When Mike met Paddy…
‘Mike Sheehy’s fist put it behind the backs, breaking along the ground out towards Kerry’s right. This time Paddy Cullen was better positioned and comfortably played the ball with his feet away from Sheehy.
He had an abundance of time and space in which to lift and clear – but his pick-up was a dubious one and the referee Seamus Aldridge, decided against him. Or maybe he deemed his meeting with Ger Power illegal.
Whatever the reason, Paddy put on a show of righteous indignation that would get him a card from Equity, throwing up his hands to heaven as the referee kept pointing towards goal.
And while all this was going on, Mike Sheehy was running up to take the kick – and suddenly Paddy dashed back towards his goal like a woman who smells a cake burning.
The ball won the race and it curled inside the near post as Paddy crashed into the outside of the net and lay against it like a fireman who had returned to find his station ablaze’.
– Con Houlihan (Evening Press)
The line that’s always quoted is that one about Paddy Cullen…and that goal. But there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of lines we could quote. That’s the genius of the big man. Con. Con Houlihan.
A personal favourite of mine related to his column on an Ireland-Scotland rugby match. Moss Keane scored a try, plundering over the line in swashbuckling fashion, a few despairing Scottish backs in his wake. Decades on, the sheer brilliance of Con’s description is vividly preserved in my mind: Having noted that Keane had indeed got over the try-line, Con wrote: “….which just goes to prove that a rolling Scot gathers no Moss”.
Every Monday evening. Every Wednesday evening. Every Friday evening. Without fail. Because you could not miss Con.
The walk to Cox’s or Sharkey’s in Rooskey was one of great anticipation. For a teenager in rural Ireland in the 1980s, there was no reason to buy the Evening Press except for this great reason: to ‘get Con’.
The Kerry man’s column usually appeared down the left hand side of the back page. The first five or six paragraphs generally had nothing to do with the sporting subject of the day’s column. The column might be about Diego Maradona or Jack O’Shea, but the first few paragraphs may well have to cover days on the bog or feeding cattle or some character from Knocknagoshel. But Con always got around to the point, reached his destination. And the journey was always wonderful.
On a special occasion, such as an All-Ireland final or a major soccer international, Con’s column began across the top of the front page, continuing on the back. It made the prospect of reading it even more exciting.
At the end of the day, what made Con special was not just his unique style, it was the quality of his writing. And it was very evident how much he loved sport, and sports people.
Yes, Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays then were special, Tuesdays and Thursdays all the poorer for his absence from the back page. At some stage Con began writing on Saturdays too. His ‘Tributaries’ column showcased his great intellect and the breadth of his interests. This column, published on an inside page, usually concentrated on the arts or politics. Although he was the gentlest of souls – that came across in his writing – and very humourous, he could prick the pomposity of politicians with a stroke of his pen.
A first sighting
of Liam Brady…
‘I remember it well, even though a lot of wine and beer and spirits has gone down the red lane in the meantime. It was in October of 1974 and I was then scraping a living doing bits and pieces for Radio Éireann and the Irish Press.
Nevertheless, I was looking forward in high excitement to the imminent clash of the Republic and the Soviets in Dalymount Park. And to soothe my seething mind I adjourned to the Harp, that seductive oasis near O’Connell Bridge.
There I was joined by a colleague, Sean Ward, then in his formative years as editor of the Evening Press. And we were in no great hurry to go to the North Circular Road.
And we had an abundance to talk about on that Wednesday afternoon long ago.
Muhammad Ali had just unmanned George Foreman away down below in Zaire. And a great little man called Joe who sported a turned-down pipe and a vibrant typewriter had departed this mortal life below in Rhodesia.
I can still recall the headline in the Evening Press: ‘All Is Quiet Now in Sherwood Forest’. That act of memory is no great feat; after all, I wrote it myself.
Anyway, Sean and myself didn’t leave the Harp until a quarter of an hour before the time for the tip-off; little did we know. There wasn’t a taxi to be had in the centre of Dublin; panic set in. Resourceful as ever, I hijacked a van driven by an old friend, John Heaney, who was then working for Max Florist. And he whisked us up to the old grey stadium that was then the venue for all our home internationals.
An amazing scene awaited us: the gates were locked – the ground was full for over half an hour. We went around to the Tramway end: there some enterprising citizens were working like their counterparts in 1789 who stormed the Bastille.
Eventually the gates gave way. Hundreds flooded in: it was a bizarre prelude to the first occasion on which I watched Liam Brady play’.
– From ‘The Best of Con Houlihan’
It is barely an overstatement to say that Con kept the Evening Press going almost single-handedly. I don’t mean to be unfair to all others who worked there – many of them very talented – but it was Con’s column that had sales of the paper soaring.
Someone once (memorably) said that they only made up their mind about a match they had actually seen or attended when they read Con’s column the following evening!
For fans of Con’s, the expiry of the ‘Press papers’ was a disaster! I don’t think he ever got over the closure of the Irish Press group. Quite apart from his love for and loyalty to the titles, he was now journalistically homeless. It showed in his writing too. The Sunday World, an unlikely match, swooped. Dare I say it, I think Con was going through the motions when he wrote there; I’m not sure his heart was in it any more. But he had already been prolific; he had entertained and educated his fans for years, with terrific writing – about sport, and about life, especially the great and wonderful simplicity of rural living and rural people.
‘No lights on his bike’
‘The Kerryman was then – and probably still is – the leading Irish provincial paper. This in loose translation means that it sold the most copies. People bought it for an almost infinite variety of reasons.
Many men bought it for the Football; many women bought it for the section that told them about the buying and selling of turkeys and ducks and geese and hens. And almost everybody looked to it for its covering of the local courts.
They delighted in reading about some neighbour who had been hauled up for having no light on his bike, or better still, for being drunk and disorderly. The greatest pleasure of all came from reading about the unfortunate who had been apprehended in a pub after hours.
Being a ‘found on’ gave your neighbours great glee, not because you had committed a heinous crime, but because you had been caught’.
– From ‘The Best of Con Houlihan’
I never met him. I should regret that, but it was sufficient for me that he was my close friend in print, as he was to thousands more. Had I met him, it’s likely that little enough would have been said. He was, by all accounts, chronically shy, noted for placing a hand over his mouth when speaking to people. Shy or not, he was apparently quite sociable and happy to be approached by admirers.
He had a number of favoured ‘watering holes’ and legend has it that he often wrote his column on beermats while supping his drink. All his writing was done in longhand; he never recognised the legitimacy of a typewriter, much less a computer.
Nobody lives forever. How I wished that the magic Con years would continue on and on. But time eventually caught up with the great giant of Irish sportswriting. He died in 2012 (aged 86) and we truly will never see his likes again.
In a piece on an old friend from Knocknagoshel, Con movingly wrote: ‘We all loved you. You gave to the world more than it ever gave to you’. We might surely say the same of Con.
Life was better when Con was here. It’s so uplifting to observe people who see the beauty in life, who have such breadth of knowledge, and who can share it so beautifully. He was extraordinary, an absolute one-off. Not all heroes wear capes; some make magic with a pen.
