At this time of year it can be difficult to know what to buy for people at Christmas time. When you are 15, 20 years married, or more and your collective libido may not be what it used to be (this column is not autobiographical in anyway ), there is always a temptation for a female to buy her partner a good book which might stop him bothering her, trying all night to do what he used to do all night.
If you feel that is the case in your relationship, a relatively enjoyable read that you could suggest is a new book just out for the Christmas market by John Scally, called The Best of the West.
The text is made up from a collection of interviews with some of the GAA greats of Connacht over the past 50 years and more.
Men like Johnny Hughes, Brian Talty, Jimmy Murray, Peter Ford, Frank Stockwell, Kevin Walsh, Dermot Earley, Willie Joe Padden, Pat Lindsay, Martin Carney, and a few men that have sadly departed this world like the prince of corner backs Enda Colleran, the great Sean Purcell, and the late John Morley help you to skip along the pages.
There are a few hurlers thrown in for good measure too such as Noel Lane, Sylvie Linnane, Sean Duggan, and Iggy Clarke, while Alan Kerins and Roscommon’s John Tiernan also feature for their terrific work in other fields of endeavour.
For Scally this was in many ways a labour of love as it must have taken an enormous number of man hours to collate all the information and research. The result is an enjoyable read, packaged in a well presented hard-back with the foreward by the multi-tasking Mayo man John O’ Mahony who would have known and played with or trained many of the men interviewed.
There are some pleasant and witty anecdotes laced throughout the book and it is some of those that will bring the biggest laughs to those who stick to their guns and go through the 232 pages, which are easily leafed.
The interview with former Galway midfielder Brian Talty is especially lively and he relives the key incidents from the 1983 final. However it is commentary on former team-mate Billy Joyce, which are especially humourous.
Talty describes Joyce as a genuine wit and some of his stories confirm that fact.
Before a big game in Croke Park, Billy Joyce asked some of his team-mates:“Did ye ring the airport?”
Talty did not know what he was on about, so asked him: “Why would we phone the airport?”
Billy replied: “To tell them not to have airplanes flying over Croke Park. I’m going to be jumping so high, I don’t want to be in collision with any of them!”
Another quick one-liner from Joyce came when Galway were playing Roscommon in Pearse Stadium on an atrocious wet day. Before the throw-in one of the Roscommon midfielders said to Billy: “T’is an awful wet day for football.”
Billy looked at him and said: “You don’t have to worry about it. You won’t be in it for very long.”
John Maughan on O’Neill
The respective interviews from Mayo Advertiser columnist John Maughan and former Mayo star Kevin O’ Neill are also interesting and their different perspectives of the reason why O’ Neill did not feature much in Mayo’s championship teams when John wore the bainisteoir bib in the All-Ireland finals of 1996 and 1997 are definitely worth a read.
Maughan is frank and points out how he was astounded at the sort of form that Kevin produced for Mayo in 2006. He also points out that he had “absolutely no agenda”. “If I felt he was one of my best players surely I would have brought him on if I thought he could help us win an All-Ireland.”
Former Roscommon star Harry Keegan, who made many of the top XV team selections at corner back from his era, tells a good story about a duel he had with Dublin’s Charlie Redmond.
“A week before we played Dublin in the league, I had played against Redmond and he had been sensational. Charlie, though, did not like the close attention. He was a big man but was a bit soft and didn’t like the physical stuff. I managed to get a clatter on him in the league game and he went down like a stack of spuds. One of his own players came running up to him and said: “Get up you f**ker. He didn’t hit you half hard enough.”
On a most Christian note, possibly the nicest tribute anyone in the book receives is that of the late Bill Carlos who was a superb centre-back for Roscommon in the 1940s when his county won two All Ireland titles. When the late Cardinal Tomas O’ Fiaich was asked what he would like to have achieved as a sports man, he stated simply: “To play centre-back like Bill Carlos.”
