As we close the book on the sporting year and get ready for another massive one, we’re looking back on some of our favourite pieces of sportswriting published on The 42 in 2023.
Today: reflecting on Stephen Cluxton’s remarkable career in the wake of his ninth All-Ireland title, Arthur James O’Dea found a man whose aversion to publicity and acclaim has only seen his legend grow.
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Fan: “You don’t know who I am, but I know who you are.”Bob Dylan: “Let’s keep it that way.”- David Kinney, The Dylanologists
I
Jacqui Hurley was teeing up a return to the All-Ireland winners’ hotel.
“There was a lot of really, really impressive performances by Dublin today,” she remarked mid-way through The Sunday Game, “but led no more so than [by] the history-makers today – a couple of lads have won nine All-Ireland medals.
“Let’s go across to Joanne who has some very special guests alongside her.”
We had already heard from two of them earlier in the day. James McCarthy and Mick Fitzsimons had made themselves available to RTÉ’s Damien Lawlor in the immediate aftermath of their landmark achievement.
Two of only three men to have won nine All-Ireland medals, their reaction more closely resembled that of ageing first-time winners. Relieved, almost, it was all they could do to think of the collective team effort that brought them to this point.
That it had been only two years since Dublin won an All-Ireland was no matter. For players like McCarthy and Fitzsimons, two years was longer than they had ever gone without such success. Whatever nine medals might be worth to them in time, it wasn’t evident on Sunday evening.
The third man was absent; although he knew something approaching actual inter-county hardship. Half of Stephen Cluxton’s Dublin career was spent in the shadows of other All-Ireland winning teams.
He hadn’t talked to RTÉ in Croke Park, however. Indeed, it appeared as if Cluxton hadn’t even walked up into the Hogan Stand to lift the Sam Maguire cup on this occasion. The television cameras captured his celebrations with teammates, staff members, friends and family, but there’s not one picture of him (on Sportsfile, anyway) with the trophy in his hands as it was being passed around on the pitch.
None of that was particularly unusual for him.
When we joined Joanne Cantwell at the Dublin reception, however, I half-hoped that this would be the moment Cluxton stepped outside of himself and publicly acknowledged the magnitude of his achievement.
“I’m here with two of the nine-timers,” began Cantwell, my hope rapidly diminishing before the camera shot had even widened, “and I say two, James McCarthy and Mick Fitzsimons, because the other fella has completely abandoned you, refused to get up from the table and be here along with you.”
As John Updike memorably wrote of the legendary Boston Red Sox hitter Ted Williams: “Gods do not answer letters.”
II
In his essay, “How Tracey Austin Broke My Heart”, the writer David Foster Wallace came to a conclusion on why sports memoirs tend to leave us readers unsatisfied.
“It may well be that we spectators, who are not divinely gifted as athletes, are the only ones able truly to see, articulate, and animate the experience of the gift we are denied,” he reasoned.
“And that those who receive and act out the gift of athletic genius must, perforce, be blind and dumb about it – and not because blindness and dumbness are the price of the gift, but because they are its essence.”
There are exceptions to Wallace’s literary rule, and plenty of athletes have been found capable of speaking to their supreme talent too.
Stephen Cluxton is a bona fide heartbreaker, however.
While other sportspeople will at least invoke “a cliché as trite as ‘One ball at a time’ or ‘Gotta concentrate here’ and mean it, and then do it,” as Wallace notes, Cluxton barely even tolerates this formality.
The player all other Dublin players point to as their North Star, Cluxton has been credited with revolutionising the game of Gaelic football, while mastering his position and providing a literal and figurative focal point around which the game’s most successful team has been constructed.
He is a figure of such obvious interest. Even if he was found to be incapable of eloquently discussing his talents, there would be a lasting fascination for hearing what he had to say, nevertheless.
Instead, Cluxton’s legacy has been crafted by those who have surrounded him.
Whereas some reticent sportspeople keep quiet knowing they have little to say, this has never appeared to be the case with Cluxton, however. His committed aversion to external intrusion is so complete as to be the work of a public relations master.
For in opting not to speak, his legend has only grown.
III
“Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the poet laureate of rock ‘n’ roll. The voice of the promise of the ’60s counterculture. The guy who forced folk into bed with rock, who donned makeup in the ’70s and disappeared into a haze of substance abuse, who emerged to find Jesus, who was written off as a has-been by the end of the ‘80s, and who suddenly shifted gears, releasing some of the strongest music of his career beginning in the late ’90s.
“Ladies and gentlemen, Bob Dylan!”
IV
I sometimes wonder if Stephen Cluxton is a fan of Bob Dylan.
For anyone who has attended a Dylan concert in the last 20 years or so, there’s a chance you heard some semblance of that “poet laureate of rock’n’roll” introduction read out to mark his arrival on stage. It’s a joke, kind of.
Lifted from a newspaper article, it both tells us something about the trajectory of Dylan’s career, while informing us that the artist is aware of the inanity of such simplistic conclusions.
Yet, it also sets the tone for what will follow.
Where a performer is expected at some point or other to tell their crowd how wonderful they’ve been, how happy they are to be here with them, or even come up with something truly original,
Dylan does not indulge these pleasantries. You reckon you know his story, and anything he could say would only have a detrimental effect on it – or him.
It is jarring, the first time, but by the fourth or fifth time you’re watching him perform (I don’t know many fans of Dylan who have only attended one show), you find yourself looking for other signs that he simply might be enjoying himself, that this night when you are here may be memorable for him.
Did he just smile at his guitarist? Was that nod of his head for us?
Performing for an audience and performing in front of an audience are not one in the same, but Dylan’s on-stage attitude is more attuned to the sportsperson than the showman.
Cluxton, the eight-time All-Ireland winner, 16-time Leinster champion, six-time All-Star, Footballer of the Year who disappeared in 2021 only to return two years later to deliver a virtuoso performance in a record-breaking ninth All-Ireland win…
You’ll never catch him talking about any of that either.
V
Tommy Rooney: “Can I ask you why? Why would he come back? Why would they want him back?
Paddy Andrews: “Why would you want him back?!”
TR: “Yeah, he’s 41 [and] it’s two-and-a-half years after he’s retired.”
PA: “He’s still one of the best players that’s ever played GAA… Even if he’s not at his absolute peak of 10 years ago, do you not think that he would add something positive to that dressing room?”
TR: “I don’t doubt that. I guess I’m wondering what’s driving it.”
PA: “Does that not answers the question like? You can try to put a negative spin on this, I don’t see how you can put a negative spin on this.”
James O’Donoghue: “There is a negative spin to be put on it… It smells of desperation first of all…They’re bringing back a 41-year-old [and] you’re thinking, where are the leaders in that dressing room to take that on in the last two-and-a-half years, rather than having to revert back?… It’s like you’re almost flogging a dead horse rather than moving on with everything… The fact they’ve had to go back for him isn’t a great sign.”
- The Football Pod, 26 March, 2023
VI
It is interesting that we can look back on that exchange from The Football Pod earlier this year and conclude that both Paddy Andrews and James O’Donoghue were probably right.
Andrews was correct in suggesting that Cluxton’s surprise return could only serve to benefit Dublin’s chances of winning the All-Ireland in 2023. Yet, that estimation dually hinted that there was some truth in O’Donoghue’s argument that Dublin succeeding with Cluxton goal does little to enhance their effectiveness when that same 41-year-old goes again.
I think this is why Cluxton has steadfastly refused to talk about himself. He does not think it will do Dublin football any good.
He may be humble, but he is not ignorant. He may not see himself as the centre-point for Gaelic football’s most dominant team, but he knows that others do. Having walked into a team that was not going anywhere particular, and walked away from another that had redefined success, he knows that Dublin existed before him and will go on without him.
As the last two years have shown, he knows that when he walks away for good a gap will emerge far greater than that which can be filled by another goalkeeper. He may not be correct, but Cluxton would seem to believe that talking about his own success – and that is all people will want him to talk about if he speaks publicly at all – will only serve to widen the gap further.
Maybe that is why his teammates past and present adore him so. Yes, he unquestionably helped many of them to line their pockets with All-Ireland medals, but to contribute so much without looking for even a hint of personal acclaim or celebrity is kind of otherworldly.
And yet, I doubt that I was alone sitting there on Sunday night waiting for a glimpse of his more relatable humanity, hoping to share for even a moment in what has been the greatest of careers.
We will go on waiting still.