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Topic:
Humphries on camogie again
spot_the_dog
(189 Posts)
Posted:
09-Apr-2008 11:48
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With apologies to everyone who has issues with Tom writing about his daughters` camogie teams, would anyone be able to post up his piece from today`s paper?
like
(1,178 Posts)
Posted:
09-Apr-2008 11:59
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Joys, tears, bonding and the very best of times
DIARY OF A CAMOGIE MENTOR Tom Humphries muses on the highs and lows of life on the sidelines with his charges at St Vincent`s
YEARS AGO myself and my friend Tommy Clancy started off with an idea that we would give a bunch of girls the best time a gang of kids could have on a camogie team together. I don`t know if we succeeded but (together with a few other friends ) we had had the best of times ourselves. We knew very little but we had a group of key phrases that negated the need for coaching courses. "Two hands on the hurl." "Ah, pull on the thing." "Now you`re hurling."
When it came to the rules we distilled centuries of dry law library argument into one beautifully succinct and watertight legal defence: "Ah, ref, the bleedin` ball was there." And there our case always rested.
We raised money any way we could and we visited any club outside of Dublin that would entertain us, telling the girls as they looked dubiously at us in a succession of dank, chilly, rural dressingrooms that this was "what it is all about".
Once we arranged a challenge game in Ratoath in Co Waterford but under a slight misapprehension we travelled to Ratoath in Co Meath, where the surprised locals actually mustered up a team for us to play against. What they were doing in Waterford at that precise time is anybody`s guess.
There were days when we fought like dogs on the sideline and days when we just sat back and rejoiced at the sight of our little team. There were sacrifices and, listen, let nobody speak of bravery who has not, as a mentor, taken a sliotar full on the testicles from a 14-year-old girl and just carried on smiling as if nothing had happened.
There were moments we would never forget. A series of famous (to us ) games at the All-Ireland Féile, beating Toomevara, beating Glen Rovers, getting hammered in Páirc Uí Chaoimh by Douglas in the final. You`ve never seen such tears but 20 minutes later the craic started again.
Two years later we had Douglas up to the club in St Vincent`s and at 3am as the Cork girls slept in our houses with their Dublin pals we mentors found ourselves in the club bar at the end of a long night of singing and, uhm, bonding.
We were standing in a big circle holding hands singing the I Love You, You Love Me song from Barney. We swore a blood oath together the next morning we would never speak of the incident but word got out and now it`s every man and woman for themselves in explaining how they got mixed up in such a thing.
Apparently the Barney song is a tradition in Douglas.
There were moments that still make me laugh. Earnestly telling them all in the lead-up to a big match they were to be in bed by midnight on the night before the game. A silence followed as they weighed this. And then an earnest enquiry from Carol McDonnell: "Eh, what time is midnight at?"
Or Leanna Byrne, who grew into stardom late but was, at that point, one of those subs who only got on late in games the outcome of which could not be altered by her presence. One day Leanna is standing beside me on the sideline late in a match as I give her the instructions. "Now, Leanna, you are going in at full forward, you know the story." "Yes," nods Leanna earnestly." Leanna comes on. Ref blows final whistle. Leanna comes straight off. "Oh!"
Or our second-last game. A championship semi-final against Na Fianna. In local terms they are Rangers. We are Celtic. We are all hyped up. So are they. Last words in a huddle before we all go out onto the pitch. "Now, girls, for all the years we have been together, all the work, all the friendships, all that this team means, lets go out on a high note." A pause. Tension you can cut with a knife. And then from Johanna Clancy a perfect High C issued at such an altitudinous octave that only ourselves and some nearby dogs can hear it. We crease into helpless laughter and the girls hit the pitch a giggling, howling rabble. And win.
Tommy, Eddie and Seán are taking a rest now as they hover on the brink of senility but me, being a much younger man, I`m still at it, at the beginning of a journey with another very special team, telling them the secret of perfect happiness is two hands on the hurl and pulling hard, explaining to them that cold, wet days on the windswept tundra in the Phoenix Park are "what it is all about".
I don`t know if they believe that, but I do.
myboyblue
(890 Posts)
Posted:
09-Apr-2008 12:01
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Mother of jaysus......
Finian
(852 Posts)
Posted:
09-Apr-2008 12:13
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Well BoyBlue lets hear it
Bodach an Cóta Lachna
(409 Posts)
Posted:
09-Apr-2008 12:28
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seriously, MBB, I get as much of a pain in my ring as the next fella when he devotes the whole of Lockerroom to it on a Monday, but it`s a grand piece about coaching chillun in a section of the sports section that talks about coaching chillun every week. You can`t have THAT big a problem with it shurely?
myboyblue
(890 Posts)
Posted:
09-Apr-2008 12:38
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Lads, I have no problem with him coaching kids, its a fine thing to do, I do it myself, and I love the satisfaction I get out of it seeing a young lad who couldnt even hold a hurl a few weeks back double on a ball and get that sweet spot just right, landing it in the corner of the net.
But how many ducking times must we hear about Humphries daughters camógie team, really?!!! He`s a fine journo, he has a fantastic soapbox, he could comment on anything, his piece recently on the yank athlete getting caught shaving her face due to the amount of drugs she was on, was a wonderfully informative piece. More of that.
Less of this.
myboyblue
(890 Posts)
Posted:
09-Apr-2008 12:39
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Originally posted by Bodach an Cóta Lachna:
it`s a grand piece about coaching chillun in a section of the sports section that talks about coaching chillun every week. You can`t have THAT big a problem with it shurely?
My apologies, I didnt realise it was a piece in a specific childrens section of the paper, I have no beef with that, the article wasn`t put in context for me.
spot_the_dog
(189 Posts)
Posted:
09-Apr-2008 12:43
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Originally posted by spot_the_dog:
Humphries on camogie again
Thanks like.
dubliner 2
(10,823 Posts)
Posted:
09-Apr-2008 12:55
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With the decline in the amount of people willing to take teams out mentoring needs every favourable bit of publicity it can get. It`s in the school/youth sports section of the Times so fair play Tom. Let`s hope it encourages a few people to get involved.
The Cats Meow
(570 Posts)
Posted:
09-Apr-2008 13:56
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Originally posted by dubliner 2:
With the decline in the amount of people willing to take teams out mentoring needs every favourable bit of publicity it can get. It`s in the school/youth sports section of the Times so fair play Tom. Let`s hope it encourages a few people to get involved.
What he said.
sid wallace
(Power User)
Posted:
09-Apr-2008 14:04
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in fairness if we were prepared to shell out a few bob to pay people to get involved it`d probably help a hell of a lot more than Tom Humphries writing about he great he is in an obscure part (turn left at the cricket and right just before you get to the hockey ) of an obscure supplement in a minority newspaper
McFlurry
(615 Posts)
Posted:
09-Apr-2008 14:09
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Originally posted by myboyblue:
his piece recently on the yank athlete getting caught shaving her face due to the amount of drugs she was on, was a wonderfully informative piece.
Any one post this please????
The Growler
(312 Posts)
Posted:
09-Apr-2008 14:16
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Originally posted by spot_the_dog:
Humphries on camogie again
Where the hell is ratoath in co.waterford, first ive heard of it??
Ozzy
(1,867 Posts)
Posted:
09-Apr-2008 14:31
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I really enjoyed that, don`t know why so much is made of Humphries writing about camogie anyway. There are frequently people complaining on this message board about the GAA not getting enough coverage.
dubliner 2
(10,823 Posts)
Posted:
09-Apr-2008 14:31
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Originally posted by sid wallace:
in fairness if we were prepared to shell out a few bob to pay people to get involved it`d probably help a hell of a lot more than Tom Humphries writing about he great he is in an obscure part (turn left at the cricket and right just before you get to the hockey ) of an obscure supplement in a minority newspaper
What`s wrong with modern Ireland neatly summed up Sid.
sid wallace
(Power User)
Posted:
09-Apr-2008 17:54
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Originally posted by dubliner 2:
What`s wrong with modern Ireland neatly summed up Sid.
yeah well you either accept that that is the way things are and you move pragmatically on that basis to secure the sports or you cling to the wreckage of an ideologically unsustainable position that ironically was introduced originally by upper class English toffs with the intention of keeping the common man out of sport
929597
(9 Posts)
Posted:
09-Apr-2008 18:24
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The trial of Tammy Thomas can prove a test case for US drug investigators as they target much bigger fish, writes Tom Humphries
SUNDAY AFTERNOON and struggling for a column. Blow the cobwebs off the laptop and there`s an email from a friend wondering if I`ve been following the Tammy Thomas circus. Why, of course!
Tammy, Tammy, Tammy. Come on down, Tammy. And there`s a link which we`ll save to the end of the column so you can click on it and view Tammy from the privacy of your work station or cell.
What drew me to Tammy and her charms was the surprising testimony recently of Mr Tom McVay, a man who for his sins works as a doping-control officer for the United States Anti-Doping Agency.
Mr McVay recently recalled how he had occasion to pay one of his surprise visits to Tammy, then a world-class cyclist, back in March 2002. Tammy was in Chula Vista, California, at the time. What confronted Mr McVay that day was an appalling vista.
Now Mr McVay is used to surprising people with his curt knock on the door and Tammy, one must assume for reasons which will become clearer, must have been used to hearing the rat-a-tat-tat of the doping-control chaps. Still, Mr McVay was shocked and Tammy didn`t seem embarrassed when Tammy answered the door with shaving cream plastered down the left side of her face.
Mr McVay testified (he would be astute this way ) that Tammy had been interrupted apparently in the act of shaving her excess facial hair. Subsequently Tammy (brace yourselves for this ) tested positive for illegal substances and was barred from competition.
Steroid abuse had given Tammy her facial hair, male-pattern baldness, chest hair and a deep, gravelly voice. Tammy is being tried at the moment as part of the ongoing investigations into the activities of the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (Balco ) , a sports pharmacy superstore or little shop of horrors, depending on your point of view.
In an unfolding plot which has already brought down Marion Jones and Trevor Graham and irrevocably tainted Barry Bonds, we can only see Tammy as a bit player but she is colourful as Mardi Gras and deserves her own little 15 minutes.
And Tammy will be important because her current legal troubles will serve as precedent. In terms of sport she was but a minnow compared to some of the big tuna caught up in the net of the Balco scandal, but certain people will be studying the outcome of her trial very closely. Tammy was indicted on almost identical charges to those Bonds is facing - that is, perjury and obstruction of justice in respect to testimony given to a grand-jury hearing in the Balco case in 2003.
There is a good movie to be made out of all this. Hollywood insists on uplifting endings and handing the laurels to the good guys at the end. The script people should write in a nice role in that case for the IRS special agent Jeff Novitzky, who has been working as the US government`s top anti-doping enforcer.
It was Novitzky, six-foot-seven-inches tall and shaven-headed, who testified in federal court last week about Tammy`s attempts to impede the Balco investigation. Novitzky led the Balco raid and if Ed Harris had the height I would give him the part. Arnold Schwarzenegger could leave politics to play the role of Tammy.
At the centre of the plot is a relationship between Novitzky and Victor Conte, the mastermind of the Balco wheeze. Novitzky says he first learned about Balco when he was a child growing up in Burlingame, California, the town where the laboratory was located. Having noted Conte in a pic of Californian athletes going to the Seoul Olympic Games in 1988 and noticed him again standing up for Marion Jones`s ex CJ Hunter at the Sydney Games, Novitzky started sniffing.
He had been obsessively tracking Conte for a decade, an obsession involving the spectrum of detective work from picking through garbage (where expecting to find financial details he found links to top athletes ) to analysing bank databases.
When the case finally broke and Balco were raided, Conte and his associates James Valente and Greg Anderson sang like the Three Tenors and fessed up straight away to manufacturing and distributing their by-now-famous designer steroids to prominent athletes. Conte has since served time and presumably was hurt inside by loose talk accusing him of being a stool pigeon. Since he came back out to the real world he has been accusing Novitzky (who kick-started the Balco probe in 2002 when while digging through the laboratory`s trash in search of a financial crime he found documentation about famous athletes and strange pharmaceuticals ) of making everything up.
Novitzky though is stern-jawed and implacable, the TJ Hooker of doping. This week he is in a manner of speaking nailing Tammy. Because of Tammy`s, ahem, inconsistent statements it took several years before officials were able to successfully prosecute Patrick Arnold, the Illinois chemist who produced the Balco drugs.
Arnold was not indicted in 2004 when four others were originally charged in the case. But he pleaded guilty in 2006 to steroid distribution and had some jail time slung his way. He can sing quite well himself. Last week he cheerfully contradicted Tammy`s prior evidence given under oath and testified he had given steroids directly to Tammy.
Arnold has testified that not only did he supply the drugs but also he helped Tammy to come up with an excuse when she failed a test for norbolethone.
"I suggested to Ms Thomas that a cover story could be contrived that involved telling the doping-agency people that she was on a morning-after pill," he said.
Tammy maintains that despite the beard, the chest hair, the baldness, the voice and the gain of sixty pounds she had no idea she had been given steroids. (Come to think of it, must send my own sample to be tested. those symptoms sound familiar. )
Tammy`s troubles continue this week. Her case foreshadows that of Bonds, whose case is expected to begin no sooner than 2009. When they are done with Tammy, Novitzky and his colleagues will know a lot more about the strengths and weaknesses of the US government`s case.
In the courtroom as Novitzky testified last week a quiet, studious woman sat intently at the witness table scribbling notes. Tammy Thomas is a law student now and has no desire to live in the past. She bears little resemblance to the mannish figure in a photo the assistant US attorneys repeatedly show to the witnesses they`ve summoned to the stand.
Check out the pic on http://flickr.com/photos/bike/322518981 next time you put down your pint and make the argument that all athletes should be allowed take whatever they like.
Fallon
(225 Posts)
Posted:
09-Apr-2008 19:36
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Hi Tommy ... sorry ... Tammy
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