great moments in sport

It was the dulcet Summer of 1976.
Me and my brother Barn were staying for a week's holiday at our friend Darragh Murphy's house in the Dublin suburb of Tallaght.
I was ten years old and the brother was eight.
The stay at Murphys was a bit of an adventure since we had moved to the country a few years earlier and our return for a visit was replete with unusual novelties and freedoms.
We didn't do much but everything we did seemed imbued with childhood magic.
At least it does in my memory.
This was the Summer when Mr Murphy, Darragh's Dad, oversaw our marathon five hour efforts to put up a tent on the front lawn.
When I say he oversaw us, I mean he sat on the front porch shouting encouragement.
He was from Cork and had a finely honed sense of the ridiculous.
I seemed to particularly inspire him to the heights of eloquence and wit.
As we struggled to erect the tent, I remember the stream of comments rising from the porch.
He delivered each remark in a ringing invectival Corkonian voice: "Jamie Healy! I hear about you building passenger aeroplanes, and rockets, and jet fighters, and you can't even put up a tent! Jamie Healy, what's all this about your space ships and your ray guns and your Tardis and your time tunnel! And you can't even put up a tent! Jamie Healy, aren't you the leader of the pack? The head of the gang. The guy who creates new animals by crossbreeding rabbits with hens. The one who causes all the mischief. And you can't even put up a tent."
You get the picture.
He was right too.
I couldn't even put up a tent.
Halcyon days indeed.
Thank heavens no one had told him about our helicopter that runs on water programme.
He'd have gotten great mileage out of that.
And I don't mean air miles.
Also resident in the house was Darragh's teenage sister Blathnaid.
Blathnaid is an Irish name meaning flower or flowery.
She wasn't quite as gorgeous as Juanita Kennedy who had lived next door to us before we left Tallaght, but she had a certain something.
Proximity.
By the way, Juanita was the daughter of a tough Glasgow woman and Mike Kennedy the famous Irish champion jockey.
Mrs Kennedy was tough in a no nonsense sort of way. When a few years earlier I had gotten into a scratch fight with her son Brian (even then I fought like a girl) she bided her time until I'd forgotten all about it and climbed into Kennedys' garden to retrieve a football. Instantly a window was flung open, and Mrs Kennedy who had been watching for the right moment, read me the riot act in stern Glaswegian.
The salient heart stopping phrase which lives with me to this day ran: "Did you scratch my Brian?"
What do you say to that?
I think I said no but she wasn't having it.
And there was nowhere to hide.
Interestingly enough the only time I ever actually ran away from home (planned to do so many times) was again before we had moved from Tallaght and again involved the Kennedys. Darragh Murphy and I had been swinging off the branches in a beautiful cypress tree in Kennedys's front garden and broken the shapeliest bough.
We fled north as far as Davy's sweet shop where my own Dad found us two hours later.
No words were spoken. He led us out to the car and drove us home.
Darragh and I couldn't believe it.
Had the Dad come into the sweet shop by chance?
Did everyone know we had ruined the Kennedys' cypress tree?
Did anyone know?
Did they actually not care?
We never found out.
But I digress.
Juanita Kennedy was something of a tomboy, ie she was the only person on the street to ever nearly beat my older brother Tom in a scratch fight.
But Juanita didn't look like a tomboy or like an average Tallaght girl either.
She looked like something out of heaven.
The name they had given her was Spanish.
If I remember rightly, on Main Street Tallaght, Juanita's name was pronounced One-Eee-Ther.
Rich Dublinese.
Crumbs she was a honey.
Juanita had looked unremarkable for much of our early childhood.
Then suddenly, boom.
Whoomph deh it is, as the young black rappers say nowadays.
When they blossom they blossom quick.
With her lustrously shining waist length brown hair, soulful brown eyes, lissom limbs, etc etc, she looked not like a creature of the earth and yet was on it, etc etc, et elle me faisait rever des choses inconnues etc etc.
Well you know what I mean.
She was gorgeous.
And unattainable.
Blathnaid was good looking though not nearly as gorgeous.
But Blathnaid was nearby.
That is to say, as per our previous, that as a member of the Murphy family she happened to be staying in the Murphy house where we were holidaying in this dulcet Summer of 1976.
And Blathnaid acted gorgeous.
With her big bouncy blonde hair and swirly skirts that looked like something out of our sister Marie's Jackie magazines.
Yes Blathnaid's name meant flower.
(Or flowery.)
And she seemed a very womanly sort of flower to our innocent eyes, if not quite in the One-Eee-Ther Kennedy league.
Her Dublin accent rendered her dangerously exotic in my febrile imagination.
She was the only one of the Murphy children to have the real city accent even though the rest of the family had also been raised in Dublin.
Barn and me had Oxbridge accents.
Even then.
And we'd been raised in Dublin too.
God had obviously already destined Doctor Barn for great things by giving him that accent and was apparently just having the crack with me.
Anyhoo.
Blathnaid's Dublin accent seemed tremendously different and wildly sensual to us.
Okay.
To me.
My voracious appetite for Enid Blyton books meant I already knew words like "sensual" and how they might be applied.
Also for the record, it was from Enid Blyton that I also knew lesser used meanings of words like "ejaculated," which the blessed Enid used rather quaintly to describe people speaking to each other.
When I think of the problems that woman caused me.
You've got to imagine me years later ejaculating to the ghost of Enid Blyton in a voice like the Spanish swordsman in The Princess Bride: "That word... I do not think it means what you think it means."
Ah, the lefties were right to ban her.
She was a sex maniac, was Enid Blyton.
In later life I had a further quarrel with her ghost about her use of the word "rather" which Enid's characters said as a single word exclamation to express enthusiasm.
Would you like a cup of tea?
Rather!
Irish kids would beat you up for saying that.
And they'd think they were doing you a favour.
It was ----ing madness.
But I digress.
Me and Barn were staying at the Murphys. Nothing much was happening. It was all fairly magical. Blathnaid made me hunger for things unknown.
That's the way things stood.
Barn and I had a room to ourselves with bunk beds.
One night I woke in the wee small hours.
The eight year old child who would later be Doctor Barn was returning to the room.
He looked a bit shook as he shut the door.
"Where were you?" sez the ten year old me.
"I was going to the toilet," replies he in a shaky voice.
"What's wrong with you?" sez me.
"When I was coming back I went into Blathnaid's room by mistake," quoth he.
I sat bolt upright in the bed.
"Yeah right, why would you do that?" sez I with Shakespearian incredulity.
"I was sleepy, I got mixed up," explains he.
"What happened?" sez I fascinated.
My little brother's pallor became positively tragic.
"I went to get into the bed," he managed. "As I pulled back the blanket, Blathnaid woke up, rolled over and just stared at me."
"Wow," sez I.
"Yes," he agreed bitterly.
"Did she say anything?" I enquired after a pause to digest.
"She said: Bairrnaird Healy, where do you think you're goin!" groaned he disconsolately.
The upper bunk shook as I began to laugh.
It was five minutes before I regained control.
(Forty years actually and counting- ed note)
"And you really expect me to believe you went in there by accident?" I ventured.
"Of course it was an accident," exploded Barn with pretty good venom for an eight year old.
I required a renewed laughter intermission which took another five minutes.
When it ended, I stared at Barn.
He stared back.
In that moment he seemed to have a premonition.
He seemed to see years and years of me laughing and making jokes about this very night.
"You're not going to keep going on about this?" he asked poignantly.
"Don't worry," I reassured him. "I'll never mention it again."