The most fun I have ever had in sport? Okay, let's stop right there. A small disclaimer before we start.
his isn't one of those cornball chatshow night yarns that a besweatered former county man exaggerates about toothpaste squeezed into his shoes while he was chilling in the cryotherapy chamber, or the time I was on a panel so high-end that we had our own pillow-fluffer in the backroom team for away trips to five-star hotels.
Nah. That's not why you click to this page.
It was my teenage years and I was working in a double-glazing factory just a few hundred yards from home.
Come Friday evening, the horn would blow at half five. It was a scramble to collect the wages and a cavalcade would inch down the long avenue, horns blaring to signify the weekend was here and the weekly indoor soccer five-a-side in the Forum in Enniskillen.
I say indoor soccer - it was many things, but not soccer. A more accurate description might be Gaelic football without ball handling.
A heavy, dark green curtain divided the hall down a sideline. Every week, some poor man would be scattered into it and magically appear on the far side of the curtain, interrupting a doubles game of badminton or some pensioners rolling bowls.
The real bizarre stuff happened post-match. One fella had the habit of bringing a change of clothes to go socialising in the town afterwards. Various delaying tactics were employed on him and more than once he arrived into the changing room after his shower to find his freshly-laundered and ironed chinos and shirt had just been very vigorously used as a towel before being stuffed back into his holdall.
What came before showering was a time-honoured ritual. Every player would take their place in the small dressing room and a hush would descend. A pause then for dramatic effect, before one last player would enter through booting the door open, unleashing a few minutes of a tirade, blaming a poor attitude to training, towards 'the club' for 'that disgrace out there', adding that our families would 'be ashamed of us'.
There may have been curse words. A lot of them.
The trick was not to giggle or else you could bring untold abuse down on your own head.
Although there were weeks when numbers were short and an outsider was brought in to fill out a team, the routine never changed. The uninitiated would sit in utter bemusement at the scene.
It was a parallel universe, working men with a taste for bizarre humour. Nobody could enjoy the luxury of taking themselves seriously in that environment. Any ego would be ruthlessly exposed and exploited.
As a way of blowing off steam after a 50-hour week cooped up in a workshop, it was as healthy as it got.
At the other end of sport - proper athletic sport and not the towel-flicking nonsense described previously - the greatest days for me are All-Ireland semi-finals. There are reasons for this.
All-Ireland final day has become as commodified as a company tent at the Galway Races. The corporate boxes will be full but mainly for exercises in sucking up to the boss. Tickets are distributed through every club on the island and the effect is to have the passion diluted among what could be a partisan crowd.
At a semi-final, everyone who wants to be there will be there. And the reward at the end is the promise of something more.
Watching semi-finals is easily identifiable in my memory. Armagh-Dublin 2002 at my parents' house. Tyrone-Kerry 2003? A high stool in the Nally Stand pub. Fermanagh-Mayo 2004? The Five Dock Hotel in western Sydney.
The greatest of those days was Waterford beating Tipperary in the 2008 hurling semi-final, perched as I was in the Croke Park press box, able to enjoy the sheer joy as the former made it to a final at the sixth time of asking in a decade.
Davy Fitzgerald rolling around the floor with John Mullane, Eoin Kelly weeping joyfully with his son Sean and wife Sharon. Very moving. Visceral. In the moment. Over 53,000 people in Croke Park. All of them with the big time feels, nobody holding a camera phone.
I'm struggling to recall when I felt less about any game in the GAA as I did on Saturday. As marvellous and welcome as Cavan have been for coming along and heeling the cart over, their fate against Dublin was never in question. Not even a tiny bit.
In an empty stadium, without the opportunity of their fans being present, they were hammered out the gate in the most business-like fashion by the greatest team of all.
The strength of Dublin, the envy and jealousy directed at them for the excellence of their team, the unfair advantages they also enjoy, the lack of appetite to address it by the GAA; it's all making for a very boring competition.
The appeal is waning. The evidence is already there. The Tyrone v Dublin All-Ireland final of 2018 did not sell out. The warnings come with big red flashing lights. The next move will be interesting, but to do nothing? Not an option.
Bringing the ladies and camogie under one umbrella would solve host of issues
One of the things that people find hard to wrap their heads around when it comes to the huge, sprawling entity that is Gaelic games is the various bodies responsible for the sports.
The Gaelic Athletic Association is not, in fact, responsible for the game of camogie. Or ladies’ Gaelic football. Or Rounders. Or Handball.
Those sports all have their own administrative bodies. I have personal experience with this, being involved in a club that provides both hurling and camogie. Such a club is quite rare, and it’s no wonder as you have to pay two sets of affiliation fees; one to the GAA for hurling, the other to the Camogie Association.
Having the sporting bodies as separate entities brings a constant threat of potential mix-ups. One such mix-up came along at the weekend when the All-Ireland semi-final between Cork and Galway had to be moved from a frozen Parnell Park to Croke Park and the game lost its television slot on TG4.
There are some who have bizarrely blamed the GAA for this series of events, despite the association essentially giving out their facilities for nothing.
These misunderstandings can sometimes lead to embarrassing situations, such as the Ulster Poc Fada held in July 2015 when a hurler won a ski holiday and a trophy, while the camogie winner was presented with just a medal.
It was messy and, when all was said and done, thoughtless.
And here’s the thing — this has not been the fault of the GAA, who through various representatives have tried to bring everything under the one umbrella, only to meet opposition, chiefly from the Ladies’ Gaelic Football Association itself.
The crazy thing is that amalgamation has already been ongoing for years at club level through the ‘One Club Model’ and has been thriving in Ulster, led significantly by Slaughtneil.
Bring everything in and any discrepancies in facilities, expenses and respect all vanishes overnight.
