‘SENT.’ Oh, the satisfaction I felt on Saturday last when that four letter word flashed up on the bottom left-hand corner of my laptop screen. This must be what it feels like to find the cup from 150 yards. You know it’s happened; you’re thrilled that it’s happened yet you still can’t quite believe it at the same time.
The first draft of the second book I’ve written, all 70,237 words of it, is now with my editor. Between now and Sunday week, I’ll be re-reading the document that’s become one of my most frequently seen neighbours over these past nine months, to spot any typos/errors/glitches I’ve inevitably made. It’s almost there. The finish line is in sight, but I’m not quite there yet.
The promotion of the book is something I’ll dive headfirst into when the time comes but we’re not quite there yet. The heavy lifting, at least on my behalf, is largely done but there’s still a few hurdles to negotiate yet. The throat is clear, the voice is warmed up but the conductor is still assembling the orchestra. You get the picture.
As much as I enjoyed the first book I was fortunate enough to work on, helping Enda O’Doherty to tell his life story, my second spin on such a carousel has exceeded that initial venture.
And while Book II is another life story, my proximity to Waterford hurling for the past 23 years of sportswriting has made these past nine months the most enjoyable of my life in writing.
It’s a world I’ve seen from the second best seat in the house, surrounded by colleagues who have, more often than not, drawn from a greater level of knowledge and understanding of the game than I have. It’s a role that I am happily and proudly associated with and while changing employers three years ago means I’m not in the press box quite as often as I once was, it’s still a space I suspect I’ll frequent for a good many years yet, I hope.
The book I’ve written is, without any doubt, one worth assembling. It’s my good fortune that I’m the person who was charged with writing it. My interviewee and those I’ve also been introduced to because of this particular job, have entertained and engaged me throughout.
Even now, this deep into the project, I’m still considering my luck that I’ve had the opportunity to work on something like this. While the cursor is blinking in front of me and the dogs are barking at the postman doing his rounds, I still have moments when I can’t believe I’ve got to work on this.
In a job like mine, you pick up nuggets of information along the way, some of which you’ll only use once and once only. Yet there are those diamonds which can be retrieved from the rough, repolished and repurposed as part of a wider narrative, spanning a sportsperson’s life both within and beyond a top level career.
Since I opened a new document on my machine while sat at my mother’s dining room table during the Christmas holidays, the same house where I wrote many a sports report for a readership of one over 30 years ago, I’ve found myself returning to older stories.
The voices of many who are no longer with us, players made famous by their deeds on the hurling fields of Ireland or from the words they filed from the press box, have come back into my life. And I’ve had an absolute ball.
Spanning eight different decades and charting success at all grades of the game, piecing this story together has never felt like a challenge. From start to impending finish, it has been an absorbing experience. Might this be as good as it gets? Well, I’d like to think Books III, IV and V may yet follow so let’s not jump the gun quiet yet.
There’s a quote of Ernest Hemingway’s I’ve returned to more than once in the 14 years since I stood on the lip of his home outside Havana, which looked then as if he and Mary (his fourth wife) had just nipped out of for a quick jaunt into the heaving city below them.
Speaking to George Plimpton in the Paris Review in the Spring of 1958, Hemingway said:
“I’ve seen the marlin mate and know about that. So I leave that out. I’ve seen a school (or pod) of more than fifty sperm whales in the same stretch of water and once harpooned one nearly sixty feet in length and lost him. So I left that out. All the stories I know from the fishing village I leave out. But the knowledge is what makes the underwater part of the iceberg.”
At a very early stage of Book II, I made a decision to go a slightly different way in the telling of an event central to my interviewee’s career. It was my attempt to record a team’s place in history in a slightly different way. I hope it pays off.
While the story I’m telling is indeed someone else’s, there’s 23 years of my writing life woven in there too. It had to be. Here’s hoping it flies…
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