Writing: A Strange Kind Of Living

#PaperbackWriter #EamonDunphy

It’s almost 1am. Stupid O’Clock from a writing perspective. Stupid O’Clock from most perspectives, let’s face it. I’m towelled off after a late night run and I’m in front of my laptop. I felt the urge to go running at an anti-social hour and now the same urge to write has struck me. I really ought to be asleep but my mind is buzzing.

There’s a stack of books on the corner of my desk, along with my diary and reporter’s notebook. In the desk drawer sits a stack of cables for my various devices, along with pens and post-its. Tools of the trade one and all.

The day job, as it has been for the previous 22 years, remains firmly rooted in regional journalism, based in the South East of Ireland where I was born and raised. I contribute as a stringer to several national titles and websites and I’ve presented three different radio shows at home in Waterford over the past 16 years. I might present something again down the line if someone deems me worthy of a shot. If that occurs, fantastic and I’ll give it my all. But here I am, still firmly wed to the constant of my professional lifetime. And I love it.

Writing is challenging. Writing is engaging. Writing is fun. And if someone else takes the time to read something I’ve penned, that’s an enormously gratifying feeling. Should someone be moved to then contact me about a piece I’ve filed or posted, that remains an incredible bonus. And it isn’t all smoke blowing – nor should it be. It’s good to be challenged. It’s essential. It staves off complacency.

Before heading upstairs, turning on my laptop and listening to Simon Kuper talk about ‘Football Against The Enemy’, an astounding work he assembled on a shoestring in his early 20s, I grab a book I’ve owned for over 30 years.

In my neat Fifth Class primary school handwriting, upon the book’s opening blank page, I have scripted: ‘Bought by Dermot Keyes on 23/12/91.’ I was six months shy of my 13th birthday at the time.

With my own pocket money, I had ventured into Waterford’s Book Centre to buy Eamon Dunphy’s ‘A Strange Kind of Glory: Sir Matt Busby & Manchester United.’ The works of Roald Dahl aside, it was the first book I re-read. In ‘grown-up’ book terms, it was my entry point into a wider literary universe. The grumpy fella on television, regularly lampooned by Dermot Morgan on radio and Zig & Zag on TV, was capable of writing like this? I couldn’t really take it in.

Dunphy’s words mesmerised me the way Duncan Edwards and George Best had charmed football fans the length and breadth of Britain and further afield.

I relished my English, History and Geography lessons. I’d collected every single sticker for World Cup ’90 and I’d made scrapbooks cataloguing the heroics of Italia ’90, even including full pieces from local and national newspapers.

I loved kicking a ball around at home with my brothers and was in my fifth season as a juvenile player in the colours of Portlaw United AFC. Even at that early stage, I reckoned I was better with a pen and paper by then than I’d ever be while standing over a dead ball from 20 yards.

I’d subsequently play with and against some outstanding footballers, some of whom went all the way to the top of their profession while others, arguably more naturally talented than those future pros, lacked the focus to fully capitalise on their unquestionable gifts.

Dunphy had played the game across the water and made a living from it, primarily with Millwall. With ‘Only A Game’, he had brilliantly written about the realities of the English game in a way no player before or since has come close to.

And nobody has fleshed out Matt Busby in print as brilliantly as Dunphy did in what remains the best book written about Manchester United.

Just drink in this excerpt towards the book’s conclusion, when writing of both Busby and his long-time assistant, the great Jimmy Murphy, who kept the United flag flying in the wake of the 1958 Munich Air Disaster.

He was a great football man. Of the many heroes of these pages, Jimmy is, perhaps, the truest reflection of the game as treasured in our memories. A few years before he died Jimmy was rushed to hospital. Something had burst, his son can’t exactly remember what. ‘Bobby Charlton and Freddie Pye came to see him.’ Pye, another Manchester lad, was chairman of City. ‘My father was all wired up, at death’s door, and he’s telling Freddie whether or not to sign Paul Stewart. Lots of football people came to see him. Sir Matt never did. It was only after he died, at the funeral, I was speaking to Les Olive and Les said that Sir Matt had just been to see Joe Mercer in hospital in Rhyl. I thought, he went fifty miles to see Joe and he wouldn’t come five miles to see my dad.’ Young Jim thought it strange. A hard game.

Dunphy continues: Sir Matt Busby CBE. Freeman of Manchester, still goes to the ground every day. The hardest man in this hard game, the professional who survived the longest. He is a lovely man. The world has honoured him, but professional football never could find a way to honour its greatest man. Matt Busby was a romantic. He loved the game, more than people or possessions. Through his love he rendered professional football in England more beautiful than any other man.

Yes, Frank O’Farrell was right, Manchester United was Matt’s fantasy world. His greatest achievement was to create the illusion of beauty in a craft wretchedly deformed from the beginning. As it decays now, the plaything of spivs and merchants, the glorious memories of Matt Busby’s United serve to soothe the pain. His has been a strange kind of life, a strange kind of glory.

Six weeks into work on my second book, re-reading that passage makes me wonder if I can conjure up something approaching the power of Dunphy’s prose – be it over the next seven months or for the remainder of my writing life for that matter.

It’s a project which will dominate my non-newspapering hours over the year ahead and the early signs, from a content perspective, feel pretty promising to me. It’s a story not yet told – at least not in an 80,000-word format – and I want to do the subject and the great team he was part of as much justice as my words and wit can muster.

The 12-year-old who bought Dunphy’s greatest work would scarcely have believed that he’d be in the early stages of his second book three decades later. But here I am, writing at Stupid O’Clock about a work which may take in the many Stupid O’Clocks to follow. It’s now almost 2am. Time to turn in. What a strange kind of living.