Charles Pierce goes to the land of his grandmother to
experience an event which her stories had made so real that it was like he'd been there numerous times before he'd ever gone. It is a wonderful story of farm life, traditional Irish life, family lines and life in general, with horse races, booze and gambling thrown in:
Up and down the round, green-quilted hillsides near Listowel in north Kerry in Ireland, the seven sisters of the Lynch family once tended their sheep. They worked in the summer sun and in the soft rain of the spring and the fall, and in the harder, snow-mixed sleet of midwinter. And every autumn, right around when the harvest came in, they would drive their sheep up the hillsides and down, and straight into Listowel, where their flock would join cows and goats and chickens and ducks, and the sheep of a hundred other families, all milling around with each other and filling the town square with an amazing cacophony of lowing, bleating, squawking, and quacking that nearly, but not quite, drowned out the increasingly lubricated haggling of the farmers and craftsmen and merchants who had come to sell enough of what they'd raised and grown and manufactured to get them through the hard winter to come, with a little left over to spend in the pubs on William Street, or to bet on the horses out at the track tucked into the bend of the river. The sisters never went to the races. Only the men went to the races. The sisters stayed in town and listened to the fiddlers and the people who played the pipes, and they danced with each other after the day's business was done.
Listowel was a farm town, a market town. It was a little less polished than Tralee to the west and the south, or Limerick to the north and east. It was louder. It was rougher. One of the Lynch sisters, Mary Ellen, would talk in her later years of a rally in support of Charles Stewart Parnell at the time of the split in the Irish Party over Parnell's affair with Kitty O'Shea. The rally turned into an all-out brawl, the clack of hurleys on skulls ringing louder than the oratory. Called "faction fights," these were come-all-ye bloodlettings, exhibitions of what the Irish called the bataireacht, a form of stick-fighting that rose to an art. These would erupt at weddings or at funerals, or at virtually any public occasion at which a longstanding grievance might detonate at the smallest provocation.
Ok, harvest fair. Sounds about like the origins of county fairs. Discussing with his guide how he felt like he knew the place and was a part of it because of his grandmother's stories, he gives a good insight into the importance of narrative, in this case, sports as narrative, in our lives:
I am of this place, because my grandmother was of this place, and she told me about it, and so it became part of what I am...
"When you come right down to it," Pat told me, "running a racetrack is like running a farm. That's why the races here have survived. It was the last thing the farmers had for the year. Once the races ended, there was only the long, cold winter."
What are sports, anyway, at their best, but stories played out in real time? Each of them has a distant beginning, a middle, and an end, all three connected by the slender, powerful tendrils of memories recited. They are part of the collective memory of the tribe. They are how we explain ourselves to each other, down through the generations. Once upon a time, there were five sisters on the hills around Listowel, and one of them had a son, who gave her a grandson. From her, I had imagined hearing the muffled power of the hooves pounding into the turf. I had imagined the soft-running river. I never had been to the Listowel Races, but I had been there all my life.
The whole story is wonderful, and I recommend it to anyone with an interest in Ireland or horse racing, or having fun in general. On this day of the Bengals-Browns game, his description of his grandmother's stories and the recognition of sports as narrative, I think his story explains every western Ohio Browns fan (and there's a lot of them, way too many, actually) I have ever met. The reason that is is because they are only Browns fans because their fathers, and most likely, their grandfathers were. Their grandfathers told the stories about Paul Brown and Otto Graham, Lou Groza and Marion Motley. They were told the glorious tales of the Browns when the Browns won the NFL Championship in their first year in the NFL, after winning four AAFC titles. Their fathers probably remember the last championship in 1964, with Jim Brown running over opponents. I understand how they became Browns fans, I just don't understand why they remained Browns fans after Art Modell packed up the Browns and moved to Baltimore. I would have expected them to remain fans of the Ravens (ok, probably not) or to have become fans of some other team. Why would folks in Western Ohio choose to wait 3 years to follow an expansion team almost 3 hours from where they live? That I don't understand.
