One of the ways I have taken my bearings as I drift inexorably into the open waters of midlife has been to rediscover certain childhood pleasures that I abandoned – more or less entirely, more or less inexplicably – in early adulthood. For the most part, this has been a result of parenthood, and of finding through my children’s enthusiasms a path, narrow and largely overgrown though it might be, back to the enthusiasms of my own childhood. The most straightforwardly satisfying of these has been sport.

Like almost every Irish person of roughly my age, the memory of my own childhood is in some sense consubstantial (and conterminous) with the Jack Charlton era, and with Italia ’90 in particular – with its torrential joy and fervour, its indelible cultural ephemera. And although my interest in GAA was a passing one at best, growing up in Kilkenny during the 1980s and ’90s I could hardly have avoided getting swept up in the communal zeal for hurling dominance.

Mostly, though, my memories are of long summer afternoons watching Wimbledon, and in particular my personal stake in the success of Andre Agassi, whose minor rebellions – soft-rock power-ballad coiffure; refusal to adhere to the competition’s fusty regulations as to sporting attire – now seem quaint and faintly risible. But in the early 1990s they were, for a middle-class tween who would himself go on to rock the establishment to its foundations every Saturday in the pages of The Irish Times, the very stuff of vital and radical self-determination. It seems remarkable to me now how much of my early life I spent watching sport on television, how deep and emotionally charged the investment in what I was watching.

It seems remarkable, I suppose, in part because of how quickly and absolutely I relinquished that love of sport in my later teens,........

© The Irish Times