Not for Brody

by W. B. READY

EVERY season Mr. Brody would give the team a set of sweaters, and whenever the foot balls began to give at the seams, or whenever Thick Dwyer ran into a goal post and cracked it, Brother John would put his hat on and go calling on Mr. Brody. Brother John possessed the great dignity that is necessary for really successful begging. He used to pocket the check gravely, almost before poor Brody had finished signing it, and he used to ease himself out of Brody’s raw new house before the man had a chance to get magnanimous, or garrulous about the team’s chances of winning the provincial championship. As Brother John would hurry back to the College, with his check, he used to grimace over the way Brody and his like used to enthuse over his team. He knew that they were all false faces, and that they were no more capable of understanding the philosophy of football than they were of practicing the doctrines of that Church to which they paid lip service and grants-in-aid, the grants being in the nature of insurance.

Brother John had the Supporters’ Club well and truly weighed up in Ins mind. He knew just what they were good for, but you’d never have known it, to watch him handling them. He had such a contempt for them that sometimes he nearly overplayed his hand, like the time that he persuaded them to build us a new dressing room. He gave them to believe that the new dressing room would contain a concrete memorial of their munificence, with their names on it. Of course, it never did, and they were too intimidated by the quiet gray man ever to mention it, and he pretended that he had just forgotten about t. “After all, gentlemen,” he used to say to them, “what does it matter?” And all the businessmen would squirm and wriggle and work up a hearty dead smile and repeat, “Of course, Brother, of course, what does it matter?" But all the time Brother John knew, and they knew, that they would never have scrambled to subscribe if they had known that it was to be built towards the greater glory of God, and not as an advertisement for Brody’s brewery, and Driscoll’s dairies, and Ryan’s funeral parlors.

Rugby football, the way Brother John taught it, was played for the greater glory of the Godhead. He never used to tear off strips about good clean Catholic lads, and we never used to say prayers before a game, or anything like that; what Brother John taught us was far deeper than any stunt to help us to win the game. We weren’t brought up to regard the issue of the game as being very important. Somehow he imparted to us a mystique of Rugby football, and it will stay with us all our lives. It has affected the way we teach history, or practice medicine, or fly aeroplanes, and it has had a strong bearing on the way we bring up our families.

We are all getting on in years now, and Brother John just taught the one team of us. There are only a few of us left after the war. We are the scattered disciples of a great teacher. We were his only team, and he had pondered and prayed for years before he started on us. That was why he loathed the gaminess of Brody and his clan. He wouldn’t let anybody or anything come near us that would spoil his life’s work. The College has always had a good team. Some of the teams are far more famous than we ever were. There was the team that Brian Welsh captained. Eleven of them went on to play for Ireland, and Brian has become a legend because of his reverse passing, but all of those werejust football teams. We were more like a religious order, dressed in jerseys of green and gold, and in stockings hooped in green and silver.

There was a preparatory school attached to the College, and that was where we first met Brother John, and became his novices. He was viceprincipal of the College even then. That was the highest that ho ever got, because of us. It was just the position that he wanted, because it gave him all the time he needed, enough authority, and none of the social distractions that were so eagorh performed by the beaky-nosed climber, Brother Principal.

We were all about nine or ten years old, changing into our football togs, shivering, under the dripping trees, on the edge of the wood that surrounded the Castle Ground. We were all frightened little new hoys. We didn’t know one another, it was only our second day in school. Wo nudged one another and whispered, “Lookout! Here comes Brother John, as he walked over to us slow ly. We weren’t doing anything, but we always thought we were in those bewildering first days.

He stood looking at us. We were Form IA, about twenty-five of us. “Good afternoon, boys,”said Brother John in his soft Kerry voice.

“Good afternoon, Brother,” we chirped hack.

He looked around and called over a squat, bowlegged little man, who was hanging around. “Well, Michael,” said Brolher John, “this is it.”

Mick Yewlett looked at us humorously, and we all looked back at him. There was no mistaking what Mick had been. He was an old ball player, and even in his middle age, and in his shabby clothes, he still looked like a ball player. Brother John had sent for him. lie had been coaching a professional team somewhere in the North of England, but he came at once when Brother John called. He had been fixed up with a job in Brody’s brewery, and he was to be Brother John’s assistant.

It turned out, I never knew until years later, that Mick and Brother John had played for Ireland together as halfbacks. They both had loved the game, and both of them regarded it more as a science, as a way of life, than as just a ball game. Lots of people get rather inchoate ideas like that: the Babe Ruth saga is an example; but Brother John had sweated over it for thirty years. He wasn’t a crank; he knew that if a teacher can get across an appreciation of anything fine, like music for instance, the rest will tend to fall into shape. Well, Brother John’s music was football, and the thud of a sweetly placed punt ahead, well thought out and coolly executed, made a good sound to him; it wasn’t an odd sound, but a part of a pattern of sounds.

The football coach of the College didn’t mind at all when Brother John took us over. He was rather relieved, because he never got interested in the boys until they got sizable enough for competition Rugb\ and we were years away from that. So Brother John and Mick had us two afternoons a week and every Saturday morning for the next five years before anybody ever started noticing us. We used to play on a pilch in the corner of the Castle Ground, far away from everybody, and even if they did come and watch they went away again.

Brolher John looked less like a coach than like a harmless old parson who was out for the fresh air. Some of the Brothers used to love to dress up all athletic, to get away from their drab habit, I suppose. Brother Gabriel, the official Sports Master, used to wear white flannel slacks and a white sweater with a whist lean a lanyard around his neck. He used to be as hearty as hell. We never had anything like that, nor did we gel all the setting-up exercises that the rest did. We just played a game of Rugby football three times a week. Brother John and Mick would watch us from the sidelines. They’d never interrupt. They even taught some of the boys who lacked the eye to officiate as referees.

Only at half-time would the two of them walk onto the field, and then only Brother John would do the talking, while Mick echoed him. He showed us how it was better to run upheld in the hope of getting a cross kick than to stand watching the wing make a run for it. He taught us that a ball heeled back cleanly from a loose maul is far more valuable to the backs than three balls from set serums, and he taught us to tackle low. Brother John had an abhorrence for the high grab that looked so spectacular, and so often missed. Most of all he taught us to play ball for our own amusement and enlightenment, a process that people could watch if they felt inclined, but in which they should have no participation whatsoever. He told us that the crowd was a cruel half-witted thing that drove ball players crazy if they courted it. As he talked maybe the soft Irish rain was falling, and we sucking our lemons.

2

IN the game as it is played over there there are no substitutes allowed. The fifteen men who start the game must play the whole ninety minutes, and if anybody is knocked out the play must go on without him. So a football team was rarely more than twenty-odd players, who would play together for the whole season. Brother John just had twenty of us, and he taught some of us to play in two positions, so that we could double up if necessary. We were all about, fourteen years old when people started noticing us. We played together, never with the rest of the College, and it soon became evident that we would be the College team in a couple of years. That was when Brody, and Ryan, and the rest of the gombeen men started noticing us, coming down to watch us play, and to be watched by Brother John.

We never found out where Brother John came from. He was Irish for sure, like the rest of the Brothers, but he was different from them. Any of the others could have been mistaken for raw Irish curates, but Brother John, tall and gray, with a hooked nose and a pompadour, looked more like a Spanish cardinal than like a bogtrotter. He could put on a terrible courtesy that was more discouraging than a growling dog, and with it he kept Brody and his company away from us. Brother John loathed the idea of their cashing in on our endeavors, and he knew that the only reason that Ryan wanted a share in our football was so that he could bring it up when he was touting for a funeral service, in order to clinch the deal, and he know that Brody would sell more beer if he could let it be known that he was a generous supporter of the College team. Still he kept us from being worried by them and got the money out of them to make us the best-equipped junior side in the four countries.

He wanted to see how we would shape up against Presentation College, and he arranged for us to play there on a Sunday. That way, by traveling on a Friday, we would be able to see Ireland play New Zealand in Dublin. It entailed a round trip of about four hundred miles, and hotel accommodation for two nights. He got that money out of the Supporters’ Club, and was so adroit about it that we had come back before they realized that none of them had been wilh us on the trip. Ryan thought Brody was along with us, who thought Driscoll was along with us, and so on. There was no percentage in it for the gombeens at all.

But the pay-off was when we went to London, to play the Vincentian College there. By that time Brother John was so sure of us that he let the whole ruck of them come along. They couldn’t do us any harm now. It was our last year in College anyway, and since we had played Abertaff earlier in the season we were more or less out of his schooling.

That London trip was an entertainment. For most of us it was our first trip to a big city, because Dublin is no big city, thank God. We must have looked like a bunch of Alices in Wonderland as we went down the escalators to the Cnderground Bailway, and we kept nudging one another and pointing with our heads at the Cockney antics. At that time the London hotels had a hate on against football teams, they had been doing so much damage; so Con had booked us in at the Grand Palace, a gilt, and marble caravanserai, as a choral society. The desk clerk gave us leery looks when we booked in, straight off the boat train from Liverpool, about midday on a Saturday. Our supporters had been wetting their whistle all the way across, and they were acting like stage Irishmen, like monkeys, to make the English laugh at them.

That afternoon we played the Vincentian team, and lost by three points. Then the rest of the day was ours. Barny and I walked for hours, through Fleet Street, down the river, past Westminster, all floodlit. I remember two prostitutes approached us, and we both murmured politely, “No, thank you, Ma’am.” I have often wondered what those two poor girls must have thought.

When we got back to the hotel we went into the lounge and looked at life. It was a greal hang-out for ladies of easy virtue, a grade better than the Fleet Street commandos, and to watch their maneuvering amazed us. They left us alone. It was just as well for them that they did. I doubt if one of us had the equivalent of two dollars in his possession, but Codger Hart, who thought he had a vocation, was so tempted by them that he went to bed, locked the door, and threw the key out of the window. I suppose it was the sort of thing that St. Anthony would have done, but it meant that Jack Kennedy, his roommate, couldn’t get into the room, and he had to bunk up with me, in a single bed. Codger’s vocation didn’t last either, He’s married now, and he’s got so many children that they say he’s scared even of opening the door. They call him Codger the Crowd.

All the time, Brody and his company were lauding us in their liquor, and telling strangers about us, and our game with Abertaff. It didn’t faze us a bit. Thanks to Brother John, we could place those good companions. Brother John had spent the night at a Brothers’ House in Richmond, but became in to an early Mass, and he had breakfast with us. I’ll never forget his look of delight as Tommy Shannon and Joe Boyle came into the rococo breakfast room and gazed around with awe at all the frescoes and the bogus pillars. A waiter shimmied up to the two of them gawking, and led them to a table. “Thank you, sir,” said Joe. “Can we get a breakfast here?

With that the waiter offered them a bill of fare about as big as a card table, and Joe studied il thoughtfully while Tommy watched him apprehensively. After cogitation Joe played safe, and ordered coffee and toast for the pair of them. When they were served they looked around and saw the rest of us eating ham and eggs, so they had that, and then a further look around impelled them to get their money’s worth, so they finished up with fish and grapefruit.

It was a joy to watch, even to myself, who was only one jump ahead of them. You can imagine how Brother John must have felt. They weren I just gauche, they were innocent. We all were. We were leaving school with a yardstick in our hands, and although Brother John never got around to telling us how to order breakfast in a flashy nighthalt, he had also made sure that we would never fall for the tinsel or the gilt, or become like Brody.