The Sunday service makes believers of us all

TIPPING POINT: It’s a sign of summer to get that familiar feeling back, the shared experience of a season of championship Sundays stretching out in front of us, writes MALACHY CLERKIN

YOU LIKELY don’t know who Eric Torpy is. Really and truly, you have no cause to so don’t feel bad about it. He’s currently bedding down for year six of a 33-year jail sentence in the Davis Correctional Facility in Holdenville, Oklahoma. Pulled an armed robbery in 2004, during which he fired off a few rounds that whizzed just past a few heads and bought himself three charges and 30 years in the pokey.

Except when the judge handed down the sentence to the then 27-year-old, Torpy had a request to make. If he was going to get 30 years anyway, could the judge possibly see his way clear to giving him 33 instead? That’s the number Larry Bird wore, see. And since Torpy is a Celtics fans with a “3” tattooed on both elbows and a green shamrock tattoo beside his right eye, he figured 33 years would be a fitting tribute to his favourite player. The judge was happy to oblige.

Torpy was interviewed in the Boston Globe last week, not feeling especially clever about life. “I’m pretty sure Larry Bird thinks I’m an idiot,” he said, not at all unreasonably. “I mean, truthfully, most people do. My own family does, so I’m pretty sure he does too. I kind of wish that I had 30 to do instead of 33. Recently, I’ve wisened up.”

Oh, Eric. Old too soon and smart too late, as Mike Tyson would say. Further proof that sport truly is the broadest church, with room for every wit and halfwit around. In a world where you need a licence to walk a dog or catch a fish or turn the key in a car, sport just exists. An ever-chugging train that we can all get on or off at any time. The Celtics were smoked in the play-offs last week by Miami and although they inhabit different worlds entirely, Larry Bird and Eric Torpy would have felt more or less the same mixture of anger and sadness at the result.

We share sport amongst ourselves, just by reflex. Last night was the first Sunday Game of the summer and even though there could scarcely have been a less enticing championship opener than Donegal v Antrim, Des and the boys still wrung nearly an hour and a half out of the first show. It was the now-traditional invited audience giving their now-traditional thoughts and theories on the year to come.

We eat the first show of the year up each time not because folk give a solitary one about the preliminary round of the Ulster championship but because it feels right to huddle in corners at this time of year, to play games of verbal conkers back and forth and get the summer up and running.

And because it feels good to get the routine back. The games will thread their way through our weeks and weekends from here on out. We’ll share them like we share the weather, like we share Jedward.

Sunday night for the next 18 weeks will involve The Sunday Game in some shape or form. We’ll be on a couch or in a pub or at the very worst on the receiving end of a flurry of texts if we’re taking the night off from it. Did u c wat Anthony Toolkit said? Stupid predictive text.

A friend of mine is a Rangers fan. He has enjoyed a fine couple of weeks, for along with glorying in yesterday’s Scottish title success, he is also a Manchester United fan and a Linfield fan. He grew up on the Shankill Road in Belfast, where the only game in town was soccer and where Linfield and Rangers came as part of the package. If you were given a choice, it was between United and Liverpool. He chose the former and the weekend just gone has only made him happier in that choice.

He moved to Dublin in his early 20s and married a Dublin girl. We were flatmates for a few years and one of the few arguments we ever had happened on the day of the 2001 All-Ireland football final.

As I settled into the chair for the game, he wondered aloud where the football was, by which he meant Tottenham v Southampton or some variant on it.

An entreaty to the effect that this was one of the great days in Irish sport was met with a firm, “I’m not paying Sky Sports every month to watch that shite!”

On Sunday, he and his seven-year-old boy will head to Portlaoise bedecked in Kildare jerseys. What happened? Life happened. Irish life happened. Their son was born and we moved out of flatland, with them eventually settling in Kildare.

The kid has grown up an incorrigible sports nut and his dad has had no choice but to try to keep pace. The more he got into it, the deeper it stuck its claws in.

A couple of summers ago, he brought a few cousins to a qualifier against Wicklow in Portlaoise. They couldn’t understand how they were allowed to stand beside the Wicklow fans, literally right beside them all through the game. That didn’t happen at Windsor Park.

He’s one of those supporters now – a league man, a championship man, hell even an O’Byrne Cup man. He still says that Kildare were robbed blind against Down in last year’s semi-final, but tells a lovely story of how a Down fan sitting in front of them comforted his heartbroken son after the final whistle, whispering in his ear that she’d never heard anyone support their county better through a match.

Sometimes we can take this thing of ours for granted. We give out about the fact that only five or six teams have a shot at winning it each year, as if that’s not the case for pretty much every sports competition on earth from the World Cup to the SuperBowl.

We decry the style of football or the standard of referees, scream bloody murder at the sight of a melee, spit out the phrase “blanket defence” as though it was a disease worse than leprosy.

But in the end, that’s all part of it. The rows, the rage, the rapture. A shared experience between friends and foes, between the famous and the felons, between fathers and sons and everyone else.

It’s great to have it back.