Dub Sub Confidential
by John Leonard
Penguin Ireland
£18.99 pp240
JOHN WHO? Quite. The answer to the obvious question is that John Leonard was substitute goalkeeper on the Dublin football team for a couple of seasons in the mid-Noughties. Fortunately, there’s a lot more to it than that. An alternative and more accurate subtitle for this memoir would be “Child abuse, drink, drugs, sex, and the travails of being Stephen Cluxton’s understudy”. Interested now?
The big reveal occurs early on. As an altar boy in north Dublin, Leonard was abused by the paedophile priest Ivan Payne. Being too young to know better, he didn’t realise that what had happened to him was horribly wrong. Enlightenment slowly dawned in his teenage years — “my first sexual experience was the parish priest rubbing my little boy penis”.
Instead of seeking counselling, Leonard took refuge in drink and drugs, but it’s to his credit that he doesn’t spend the remaining three-quarters of the book bemoaning his fate. Not long afterwards, in fact, he reveals that his father’s father had been an alcoholic. He reckons “it was in the family, this addictive gene”. Yet the book is far from a cautionary tale. Still less is it misery lit. Leonard is having way too much fun for that, bouncing around Dublin, ingesting every illicit substance he can get his hands on, drinking a lot, and somehow holding down various jobs all the while. He also holds down the blue No 16 jersey.
Leonard is good on the life — if hardly the lifestyle — of an intercounty panellist and the frequent monotony of training. Students of Gaelic football will be intrigued by his account of the rivalry with Cluxton, arguably the most important player of modern times since he has revolutionised the art of goalkeeping. Leonard “coulda been a contender” for the Dublin team had he been up against anyone else, he reckons. In the end he was restricted to the subs bench due to Cluxton’s single-mindedness and dedication to duty. For example Leonard decided to make a habit of arriving early for training; Cluxton kept upping the ante and arriving earlier still.
Advertisement
Leonard believes he was the better shot-stopper, but shot-stopping is less important in Gaelic football than in soccer. They were equally good under the high ball and at commanding their area. But Cluxton, Leonard acknowledges, had the advantage when it came to distribution, which is now what matters most for a goalkeeper in Gaelic football. “His kicking was incredibly accurate. He was robotic in his technique and relentless in the repetitive practising of his methodology,” Leonard writes. The memoirist also explains that Cluxton was preternaturally calm under pressure because he rehearsed everything so often. “An exemplary range of techniques was stored in his muscle memory.”
For a man whose literary heroes include Hunter S Thompson, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, Leonard’s writing is refreshingly clear and straightforward. Occasionally he tries too hard (“The deep, dark sky lorded ominously above, as the scream of a jet ripped ferociously through the sky”), but only occasionally. His mini-thesis for English finals in UCD was on the use of allegory and synecdoche in the poetry of Robert Frost, for which he received a first. Leonard claims he was stoned while writing it.
Admittedly his tale becomes wearing after a while: more drink, more drugs, more gambling, more sex. Only the locations vary: Dublin, Tangier, Bangkok, India. With 25 pages to go he’s still getting drunk and fighting with a friend, this time in Sydney. Yawnsville. Leonard is not quite as intriguing as he thinks. Then again, what young man is?
The book ends happily but not mawkishly. One is left wondering what a man with Leonard’s boundless lust for life and abundant reserves of nervous energy will do with himself over the coming years; something slightly more constructive and fruitful than he managed in his twenties, hopefully. A second volume of memoirs to coincide with his 40th birthday could make for genuinely uplifting reading.
Advertisement
Tap to buy for £12.59, inc p&p, from The ST Bookshop http://timesbookshop.tbpcontrol.co.uk/tbp.direct/PurchaseProduct/OrderProduct/CustomerSelectProduct/FullProductDetail.aspx?productCode=9781784290184