Real men do cry. Ian Madigan is living proof of it. Ireland’s substitute out-half sobbed his heart out last Sunday; and he’s a rugby player. There is no manlier stereotype in the galaxy than the bicep-rippling, ruck-ripping, muck-raking rugby player. Today’s flanker is ancient Greece’s Spartan warrior.
Madigan, whose shoulders are broad enough to seat a pantheon of giants, turned towards his parents after victory against France in the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff, and bawled his baby-blues out. His fists, outlawed in other circumstances as lethal weapons, were scrunched up like a baby’s in the throes of a tantrum. The image captured a nation’s jubilation.
Society operates an unspoken criers’ code of conduct. It dictates that damsels sob in distress while men stay stoically dry-eyed. Unlike women, men cry when they’re really and truly, pinch-me, deliriously happy. Usually, it’s when the referee blows his final whistle. Men have wept watching Katie Taylor boxing for Olympic gold and Packie Bonner’s hands of God in Rome. Some even shed tears at Michael Flatley tap-dancing his way into the Eurovision song contest record books.
Men cried when Ray Houghton put the ball in England’s net. Women cried when Roy Keane was sent home from Saipan. Men cried when Stephen Roche won the Tour de France. Women cried when his fairytale marriage to chic Lydia bit the dust. If we’re to believe the clichés, men cried when Hannibal crossed the Alps. Women cried for the exhausted elephants.
Women cry at funerals. Men cry at weddings. Women cry over weepie movies. Men cry over Herculean feats of endeavour. Women cry with the labours of childbirth. Men cry with the wonder of it. Women cry for other crying women. Men laugh at other men’s tears.
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Rob Kearney, Ireland’s rugby star, said after Sunday’s match that the lads in the squad now call Madigan Gazza, which is more a tease than tribute. Paul Gascoigne wept when he was yellow-carded in a World Cup semi-final that England lost 25 years ago. The media marvelled.
Madigan’s tears were the opposite of Gazza’s. Madigan sobbed because he won; Gazza because he lost. It’s why Gazza’s tears became such huge news. Here was a male of the species crying in public, not because his heart was fit to burst with joy, but because his heart was broken. He shattered the taboo that men — real or not — do not cry with sorrow; at least, not in public.
No doubt, other fearless rugby players cried too after last Sunday’s match, and not just in the French dressing room. Were those not tears of disappointment and frustration that Jonny Sexton rubbed from his face as he left the pitch, injured, in the first half? Sexton’s commitment on the rugby pitch is the stuff of legend. Before Sunday’s match, the French camp accused him of all sorts of diabolique carry-on. Our Jonny, they said, is ambitious, passionate and partial to expletives. And the French wonder why they lost the match. Sacrebleu, if you’ll pardon my French.
It would have been natural for Sexton to weep after plunging from a pumped-up adrenalin high to abrupt incapacitation. So too Paul O’Connell, as he lay on the ground knowing he was unlikely to ever again play in the Ireland shirt. Ditto Peter O’Mahony, whose do-or-die attitude on the field is the epitome of machismo. Yet we have heard nothing about these men’s tears. Au contraire, Kearney rhapsodised about the width of O’Connell’s smile in hospital that night when he learnt of Ireland’s triumph.
Tears ran down the cheeks of John “the Bull” Hayes, a 6’4”, 128kg mountain of manliness, during the playing of the anthems before Ireland faced England in Croke Park in 2007. The image is ingrained in the iconography of Irish sport. Never did a man serve his country so selflessly for, according to popular lore, the Bull’s tears were a weapon in the arsenal that defeated England that day.
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Tears have changed the course of history. Remember Mary Robinson weeping at a press conference in Nairobi after the then president – often described as aloof – visited famine victims in Somalia. Afterwards, she said she felt embarrassed by her tears, but they opened the eyes of the UN and the rest of the world to the human suffering in Somalia.
Remember John Hume’s tears in a graveyard in Greysteel, Co Derry after UDA gunmen shouting “trick or treat” killed eight people in the Rising Sun bar, at Hallowe’en in 1993. Hume’s tears at the funerals became a defining moment in the Northern Ireland peace process.
More recently, Enda Kenny cried in the Dail when he apologised on behalf of the Irish state to the thousands of women who were enslaved in the Magdalene laundries. The catch in the taoiseach’s voice added potency to the apology because what’s rare tends to be precious.
Academic research has found that women cry more than men in cold climates. Well, somebody must have turned up the temperature last Sunday when Madigan cried because, all around Ireland there were men, women and children watching entranced, and weeping too.
Here’s to another warm front of deliriously happy man tears next Sunday.