On the life of elite professional sportspeople, Malarchy Clerkin of the Irish Times wrote: ‘By the start of your 20s, you’ve already done the thing that will be in the first line of your obituary when the time comes.’
Never within an ass’s roar of the apex of professional football, Eamon Dunphy (1945) still carved out a respectable career for himself as a self-proclaimed journeyman in the lower reaches of English football. It was only when he swapped the shoddy pitches and dank dressing rooms for a typewriter and media studios that he began to embark on a journey that would see him become Ireland’s most prominent, memorable and quotable popular culture figure of the last 40 years. Dunphy.
It is a status underpinned by a remarkable longevity and an ability to roll with the punches while moving with the times. Mostly.
A close friend, and fellow Dunphyite, once described Dunphy as a chameleon. ‘Football, writing, punditry, books, broadcasting…..he’s evolved when others have fallen by the wayside of moving sentiments and changing eras.’ Dunphy has always been there — everywhere.
Now approaching his 78th year, Dunphy has been a constant presence on our screens, in our ears and on our back pages, never far from the action. He provoked necessary debates; he stoked many unnecessary fires. We’ve seen it all: the laughter and the tears, the on-air apologies for swearing and the effect of the previous night’s beers. He couldn’t help himself, and nor could we.
Swan song
While trudging to a job I hated, I would often see him coming out of Cullens, a small convenience store on Mount Pleasant Avenue, just south of Dublin’s Grand Canal.
Dunphy’s unmistakable voice has been a backing track to my life, his deeply furrowed frown lines and pained expressions a wallpaper to my existence. I only know life with Eamo. And there he would be at about 08:30, invariably togged out in shorts and a sweater with a pile of the morning’s newspapers for company.
He was the bedrock of RTE’s emblematic panel of football pundits, taking a scalpel to the…
