When it comes to talk it’s all in the way you tell ‘em

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

There’s a story often told from some time back of a night that Castleblaney’s man mountain Big Tom McBride and his band turned up for a dance at a venue in New York – only to find the room packed to the rafters with disorientated drug addicts.

The problem, of course, lay with the posters advertising this event as starring a band called Big Tom and the Mainliners – leading the addled addicts to believe that this was a giant needle fest in the heart of the Big Apple.

Four Roads to Glenamaddy is all good well but these guys were hoping for a higher destination with a much shorter, if more hazardous, journey to get there.

Country music was the backdrop to another name game around that same time, when the player they called the Black Flash, Laurie Cunningham, was setting the old English First Division alight.

Back in 1977, he left his first club Leyton Orient for the city lights of West Bromwich Albion, then managed by one half of Ireland’s latest dancing sensations, Johnny Giles.

This was long before Johnny sold his soul for thirty pieces of chocolate; back then he was gainfully deployed trying to put together the footballing equivalent of the Ford plant in Daghenham by surrounding himself with a collection of old Irish pros at the club.

Galway’s old manager Paddy Mulligan was among them as were Mick Martin and the man who still holds the record for Irish international away trips, Ray Treacy – most of the trips, it has to be said, were undertaken as a travel agent.

But Ray was never slow with a word in any company and when Gilesy introduced their new superstar left winger to the rest of the players, Ray told him he was a great admirer of his talent.

“I have all your albums at home,” he told the bemused Black Flash, before revealing that his favourite recording of all had to be the anthemic ballad, Lovely Leitrim.

Ray was talking of Larry Cunningham, of course, the man from North Longford whose gravelly tones will also always be associated with those Forty Shades of Green.

But for the rest of his WBA career, Laurie was known as Lovely Leitrim by a squad where only the Irish lads had a clue what the joke was.

It’s not known if he carried his nickname with him to Real Madrid or any of his other eight subsequent clubs before he was killed, at the tender age of 33, in a car crash in Spain outside his adopted home in Madrid.

The point of all this is simple – a name in one part of the world can have an entirely different connotation in another. And conversely a pun, a phrase or an acronym in one place may mean absolutely nothing – or something highly offensive – somewhere else.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.