THE WARRIOR'S CODE - My Granda and Big Daddy

"I wouldn't watch the World Cup if it was on in the back field!" My Granda Logue wasn’t a sports fan, and this was his proud boast any time football was mentioned about his house. A big, uncompromising farmer, it would be a short conversation. The genesis of the Warrior’s Code’s love of sport is hard to pinpoint, but safe to say last weekend’s offering from the sporting gods was almost orgasmic for all us sports nerds out there. The final of the European Football Championships and Wimbledon. Derry’s Lazarus-like come-back to defeat Meath in the GAA. There was the Tour de France in full swing. European Championship athletics. Boxing and MMA for fight fans. And Grand Prix motor racing if you felt like a mid-afternoon nap. And if you have enough money (or own a sneaky Dreambox) you can subscribe to hundreds of television channels and enjoy all these great events to your heart’s content. Sport is now literally 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Indeed, the Code has often over-dosed on a big hit from a sporting weekend, and left spaced out for days afterwards like a heroin-addled junkie. Whether that is a good thing or not is open to debate. Choice is great. But back in the 80s there was little choice. In the pre-satellite days folk had only the option of three channels where I lived – BBC1, BBC2 and ITV. Channel 4 would come later, and you had to get a swanky aerial if you wanted RTE. We didn’t. A paucity of channels went hand in hand with less sport. The only live football match would have been the FA Cup final, with the Match of the Day highlights the must watch programme for football fans. Now Mrs Doherty reared four fine young men and she did a hell of a job. She was, and still is, a great cook and the undefeated Queen of the Egg n Onion in the Limavady Borough area. But me Ma also ran a tight ship. The young Doherty rascals would be in bed sharp every night by nine and we could only listen jealously as our friends played outside to the late hours. Off our wee becks on 10p mixes, sleep was the last thing we wanted. (I remember one night we were forbade to stay up late to watch Rambo, so we sneaked half way down our stairs to ‘listen’ to it.) BBC Sportsnight However, we were allowed up late one night – Wednesday night. Wednesday night meant Sportsnight on TV and it was a family favourite. We lived for Wednesday nights. Under the banner of the ‘weekly review of sport’, this sturdy and much-loved BBC vehicle rounded up the action for the football-deprived midweek pundit and offered a smorgasbord of other sporting delights. The Sportsnight theme tune, that fantastic bossa nova xylophone-riffed theme tune by the Tony Hatch Orchestra, sent shivers sprinting up the spine. ITV boasted it’s own sports show, also on a Wednesday – Mid-Week Sports Special. Midweek Sports Special played the young upstart to Sportsnight’s assured uncle. A similar format - footy highlights (after Alistair Burnett had helpfully told us to “look away now” when doing the results on the ITV News), bit of snooker, boxing, and greyhound racing. It also boasted that majestic orchestral march as signature tune. While specialising in domestic and European football, it was more often than not introduced with lines such as: “Hello and welcome to Mid-Week Sports Special with me Elton Welsby. Tonight we bring you a great night of domestic boxing from Bethnal Green.” Poor enough fare, but we still lapped it up Dave ‘Boy’ Green battering the bap off some other white lad. Sportsnight, of course, acted as a midweek version of Grandstand. Grandstand was the BBC’s flagship sports show which ran all day Saturday between 1958 and 2007. Frank Bough (he of the sex dungeon penchant it later emerged), Des Lynam and Steve Rider were the main presenters throughout the 80s and 90s. We were in safe hands. Grandstand’s great rival was World of Sport, with the late great moustachioed Dickie Davis. World of Sport ran on ITV between 1965 and 1985 in competition with the BBC’s Grandstand. The wrestling 90 Tartnakelly Road in Glack, where my Granny and Granda Logue lived, was always a hive of activity. Matriarch and patriarch to a big Irish catholic family, the house was always a bustling centre of activity. Local farmers and characters would call in as they passed by for a yarn with my Granda or some of my Granny’s home made scones and a drop of tay. A dog – Rover Logue – would also be in attendance when it wasn’t out in the street chasing it’s own tail around in circles. (Glack, I would later find out to my own amazement, is the only place in the world where dogs are also given surnames – Rover Logue, Daisy Duffy and Caesar Cooper were all renowned local canines.) The Stanley cooker would never cool and my only task when I stayed up with them would be the regular run to the peat shed for refills. The turf of course originated in nearby Loughermore mountain - cut, stacked and turned during long back-busting summer days. “Ye for the hill, the year?” would be the opening line for manys a generation of Glack men as they doffed their caps to one another in post-Mass conversation. Not a sports fan then, Granda Logue cared little for television other than black and white Westerns. But he used to love the wrestling. And World of Sport on Saturday afternoons was the home of wrestling. A hard working farmer, Davy Logue also drove a lorry for Barney Mullan, but his hectic working life would shut down at 4pm sharp every Saturday afternoon when he’d take the best seat in the house in front of the TV to enjoy fat men in leotards play-acting in the ring. For children of the 1970s and early 1980s, and a certain farmer from Glack, no Saturday afternoon was complete without watching Big Daddy and the Giant Haystacks wrestle each other to the ground in front of an hysterical and mentally challenged live audience. In simpler times, adult wrestling was considered prime family entertainment. Folk sat transfixed as the 26-stone behemoth Big Daddy (real name Shirley Crabtree) led the crowd with chants of ‘Easy! Easy!’ before demolishing his opponent with his trademark ‘Splash’, which involved felling them with a belly flop in (carefully choreographed) violent bouts. The frightening-looking Giant Haystacks was his arch-rival, and at 48 stone, he was some big unit. Mullet-haired Irish man Dave ‘Fit’ Finlay was also a regular, and in a pre-PC world, Finlay would appear with a native American wife he would call his ‘squaw’. So there my Granda would sit transfixed by the heavy set men in lycra tights, as he struggled to light his pipe and sipped the ‘juice’ at the bottom of a tin of marrowfat peas. (Country folk are easy pleased.) He’d insist the wrestling was ‘real’ and the more he protested the more my uncles would tease him. Even a young Warrior’s Code could see it was all pantomime, but I so wanted to believe just for my Granda’s sake. I didn’t want him to be wrong. Neither Granda Logue nor his wrestling show are with us now. Very much like my wife, he wouldn’t have had much time for Sky Sports and the glut of sport so prevalent in today’s world. But give him an old portable TV, a turf fire and the wrestling, and Davy Logue was your man.