I imagine, in an alternate world, David Clifford is made Superman instead of David Corenswet. The time comes to film a scene in which Superman flies. The crew approaches Clifford with wires and rigging. The Kerry footballer looks at them with confusion. “What are those for?”, he says, before proceeding to take off without any assistance, much to the bemusement of everyone on set. If the Superman comparison has been done to death with Clifford, it may be because it speaks not only to the superhuman nature of his feats on the pitch, but also to the Clark Kent quality he has off it. Despite recently receiving his third PWC, to match his two All-Ireland titles, the abiding image of Clifford around the country seems to still find space for mentions of what a sound man he is. As Cormac O’Malley pointed out in the afterglow of Kerry’s victory over Donegal, the joy he takes in his teammates’ scores is evident. In the age of the modern superstar in football, we’ve seen the greats held up as something akin to the 21st century demigod: Cristiano Ronaldo as the pristine Adonis that scores goals at will and Lionel Messi as the diminutive genius warranting comparisons to everything from an artist to an alien. Conversely, Clifford has his own superlative in these Superman comparisons, but he also ticks the box that the great of their sports so rarely satisfy: he seems a nice lad.
The issue in every Superman movie, then, is how to make the flying, laser shooting, bulletproof alien interesting. You know he’ll save the day because there’s pretty much nothing that could actually stop him from doing so. In Clifford’s case, we as viewers risk letting the inevitability of his greatness blunt our enjoyment of it. I can recall, in the days after this year’s All-Ireland final, singing his praises to someone with whom I’m not sure what I can talk about beyond GAA. I praised Clifford’s obvious genius, and I was met with a droll reply of “Ah, I didn’t think he did too much”. Such a sentence beggars belief; the only person who could possibly be dismissive of nine points in an All-Ireland final is Clifford himself. Like the frog says, it ain’t easy being green. Being the best player in the country, on the best team in the country, the bar is lofty enough.
What also persists is that tricky question in sports; how do you appreciate a player on another team? Especially when said player is liable to score three–eight against your team on any given day. Same as the bank robber in Metropolis probably merely rolls their eyes and shakes their head whenever Superman swoops in to thwart them, the great athlete is often a nuisance when they’re playing against you. The other issue with modern sport is the great sportsperson feels like a bit of a bore. Drug addicts like Diego Maradona and alcoholics like John Daly wouldn’t find a seat at the table waiting for them in the upper echelons of sport in the modern game (although drinking yourself through an entire tournament of golf might be the only way to make it bearable). What this allows is the likes of Lebron James and Serena Williams to continue being brilliant into their 40’s, producing genius on demand to match the TV schedule through which sport is consumed. The downside is that the whole spectacle is far more robotic than before. We as viewers sit further from our favourite athletes than ever before, despite the seemingly endless connection we have with them through various forms of media. Simply enjoying sport is getting harder and harder as the practitioners are pulled further and further away from us.
This clashes with that supposed virtue of sport, the idea that it brings people together, the same way the GAA is supposed to bring us together as a community. I’m sceptical about either of those things in isolation doing the job; community is a great word until it doesn’t extend beyond your parish. But what we can maybe all agree on is great sport. Clifford is unquestionably great, and as of this moment, there aren’t a lot of unquestionably great Irish sportspeople. The added virtue that he plays in Ireland, in what is an Irish sport, frees him from some of the moral questions we love to avoid as fans when trying to enjoy our favourites, including but not limited to, the involvement of the regimes of Qatar and Saudi Arabia, overcommercialization and the pricing out from stadiums that has emerged in the past few years. We fetishize the purity of sport so often that when something unadorned by the issues we are regularly faced with when navigating the sporting world of 2025 is presented to us, we should seek to enjoy it. GAA lover or not (and I sit in the latter camp) the simple pleasure of watching someone great in action is one of the reasons we tune in, and it’s up to us as viewers to make the most of it. If we could as a nation find some way to make the Kerry accent intelligible to the rest of the world, maybe they could enjoy it too.
