There were two interesting and seemingly unrelated events from the GAA this week that raised our eyebrows here at Balls Towers.
1. Alan Nestor of DIT had to apologise for the photo of him wearing the Sigerson Cup and nothing else in the aftermath of the Aungier St side's win over UCC after statements from Ray O'Brien, the head of HE GAA, saying that any such photo could bring the GAA into disrepute. He also deleted the tweet.
2. After posting the Kildare U-21's rather good version of the Harlem Shake - a performance that also featured naked people - we received contact from a member of the panel asking us to take down the video after they'd apparently received a bit of a bollocking from their selectors.
One takeaway is that GAA players are getting naked more often than they used to.
The second is that there is a growing generation gap in the game. Members of a certain generation might say that this deleted content is ill-judged and ultimately embarrassing for the team the players represent, and even the GAA itself. Similarly, seen out of context, a 50-year-old selector could see a Harlem Shake video as nothing but a few naked fellas and a few fellas in masks making arses of themselves for thirty seconds while blaring music play. A 16-year-old might see that same video and think it's every Harlem Shake video he has ever seen.
We love celebrating the poignant side of the GAA but we also love the eejit side of it. In 2013, the two should be able to co-exist. Is Alan Nestor the first GAA player ever to be photographed with his balls.ie inside the Sigerson? We doubt it. He was just the first person to share it with the world. Was he making an eejit of himself? Sure, but it was good natured and an expression of his delight and pride for winning the trophy. Note the #dit4life hashtag.
There's a culture clash here - the players, who are clued in to social media, and management and people who run the sport, who seem to see the whole thing as daft. The GAA is very forward thinking in many ways, but we hope we won't see a further concerted effort to clamp down on personal expression (we'd say that even if we didn't run a website) in the coming months. Who saw Nestor's photo (a photo he voluntarily uploaded by the way) and thought - 'god the moral standards of the modern GAA players are slipping?' Nobody. The management side is going to have catch up pretty quickly here. They can keep the media away from the players, but I don't think they'll be able to get their own players off Facebook and Twitter.
