In his role as Sunday Independent hurling correspondent, Lawlor spends his days dealing with the relatively small pool of players and managers in Ireland, which can present problems.
“Only 6 or 7 teams are competitive in hurling and if you write anything offensive you are kind of blackballed,” Lawlor said. “If you are blackballed by a manager you are not going to get a whole lot of cooperation from their players because the manager might not encourage that.”
In a job where maintaining relationships is key, Lawlor prides himself on having good dealings with the people he covers. But he knows he has to maintain a fine balancing act between keeping his sources happy and being fair to the reader.
“Maybe sometimes I am a bit soft and it does color my view.” Lawlor said. “Particularly if I’m writing books, you are going to need huge cooperation from people down the line so I’m probably a bit guilty of keeping my cloth a bit too clean sometimes but I don't shirk from it either.”
In your role as hurling correspondent you deal with a lot of the same players and managers on a regular basis, is that a help or a hindrance in your career?
I was brought in as the hurling correspondent and after two years was made the GAA correspondent so that makes it a bit easier. Now I have got hurling and football. But it can be very repetitive. Only 6 or 7 teams are competitive in hurling and if you write anything offensive you are kind of blackballed. If you are blackballed by a manager you are not going to get a whole lot of cooperation from their players because the manager might not encourage that. The fact that I cover hurling and football brings about 30 other teams into it so that does make things a little bit easier. The great thing about my job at the moment, and I’m not too sure how aware of it you are over there, is that this is the best hurling championship of all time. It’s wide open, unpredictable and dramatic so there is plenty to be writing about. You don’t necessarily have to go to the current players and what I'm doing quite a bit is going to former players. Everything is done mostly through controlled press nights now. When I started off you could be on call til 11 at night and if a guy got an injury he would ring you. These days it all goes through press officers. Even though it is an amateur sport you still need to go through the official channels or all cooperation is taken away.
So even for someone like yourself who would have quite a good relationship with players, you can’t just ring up someone like Lar Corbett and ask him for a quote?
You can the odd time and you will get away with it but you don't want to get those guys in trouble and ultimately that is what is going to happen. In the off-season you can do that but during the height of the season unless you know a guy really well and you could drop him a text, you wouldn’t really do it. Every player is so paranoid now they would very rarely talk to you even if you know them quite well. So what happens now is you go to a press night where there would be four or five players and maybe the manager put forward and if you are lucky you can sit down with them in a small group. But I will put it like this to you, I’m a man who always comes up with his own ideas and features and when you are going to these press nights you are sharing your copy with two or three other journalists. That’s just churnalism and it becomes like fast food production so I try to do my own thing as much as possible.
You were saying that if you write something critical you might not get cooperation from managers. Does that ever cloud your judgement when you got to write a story?
Yes, it should’t but it does. Maybe I’m not suited to being a journalist like that because if a player strikes someone across the face I have no issue in coming down hard. But maybe sometimes I am a bit soft and it does color my view. Particularly if I’m writing books, you are going to need huge cooperation from people down the line so I’m probably a bit guilty of keeping my cloth a bit too clean sometimes. Not that I shirk away from it and I try to always call it as I see it but sometimes I am a bit guilty of that.
And in terms of your county Tipperary, you would obviously know a lot of those players very well so is it even more difficult then to write something critical if they are having a bad game?
Funnily enough I’d be inclined to criticize those guys more than anybody else because I think even when I was doing the radio show on RTE a few years back we won the championship game and lost the championship game in consecutive years and I would like to think I kept the tone of my voice the very same. Sometimes you are expected to be a bit bias towards your own county but I would be as critical of Tipperary as anyone else. However, I would say that I have more or less kept away from writing about Tipperary recently. When I started off first I used to write about them the whole time because I knew a lot of the players and I would get great interviews with them. But as the years have passed and my family continues to live there it is just not worth the hassle to write about them to be honest with you. There are plenty of other team’s to write about besides Tipperary so even though I would have a good insight into what goes on behind the scenes there I just leave it go.
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