DAVE HANNIGAN’S COLD-CASE investigation into his early love of sport identifies plenty of suspects.

There are kindly teachers who train soaked-but-enthusiastic young hurlers in ground striking after school and concertina the entire panel into two cars before games on Saturday mornings.

And enigmatic, bachelor uncles with stacks of Ring magazine, which brim with exotic tales of boxing at Madison Square Garden.

There are neighbours who are teammates, table football rivals and tennis opponents.

But, it’s clear, the parents did it.

‘This book — hopefully — is a hymn to the Irish mother,” Hannigan says on a trip home from New York, where he’s lived for 17 years.

Boy Wonder is his beautifully-crafted reconstruction of a nascent passion for playing and watching games while growing up in Cork city, as the youngest in an ordinary family during the ’70s and ’80s.

It’s a collage of memories; playing tennis between chalked-out lines during Wimbledon fortnight, flicking to kick on the lino with other Subbuteo-obsessed kids and the joy of glimpsing a hero like Platini or JBM on the telly or Bandon Road.

The result is a cinematic story that is so evocative it should come with trigger warnings for those of who swam in pools made up mostly of concentrated chlorine or were the kids with the ill-fitting, wrong-colour football boots.

“It only took about a year to write but I suppose it was a long time in the making,” says Hannigan, who worked at the Sunday Tribune before pitching up in Long Island, where he is a professor of history as well as writing for, amongst others, the Irish Times.

“I definitely had wanted to write something about my childhood for a while,” he says.

“And after my mother died in 2015 I wrote a piece about her, got a lovely reaction to it and it made me think my childhood — which is completely average, nothing untoward or special about it — but it was the same childhood as so many, you know. And that reaction taught me that… and I thought ‘there might be something in this’.

“It was a very different book to write from a non-fiction book where you have your desk covered in clippings and books and print-outs and stuff that you’re working off. This was all in your head which is easier and more challenging at the same time.”

Hannigan added to his personal bibliography last year with the publication of ‘Drama in the Bahamas: Muhammad Ali’s Last Fight’. He’s previously written about Ali’s fight in Dublin as well as numerous other books, sport-focused and otherwise.

But this time, it was personal.

“When you’re Irish and you write about yourself, you’re very conscious of people mocking you or ridiculing you,” he says. “But you have to get over that too and hope that the people who enjoy it or understand it or empathise with it will outnumber the other people, you know.”

The result is the portrait of a perfectly-ordinary and very loving family at a particular point in Ireland’s story. Each chapter is a peek through the hall window to a familiar kitchen-sink drama.

Hannigan’s father lovingly cleans his boots before games and passes on a grá for that Dutch team of the 70s, as well as being a clue to the adult world of horse racing and bookmakers shops.

But perhaps his mother, always quietly supporting his various sporting passions, is even more powerful a force in the book.

Muhammad Ali facing Al 'Blue' Lewis at Croke Park in 1972. Allsport / INPHO Allsport / INPHO / INPHO

But would it have been written if the author lived in Ireland rather than cracking open a  laptop thousands of miles from the story’s setting?

“There’s definitely something in that,” he says. “When you leave Ireland and look back at it from a distance, there’s that sense of coldness as well that allows you to look back with a detached eye. And also when you leave somewhere else you didn’t give a crap like – if you lived and worked in Dublin I’d be much more self-conscious, whereas I’m going to fly back to New York on Sunday and no one cares there.

“I’ve written a column in the features section of the Evening Echo for a very long time about life in America which actually became a very personal column. Not all the time, but I’d write about my family and stuff, and so over the years it became much easier to write ‘me’ pieces, if you know what I mean; pieces with ‘the I word’ in them. When you’re a sports journalist you’re thought never to use ‘the I word’ at all – that’s a sin. But then when you’re writing a column it’s different, so that built me up to putting myself out there.”

He continues: “I’m 17 years gone out of Ireland and 25 years this month out of Cork. I came up to Dublin in September ’92 which means I’ve now spent more time away from Cork as I did in it.

“I’ll never live in Cork again, I’ve made my peace with that but it’s always the heartbeat of everything you do. And I think Cork is almost a character in the book hopefully.”

Jimmy Barry Murphy: 'Cork is a character in the book'. Billy Stickland / INPHO Billy Stickland / INPHO / INPHO

So where in the past, he excavated historical documents and interviewed primary sources to piece together a book, this time it was a nightly journey through space and time fuelled by memorabilia and old gear.

“It was massively rewarding,” Hannigan says. “This is a peculiar book but it was a labour of love.

“I would just have these things around me like my France ’84 jersey, my white Steve Heighway boots, my Subbuteo and I’d have all these artefacts of my life and then touch them and sniff them and remember where you were and thinking back. And that was just brilliant.”

Boy Wonder is published by Gill Books, priced €14.99.

Originally published at 7.30am

Read an extract: ‘We can only use this on grass’ – the days when we treasured a proper leather ball