CONNACHT SFC FIRST ROUND:WHEN CROSSMAGLEN Rangers won the All-Ireland club final on St Patrick's Day, Alan Hearty followed the match in New York. His brother Paul was playing in goal for the Armagh champions. Alan has been living in New York for the past four years and has been keeping goal for the expatriates throughout that time. Tomorrow, once again, the All-Ireland football championship officially begins when Sligo and New York meet in the Bronx.
The annual fixture remains one of the great secret stories of the GAA. Few football grounds that fall under the umbrella of the GAA can match Gaelic Park for history and chutzpah. It is nothing like as pretty as Markievicz Park and one corner of the field is constantly worn from its alternative role as a baseball diamond and it has hosted several of the rowdier scenes in the long history of Gaelic games.
But Gaelic Park is where Eoin O’Duffy was booed by the native crowd, where Robert Kennedy made an appearance on a muggy summer’s day in 1965 to watch a fabled hurler named Christy Ring, where Mick O’Connell and Roy Garela of the Pittsburgh Steelers had a kicking competition with the oval ball, where so many skirmishes broke out that the place was known as early as the 1940s as the Bloodpit of the Bronx, where, according to John D. Hickey in the Irish Independent, the second best hurling team in the world (after Kilkenny) resided circa 1965 and from where the Sam Maguire Cup, stored overnight in a cupboard during a night of festivities at the bar, was stolen during one of the Kerry football team’s October visits in the 1970s.
Only when the FBI was called in was it returned, bearing slogans that suggested it had been on a tour of the boroughs in the meantime. Gaelic Park is boozy and sentimental.
It has hosted more great players than any venue outside of Croke Park. The New York GAA has had several spectacular rows with the parent body in Dublin down the decades. The New York GAA has watched its senior clubs dwindle from 20 during the 1980s, when the canyons of Manhattan were crowded with Irish workers, to just six. Their participation in the All-Ireland championship has been dismissed as a needless expense on the Connacht teams who travel there and as one of the most important symbolic days in the whole calendar.
Some years, the results have been horribly one sided. On others – as when Joe Kernan’s Galway were given an almighty fright in 2010 – New York have made their presence felt. The bottom line is that come early May, they always field a team.
“It is a long shot,” Hearty says when asked about a home win tomorrow. “We all know that. But it was the same when we played Galway two years ago . . . anything can happen on the day. We are hopeful we will put up a performance anyway. The first 20 minutes will tell us a lot as to whether we are thereabout. The forecast is supposed to be 23 degrees: we would take 33 degrees.”
Hearty grew up in the most enviable parish club in Ulster. Crossmaglen Rangers have claimed virtual ownership of the Armagh championship and have been among the best half-dozen club sides in Ireland for the best part of two decades.
He has swapped that for the necessary chaos involved with trying to play Gaelic games in the sprawling metropolis. It isn’t just that players face lengthy commutes by train or car just to make training; they are often snowbound in winter and sweltering by mid-summer. The transitory nature of life means that players come and go – just five of the team that threatened to upset Galway in 2010 will play tomorrow. And even the most committed of players has to abide by the governing rule of the city: work comes first.
“If you prepare well there is always a chance that you can produce a big game. But we are always at a disadvantage because we don’t get enough games. We got a decent game against Down even though they were on a holiday as such . . . you take any game that you can. There would be five or six left from the Galway game. There is a big turnover.
“Out here, work commitments overrule everything else. If you work for an Irish guy, he is probably into Gaelic games and will let you go at four. Here, you are working for someone who won’t understand what you do. When work is there, you have to do it. Nobody is going to pay your bills.”
In McLean Avenue, they read the Irish newspapers on line and listen to the radio at work and are well-versed in the economic troubles that have mired the country.
“People are very disillusioned and depressed at the way the bubble burst there,” says long-serving New York GAA stalwart Frank Brady.“For a good while, Ireland was the pride of Europe and that was important to people here. So they know that young people are unemployed and that the prospects aren’t great.” And they have seen the young people beginning to show up at the usual joints again, straight from JFK. But the influx has been nothing like the old days.
“The revival hasn’t been anyway comparable to the 1980s because I think the stricter emigration rules have put people off and there is more work in Canada and Australia,” says Brady. “There has definitely been an influx but nothing like the flood of people then. The job situation is not strong here either. A lot of people used to come in and conveniently forget to go home . . . that isn’t really possible now.
“Some guys are heading home on the 89th day of the 90-day visa. But that isn’t satisfactory either.”
Brady quit his job as a schoolteacher in Leitrim and moved to Yonkers in 1977, just when New York flirted with bankruptcy and the boroughs of the Bronx was being terrorised by Sam Berkowitz, the ‘Son of Sam’ serial killer. Brady immediately became involved with the Leitrim-New York Gaelic club but the GAA tradition was struggling then; few people were leaving home and with no new players lining out for the New York teams, guys in their forties and fifties were coming out of retirement just so local clubs could field teams.
So Brady witnessed the phenomenal resurgence of Gaelic games in the 1980s, when big intercounty names were flown out to moonlight for local teams and many others simply came to the city to work and live.
On any given Friday night, you could have walked into one of the bars along McLean Avenue and cobbled together a team containing players who had worn county shirts back home.
“Underage football is booming but we have only seven senior clubs here now,” Brady says. “But the minor board have done terrific work. But once kids hit 15 or 16 they drift away to basketball or baseball, the indigenous games. A few kids from other ethnic backgrounds are taking up the game as well. And the senior panel will have four American-born players – Donnacha O’Dwyer at full back, CJ Molloy at full forward and then the two Hogan brothers.
“They have just come on a very successful New York universities team and this will be a big step up. It is most unusual . . . I would say that is the most we have ever had.”
Brady has graduated from his roles as player and manager – he took the New York team that played in Castlebar when the American city returned to the All-Ireland in 1999. This Sunday, he will be in the press box writing a report for the Irish Echo. He describes this New York vintage as “very big and very inexperienced”.
“Mickey Coleman, the trainer, is a Tyrone man and he has taken a number of pages from Mickey Harte’s book so they won’t be wanting for fitness or passion.”
The frustrating thing is the New York team have to start from scratch every year. If they are beaten tomorrow, the players will return to club duty for the summer. They began training for this match in late January but the logistics of getting regular numbers at training and of not having any real opposition to play against means they can’t really measure their progression. They played a Down selection in a challenge game before the season began.
“It was a holiday for them, basically, but it was important for us to be playing against intercounty players,” says Alan Hearty.
New York football has been a culture shock for someone raised by the standards that Crossmaglen have set themselves. He admits it frustrates him sometimes. “You are always fighting odds. At home, the momentum is there and priorities are right. Here, once guys finish work and go home and boredom sets in. And what do you do when you are bored? You go for a drink. That is something that gets to me. There is nothing the GAA can do about that. It is just easier to create that parish feeling in a place like Crossmaglen.”
In the 35 years Frank Brady has lived in the city, he has seen a radical erosion of the traditional Irish power base in the city. Fingers are crossed in the Irish strongholds that Christine Quinn, speaker of the New York City Council, will poll well if, as is generally anticipated, she decides to run for mayor next year. Gaelic Park is one of the few institutions that have remained impervious to the sweeping changes Brady has witnessed. In fact, the New York GAA board has just taken over the lease on the bar and catering facilities
“So that might become the nucleus for major Irish events and it could be a throwback to the 1960s and 1970s when it was the hub for most weekend activities. One of the problems has always been that the Irish have always been tenants here; they have never had a place that they could call their own. But I do think the GAA will always maintain a presence in the city. And this is still a big weekend around Daytone and McLean Avenue.”
And that may be the most important aspect of the beginning of the 2012 championship. It will be the only All-Ireland football championship match most exiles will attend this year. The setting is like nowhere else, a rectangle of green in the heart of the Bronx with commuter trains rumbling overhead at regular intervals.
Only the Sligo exiles will be cheering for the visitors. The rest of the crowd will be behind the outsiders, made up of a patchwork of Irish men and a growing number of American-Irish. And they will be up against it but that is just part of the emigrant experience.
“That is the beauty of the game,” concludes Hearty. “There is always a chance.”
