IN THE early 1890s, it was the sport that the American press rapturously described as “scientific”.
The New York Times claimed in 1890 it was “very much like the old American game, except there is more scientific teamwork in it”. On the other side of the East River, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle promised that a match at the 1892 New Jersey Athletic Club Labour Day Carnival would showcase “science, speed, agility and daring”.
The Pittsburg Dispatch opined in 1890 that any “game played under the Irish rules is more scientific, while just as exciting as one contested under the Association rules”.
Two years later the San Francisco Morning Call described one match being “played scientifically and without any rough play. When a man’s head came in rough contact with the soft sand he quickly got on his feet, shook himself together and was in the midst of the fray in a twinkling.”
For a brief time, many were optimistic that Gaelic football could become a major American pastime.
The previous 50 years had witnessed the Irish dominating most blue-collar sport in the country, producing its best pugilists and baseball players, like John L Sullivan and Mike ‘King’ Kelly. But more crucially the Irish had also transformed ‘sport’ from a dirty word entailing ‘a feckless gambler’ into a craze.
Now there was hope that the Irish footballing code could do the unthinkable and eclipse its American cousin.
During the late 19th century, as the game evolved from rugby, American football had become increasingly dangerous.
By November 1905, it was in severe crisis, with 19 people killed playing the game over the previous year. The sport was subsequently banned at Columbia University, where the philosopher, Professor Herbert G Lord, called it an “obsession” which had “become as hindersome to the great mass of students as it has proved itself harmful to academic standing, and dangerous to human life”.
In contrast, Gaelic football was viewed as a sufficiently physical, yet not overtly dangerous sport. And in an increasingly industrialised society where men were required to go to work uninjured, this was a huge bonus.
Ultimately, Gaelic football failed to capitalise on this, or the early good publicity to the game. President Theodore Roosevelt’s incursion into the debate about the number of people dying playing the game played a crucial role in saving American football.
In consequence, Gaelic football failed to even make any of the varsity sports of the heavily Irish, Catholic colleges, such as Georgetown and Fordham — both founded by Irish priests — until the late 20th century, where a more determined, Irish-born, immigrant brought the game into American universities.
There were other setbacks: One reporter for The Sun of New York wrote that the difficulty getting to watch the sport put patrons off: “To reach [Ridgewood Park, NY] you must ride five miles… then walk up a muddy railroad track for a third of a mile… [then] wait with what patience you may for the arrival of the teams which may be anything from an hour to an hour after the set time.”
But from 1898, the Irish had the better located Celtic Park stadium in Laurel Hill, Long Island, where every county, trade union, Catholic athletic club, or Clan na Gael/AOH ‘picnic’ would culminate with at least one Gaelic football match.
More serious was how the press quickly focused on violence — on and off the pitch — despite baseball games being far worse.
The most notorious ‘Donnybrook’, to which the American press inevitably christened these altercations, was at the 1895 ‘Championship’ game between the Shamrocks of New Jersey, and a Tipperary team based in Harlem, the Kickhams. The match made newspaper pages far outside of New York, primarily due to the behaviour of the Kickhams’ captain’s sister, one ‘Miss Buckley’.
She had already thrown a large stone at one of her brother’s teammates before she ‘broke loose’, according to the Boston Daily Globe, as a mass brawl erupted between the teams. “She was very excited, and punched right and left into the Shamrocks. During the struggle her hair became disheveled [sic] and someone pulled her away by the end of her braid.”
While the Irish-American press slammed these incidents, it was equally quick to close ranks to outside attacks.
When the New York Times claimed that in Gaelic Football “you kick the ball, if you cannot kick the man,” John Devoy’s Gaelic American snapped, hitting back by asking how many Gaelic footballers have actually died on the pitch in the past quarter century.
“A hostile press has too long been attempting to belittle the Irish character, to convey, if possible, the idea that their pastimes flavoured of semi-barbaric character, but that day is past and gone forever… The clean play which the Irish game fosters is emphasised by the costume of the players, who want neither ear or nose protectors, shoulder or hip pad, masks or leather.”
Moreover a greater problem for the game’s growth was the insularity of the GAA itself.
As the Irish Olympic historian, Kevin McCarthy, has argued, the GAA shunned the modernisation and internationalisation of sporting competition “in part because it did not distinguish such modernisation from Anglicisation”.
Another Irish sport but one outside GAA control, handball, became hugely successful. Aided initially by the Laois-born Phil Casey, and another Irishman, a former-pug, part-time local politician and part-time throttler of local hacks who criticised him, ‘Bulldozer’ Jim Dunn, it now has a diverse playing base in comparison to a game that would remain both on the periphery of American sport, and heavily dependent on its survival on the fluctuations of 20th century Irish immigration.
While Gaelic football remains a huge part of Irish-American sporting life, it has fallen a long way from a ‘national’ sport, when in 1893, the English-born ‘Father of Baseball’ Henry Chadwick, and hardly a biased critic, wrote in his Sporting Life column: “[The] only legitimate football game in vogue is that known as the Gaelic game…”
Pat Redmond is the author of The Irish and the making of American Sport, 1835-1920, published by McFarland Books.
