A good
story about
April 12, 2009
DAN GREANEY’S brown-flecked blue eyes can still see half a century ago,
when thousands of spectators roared at his every move, piled into stands at
Gaelic Park, spilling out along the hillside and packed in around the
sidelines. He is 71, his ruddy cheeks now spotted with age, but he can hear the
cries of the beer sellers and the bands, heavy with fiddlers, behind the field
where generations of Irish and Irish-American athletes once clashed.
From the 1920s on, players battled ferociously in the Irish sports of
hurling (a combination of baseball, lacrosse and field hockey) and Gaelic
football (which blends elements of soccer and rugby) while fans caught up on
teams back in
“There was so much activity here, so many teams, so many players,” Mr. Greaney said one Sunday afternoon, surveying the thin
spread of fans gathered under a drizzling gray sky. “They removed all that
stuff.”
Where rickety wooden stands once teetered toward the
sky, there is now a scattering of empty picnic tables. On the field
where players once barreled into one another, cracking heads and bones in
brutal pursuit of the ball, a referee’s whistle regulates play. The beer sellers
and the Irish bands are absent.
Though the great waves of Irish immigrants had long since passed, by the
1980s New York’s concentration of Irish immigrants earned the region the status
of an Irish county in the eyes of the Gaelic Athletic Association, which is
based in Ireland and oversees hurling and Gaelic football (the rest of North
America is considered a second county).
But from 1990 to 2000, the number of Irish in
“What we find is the people who are actually managing and running these
clubs are the same old faces,” said Larry McCarthy, chairman of the Gaelic
Athletic Association of Greater New York, the group’s local branch. “They
are not being replaced.”
On this Sunday, a cluster of young men were warming up, cheerfully
smacking small, hard balls against a wall bearing the words “Absolutely No Ball
Playing in the Area.” Players scrabbled for the ball, sticks crashing in rapid
fire.
But old-timers acknowledge that crowds are not what they used to be, that the park’s centrality to the Irish experience is
fading as older players start families and feel the tug of American options.
“The type of immigrant coming out of
And while the park is currently in its best physical condition ever — a
$3 million renovation provided a new turf field and night lighting — other
forces have taken their toll. Tightened immigration laws and stricter
border security after 9/11 have drained the park of players and spectators,
further challenging its historic role as the heart of
“The funny thing is, for years Gaelic Park was going very well because
there were so many Irish here and we were trying to get the field renovated and
done up,” said Peter Slattery, 39, a hurler turned coach. “Last year is the
first year it was done with the new surface and made a massive improvement. But
it’s a shame that there are so many people gone, that it didn’t happen years
ago.”
‘The
When Therese Crowe arrived in 1962 from
“I wanted freedom,” said Ms. Crowe, now 74, with cropped blond hair and
eyes ringed with dark eyeliner. She was sitting in a dimly lighted banquet hall
next to
Growing up in
It didn’t matter. Thousands streamed into the park every Sunday, filling
the stands with familiar talk, familiar food and, most of all, the feeling of
home.
“You met everybody,” said Ms. Crowe, who has volunteered as the park’s
nurse for more than 30 years. “If you were lonely, it
was a great place to go.”
In the crowd was Terry Connaughton, a
barrel-chested athlete who in 1952, at age 19, had emigrated from western
When Mr. Connaughton was growing up, his
village was home to 100 people and four pubs. There were no movie theaters, no
television sets. Entertainment consisted of one main activity: hurling.
“I was involved practically since the day I was born, like most of the
people,” said Mr. Connaughton, now 75, sitting on the
sidelines of
On Mr. Connaughton’s first Sunday in
Over that time, he joined the Police Department, met his future wife in
the stands and found a second career as the owner of a local restaurant. Even
after he stopped playing, his life remained interwoven with
The field that Mr. Connaughton played on — the
“
“One thing is for sure, there’s less people
attending the games now than back in the day,” Mr. Connaughton
said. “Almost 100 percent of the Irish immigrants would come here. Today it
would be 20 percent, maybe, tops.”
The
“Young people have almost everything they have in this country,” he said.
“Irish people coming out here today? They go skiing.”
Even a generation after Ms. Crowe and Mr. Connaughton
emigrated, little had changed in their homeland. When Peter Slattery was
growing up there during the 1970s and ’80s, schoolbags were still packed with
books and a hurling stick, and in rural villages, the hurling pitch remained
the central gathering place.
“From the time you’re a kid, that’s what you’re taught,” Mr. Slattery
said. “All your idols are playing it; all the kids you know are playing it;
everybody’s playing it.”
Hurling unified the community and provided identity. Mr. Slattery and his
five siblings grew up with the game, but when it came time to find work, they
struggled. Listening to stories spun by cousins home on holidays from
In 1992, Mr. Slattery made his move. He immigrated to the
“I loved it and all that,” he said, “but there wasn’t that many Irish up
around here. There’s no point in talking to an American person about hurling
because they won’t know what you’re talking about.”
One day, a priest named Father Bolland walked
into his bar.
“How is everything going?” the priest asked in a
“Great, great,” Mr. Slattery recalled replying.
“There aren’t too many Irish around here,” Father Bolland
observed. He passed along the number of a local hurling club where he had
played 30 years before, and a few weeks later, Mr. Slattery joined the team.
At
But when Mr. Slattery finally retired from playing, he noticed that
everyone else seemed to be retiring or moving away, too. He stayed involved,
suiting up when there were too few people to field a team, but other players
just disappeared. Mr. Slattery began hearing talk of teams disbanding. Clubs
started to fold, one by one, and two years ago, he realized that his team could
be next.
“It’s very hard to have a championship with less than five or six teams,
but if it goes below four, you’re going to have big problems,” Mr. Slattery
said. “We’re always trying to recruit new guys. But the numbers are dwindling
all the time.”
‘Can You Play Camogie?’
As Geraldine Lavery, then a trim 34-year-old
with long dark hair, stepped out onto the field, a shiver raced through her
body. It was June 2007 and the first day of the Cul
Camp, an Irish camp making its debut in
More than 80 boys and girls from 6 to 9 years old were arrayed in hurling
and Gaelic football practice stations around the field. Not all of them were
Irish. She was overwhelmed.
“I saw in front of me the future of Gaelic sports for my children,” Ms. Lavery recently recalled. “I had a rush that just came
through me.”
Her involvement began in the late ’90s, just weeks after she arrived from
“Once you hear that accent, the first question you ask is can you play
football or camogie,” said the waitress, Pauline Coll, who is now a close friend of Ms. Lavery’s.
“You serve her a cup of tea. ‘By the way, can you play camogie?’
It’s just something automatic that comes out of my mouth.”
Ms. Lavery joined a camogie
team and soon began playing Gaelic football as well.
“Had I not had the Irish sports and the Gaelic sports the first two
years, I would have gone home within the first six weeks of being here,” said
Ms. Lavery, who is now dean of students at
Both women were participants in the Ladies Gaelic Athletic Association of
New York, which was founded in 1991. When a president named Nollaig
Cleary was elected, she asked Ms. Coll to found a
youth program for girls.
“Patience, hard work and lots of phone calls,” Ms. Coll
said of her strategy. “Initially I’d say to one mother: ‘Oh, you know Gaelic
football. Why don’t you bring your daughter up?’ It’s a very tight-knit
community, and if your daughter is doing it, my daughter should do it, too.”
Ms. Coll recently moved back to
The leader of the boys’ youth program, Roger Slattery (no relation to
Peter Slattery), retired from playing in 1979, but when his first son, Ciaran, turned 5, he wanted to
play.
“My father hurled here in
Every Friday and Saturday night, his household in Castle Hill in the
It’s a tradition he has tried to pass on to his American-born sons.
“There comes a place where family, work, children come along and our
priorities change, and we can’t devote the time that we have to,” Mr. Slattery
said. “And we miss it.”
He paused. “Maybe we’re living a little vicariously through our children
at this stage,” he continued. “We never wanted to be spectators on the
sidelines. But now we have a chance to get back involved.”
Dennis P. Cleary
302.539.2916(H)
302.222.2967(C)