Chasing the dream
Monaghan’s Beggan among wave of Irish hopefuls hunting spot in NFL
BOB NASH was one of nine foreign-born players that featured in the inaugural NFL season back in 1920. His family had emigrated to New Jersey from Collinstown on the Westmeath/Meath border when he was only five years of age, but when he lined out for Akron Pros, he entered the record books as the league’s first Irishman – he later became the first ever captain of the New York Giants.
Irish-born players are such a rarity in the NFL – there have only been 11 in over a century – that when Daniel Whelan became the punter for the Green Bay Packers this season, the Enniskerry native bridged a gap of almost 40 years to Neil O’Donoghue, the former Shamrock Rovers player who was a kicker for Tampa Bay Buccaneers and St Louis Cardinals.
Ireland isn’t the only nation who hasn’t had a prominent presence in America’s most popular sport. According to a study in 2015, the NFL was the least international of the four major sports leagues in the US, with less than three percent of the playing base born outside the States. That is why Aden Durde, a British coach at the Dallas Cowboys, devised the International Pathway Programme which, over the past eight years, has offered elite athletes from other sports a path into America’s game.
And the number of overseas athletes in the NFL have steadily increased over the past few years. But as Monaghan’s Rory Beggan, Wicklow’s Mark Jackson and Down’s Charlie Smyth – along with former Connacht rugby player Darragh Leader – embark on the programme that will culminate with the NFL Combine in Indianapolis at the end of February, the odds of them making it into the big league remain long.
Still, the three Gaelic football goalkeepers will have something going for them, as their kicking coach Tadhg Leader has pointed out. ‘There is common ground between NFL kickers and Gaelic football free-takers in that for both, you put the ball on the grass and you kick it high, straight between uprights… The GAA lads have already amassed such an amount of indirect repetition of the art of kicking a ball off the deck and so, it’s no surprise that of the four Irish lads going, three are inter-county Gaelic footballers.’
Beggan is the highest-profile of the four Irish players – also included in the 16 of this year’s participants is Wales and Lions star Louis Rees-Zammit – and has already suggested that he wants to be known as one of the best 32 kickers in the NFL.
Whelan, whose superb punting for Green Bay helped lay the foundations for their upset win in the play-offs at Dallas Cowboys last weekend, suggested to IMoS a few weeks ago that there could be a number of prospective punters in GAA and rugby in this country. ‘Everyone’s got a leg and in Gaelic, rugby and soccer, you are used to using them all the time,’ said the 24-year-old, who was spotted by a High School football coach as a 16year-old while playing centre-half in soccer.
Morten Andersen is one of the few overseas players to make the NFL Hall of Fame. Nicknamed ‘the Great Dane’, he was a place-kicker in the NFL for 25 years and holds the record for most regular season games at 382. A talented youth soccer player, his American football career started when his kicking prowess was spotted while on a student exchange as a teenager.
And that’s the thing. Both Andersen and Whelan were introduced to the game in their midteens. Beggan is coming to the game, late, at 31, although he is determined to make a proper fist of it, having worked on the timing aspect – NFL kickers have 1.3 second snap for a field goal.
‘I’ve got into a technique that I am happy with. I am striking the ball better. A bit of self talk, a bit of breathing and then the nod. You know before you raise your head that you have kicked it well.’
By any measure, it is extremely difficult to make it onto an NFL roster. Only 1.6 percent of college football players do so. And even then, the average length of a career in the league is little over three years, hence the quip that NFL stands for Not For Long.
But the league itself is eager to show that its international dimension isn’t simply about taking games to London, Munich and Mexico City – and hopefully, Dublin one day. Last September, the league ruled that each of the 32 rosters could have an extra practice squad player provided they were born outside the US and Canada. That has opened another avenue for the 16 hopefuls who have joined the IPP this week.
As a kicker or punter, perhaps they won’t need to know 600 different variations of defensive cover, but it still requires special and unique skills – Whelan said that holding, which a punter is required to do for the place-kicker, is something he is still trying to master.
Beggan, Jackson, Smyth and Leader are about to embark on a wonderful adventure. Even becoming an international player on a practice squad exemption would be a remarkable achievement. Beggan has set his sights higher. And there’s no harm in that.
If they do make a mark in the coming weeks, Daniel Whelan’s nationality will no longer be considered unusual in the NFL.