GAA TAPS INTO THE AMERICAN DREAM...
Hurling and football are thriving like never before in United States
COLM EGAN has spent nearly three decades in the United States. An older brother of Tipperary All-Ireland winner Darragh, the Wexford senior hurling manager – he could have been a contender himself. He was a contender himself. Until fortune, or the prompting of Babs Keating, intervened, that is.
In a way, being cut from the Tipperary senior squad himself led on to travel and making a life in Chicago where he went from working construction to spending the last 10 years as Games Development Officer for Chicago, his part-time role also taking in hurling development for USGAA as a whole.
Beside him sits Robert Tierney, a Dublin native who flew to Pittsburgh over 20 years ago and ended up marrying and settling. He helps to oversee the remarkable success story that is the growth of Gaelic games on this continental landmass, which makes up his brief as USGAA Games Development Officer. Basically, America without New York or the separate entity of the boroughs.
Tierney explains how USGAA has grown to touching 6,000 members, in tandem with the work of the board, of which he is a volunteer member. The 158 different clubs capture how the GAA has become a truly global village.
Last weekend, the GAA ran a two-day series of special workshops for the visiting delegation from the States and we had the opportunity to sit down with Egan and Tierney in The Croke Park Hotel. Topics include the growth of USGAA, the impact of the split season and the mini-exodus of county players to Chicago last summer, as well as the news that USGAA will be entering a team in the AllIreland junior championship in 2024 and is creating an American All-Stars selection team around it.
Tierney explains how the GAA is conquering new frontiers all the time.
‘Over the last five years we have had 28 new clubs start. I had a call during the week from a club hoping to on-board – Billings, Montana. I had to literally look it up on the map. We have a club in Butte, Montana, interest in Billings. We’ve got Missoula, Montana. Like, Montana! You’re wondering why.
‘We onboarded a club from Charlotte during the week, the Red Wolves. Hurling is by far the biggest growth area.’ Why so? ‘Tribal.’ The names are exotic — Windy City Hurling, San Francisco Bay Area Law Enforcement Gaelic Club, Los Angeles Mulhollands GAA, or Los San Patricios, a new Mexican city team just established.
‘In hurling development terms, I’m there 10 years,’ explains Egan. ‘I’m Chicago development officer and nationally hurling. There were 24 clubs in hurling when I started – there are now 63. But it’s not someone from Galway or Tipperary starting the clubs, it’s American-born people starting clubs in Raleigh, Indianapolis, Milwaukee. To be fair, USGAA has got so much better at being a landing area. So if someone says “I’m here, I’m in this city, is there a GAA club near me?” you feed them that way. If there’s not, we help them start one.’
When we struggle here at home to expand hurling beyond its traditional base, how is it there is such interest and new clubs sprouting up across the world, with America a prime example?
‘I think it’s a lack of snobbery,’ says Egan. ‘Think of a club in Indianapolis with a completely blank sheet. They find hurling. Next thing they find two or three Irish lads in their town. This is true. When the club started they found three Irish lads. One was from Tyrone, one from Kilkenny, and there was another. The Tyrone lad had never played hurling in Ireland. But he started his hurling career in Indianapolis in the United States.
‘Why can we grow hurling in the United States? Because there is nothing to stop it. There is no barrier to entry.’ No baggage, no hang-ups. A native of Lucan in west Dublin, Tierney’s story offers its own revealing snapshot of the Irish experience via Gaelic games.
‘I knew one guy in Pittsburgh that offered me a job. I hadn’t been involved in GAA since Lucan Sarsfields, March ’01. He said, “There’s a GAA team here, come down.” I thought, “No, it’s passed me by”.
‘So you go down and there’s 20 lads who are now about to be your best friends, who love Ireland, love sport, love pints — and they’re my closest friends today. It was only then that I realised how important the GAA is, how it affects the diaspora.
‘I knew one guy… a week later I knew 21 guys.’
Egan was a serious hurler with Kiladangan, right around the time Babs Keating was guiding the county out of the Munster wilderness to double All-Ireland success in 1989 and ’91.
‘Babs had the foresight to drop me in ’94. When I went to Chicago, I was never fitter in my whole life than after a year of construction. Went on a building site, playing hurling at a high level.’
He laughs when he’s asked if he was part of the ’91 success. ‘The first of April every year, Nicholas English’s hamstring would miracat ulously be okay and [Pat] Fox’s elbow would be alright,’ he says with good humour and tongue firmly in cheek. ‘In trying to make the senior set-up, I opened every field from Kiltormer to Bennettsbridge but ultimately didn’t stick the top level. Babs must have had some deal with Puma. He had these boxes of Puma boots. If Babs came at you with a pair of boots in his right hand and another in his left, you knew you were getting dropped. He had the same story for everyone.
‘He’d go up to you, “Colm, fair play. You’ve been going well. We’ll have a look at you nearer the summer. Take these home with you and keep hurling.”
‘If he was walking towards you with the boots, well you were b ***** ed!
‘There’s a funny story about Brendan Carroll of Thurles. He was one year younger than me. Hurling only okay, on the panel. Next thing Babs was walking around – and we knew he was looking for Brendan Carroll. And Brendan Carroll knew he was looking for Brendan Carroll. So he jumped over the barrier and went home so Babs couldn’t find him.
‘That was a Tuesday night.
‘You meet 20 lads who are about to be your best friends’
Hurled out of his skin for Thurles on the Saturday. Stayed on the panel. And won an All-Ireland in ’91. Because Babs didn’t find him that evening!
‘I got six pairs of boots out of it.’
THE current success story doesn’t mean things have been easy. Egan explains how the visa situation and 9/11 has tightened things up for entry, making access harder outside of graduate programmes.
‘The Irish people emigrating to Chicago has gone to a trickle. So some of the older established clubs died on the vine. They relied on the summer players to top up the lads living there. The lads living there got old and went away.
‘The clubs that have succeeded and are still around are the ones that nurtured the American players. There is still that summer J1 tradition but the ones that have survived are the ones that evolved quicker.’
The impact of the split season saw headlines generated by the high-profile roster of players that upped sticks to play in America for the summer after their county’s championship exit – Armagh star Rian O’Neill, Tyrone’s Conor Meyler and Mayo’s Oisín Mullin part of a long list.
‘What fills newspaper columns is Rian O’Neill out here on a Sunday,’ says Egan. ‘The split season means he has no club games in Ireland and he’s under the wire for the deadline in the United States. So he now goes to a club in Chicago for the summer. He’s there for eight weeks. The split season allows him to do that. He missed one group game for Crossmaglen in his time here in Chicago.
‘Absolutely he put bums on seats in the Chicago championship. Him and others.
‘Most clubs in the big cities now have second teams. So there is a landing spot for all players.’
Is it unfair on clubs who don’t have access to their county players for the first six months of the season and then lose them in a summer window to the States?
‘The club in Armagh will probably say you’re right – “You’re taking my player and we don’t have him for eight weeks.” But we’re not responsible for the Armagh championship, we’re responsible for the USGAA championship.
‘It’s a huge question. Is it unfair? If I was Crossmaglen, yeah, I probably would feel a bit miffed.’ But despite some scaremongering about clubs not having their players back for championship, there was an element to players being hungry to get away after all the restrictions of the pandemic. The long-time tradition of intercounty players heading Stateside also means there are strict limits on the numbers.
Hence, Egan says: ‘It was not a record number. It was pretty much pre-Covid numbers. But the bigger names made the impact. I think there’s a reason why it wasn’t a record number. We can’t bring every player from Ireland. Each club is only allowed 10 summer sanctions. So there is a limit. Lad number 11, 12 and 13 can’t come.’
Tierney adds: ‘We have made massive strides in terms of the number of homegrown American players that have to be on the field. It’s two in football and hurling – at all levels. Junior, intermediate and senior. That’s American-born players on the field. Minimum.’
The games are 13-a-side and teams at senior and intermediate level can only have five imported players on the field at any one time. The remaining eight must be based in the city with two
‘Our games lend themselves to tribalism’
American-born. At junior A and B level, only three imports are allowed.
Part of the success story is how USGAA has embraced integration between the codes. Tierney lauds the One Club model, which broadly operates so that the traditional demarcation lines between the GAA, Camogie and Ladies Football associations at home are more quickly broken down.
In this way, the international model for Gaelic games is at the forefront of the GAA evolution with former President Mary McAleese chairing the existing integration process here.
‘If you were given a piece of white paper and look to start a sports club, there is no way you’d say it was men-only,’ says Egan. ‘Start another club over here and say it’s ladies-only. It makes no sense whatsoever.
‘I’d hold up the likes of Indianapolis – 250 members, started up as a hurling club, evolved into a camogie club. Added football. Added ladies football. Has a youth element. Denver would have done it. Austin, Texas and more.’
‘Thankfully our games lend themselves to a bit of tribalism. If you didn’t have that, you lose a huge element of sport.
‘There is another interesting element to the American model. A lot join Gaelic games for the recreational play. Kids play sport and head into the college situation. Maybe play there. Come out then and there’s nothing. It’s gone. I think that’s why we’re picking up a lot of players as well.’
As Tierney explains: ‘The growth in clubs is happening outside of Ireland. Look at World GAA being formally created last year. Niall Erskine, World GAA chair, has been great for us. Groups have been set up to look at commonalities in games and coaching development. No more than in the Middle East and Australia.
‘Hopefully we’d be held up as a model for doing things right.’