OLDEST IRISH AMERICAN NEWSPAPER IN USA, ESTABLISHED IN 1928
Category: Archive

Irish Echo editorial: a most game Gael

February 16, 2011

By Staff Reporter

For years more than can be easily counted, John was an impassioned chronicler of the games of the Gael as they were played, not just in New York, but throughout the United States.
Knowledge is essential in the reporting business, but love for the sport and the passionate desire to promulgate its virtues are equally necessary if a game is to be brought alive to the reader on the printed page. All these John possessed in thankful abundance.
John was witness to countless contests waged on football and hurling fields, but his sporting interest, and knowledge, went well beyond just the Irish national games. He knew his horses, his runners, his boxers and he knew how to swing a golf club with a classical hurley grip.
In his last years, John was not nearly as mobile as he would have liked to have been. But the heart of the athlete continued to beat inside a bodily frame that had seen its own fair share of matches in younger times.
John’s wife, Eileen, had passed away some years ago and they had no children. But John was gifted with a broader family, not just of siblings, nieces and nephews, but also of the members of Gaelic Athletic Association on both sides of the Atlantic and an Irish community in America that recognized that here was a most special man, a most game Gael, a reporter who carried his sporting passions all the way to the very end.
We extend condolences to John’s family. May he rest in peace.

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