February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
A litany that sounds like it could be culled from an old All-Ireland football final program rather than the annals of baseball’s major leagues, these characters were either born in Ireland themselves or were the sons of parents who’d sailed the Atlantic in the years immediately after the Famine. By some estimates, nearly one-third of all pro players at that point were Irish, the parts of each venue where their supporters gathered were called “Kerry Patches”, and even the bleachers at New York’s Polo Grounds were so stocked with emigrants and their kin for every game that that particular section of the stadium was known as “Burkeville.”
“Once baseball became a money-making opportunity, created ironically by the same class that had turned Irish immigrants into servants and day-laborers, the Irish were among the first and the foremost in seizing upon the game as a means to rise out of urban slums,” wrote Richard Peterson in “The Irish in the Early History of Baseball.” “It is true that some Irish players in the first decades of professional baseball could not handle their new financial success and celebrity status and ended their careers and sometimes their lives in disgrace and tragedy. But it is also true that many performed so well and conducted themselves with such integrity that they became a major reason for the advancement of baseball into a major sport, a big business, and a national pastime worthy of the support and passion of the American public.”
While Michael Cusack was outlining his peculiarly Irish vision for sport back home and putting in place the building blocks to construct the largest sporting association in the history of the country, the preponderance of Irish on the baseball fields of the United States was such that a myth grew up claiming their superiority was somehow based on a unique genetic advantage possessed only by those hailing from that island 3,000 miles across the sea. How else to explain why the sport sweeping the nation could be described by one historian as “a game of the Irish, by the Irish and for the Irish”?
The ability of Irishmen with bats and balls in their hands was matched by their prowess in the boxing ring. The most famous fighter, and by extension the most celebrated athlete, in America that year and most others over the next decade was John L. Sullivan. His parents had emigrated from Kerry and Roscommon, and by virtue of his bareknuckle victory over Paddy Ryan (a pugilist born in the same Tipperary town where Cusack chaired his gathering) two years earlier, Sullivan was regarded as the heavyweight champion of the world.
On November 11th, 1884, Sullivan was paid $8000 for an exhibition bout against John Laflin at a packed Madison Square Garden. A few days earlier, Kildare-born Jack “non-pareil” Dempsey, so called because no other fighter possessed comparable natural talent to him, had confirmed his growing reputation as the most gifted boxer in America with a victory over Tom Ferguson in which he’d retained his American middleweight champion belt. Sullivan and Dempsey were merely the two most famous in an era when boxing in this country was as Irish then as it is Hispanic now.
Just like on the baseball diamonds, non-Irish contenders in the ring often Gaelicized their names to amplify their chances of making it to the top. The fashion for all things Hibernian in the sporting arena extended to other codes too. In a time when competitive walking was a huge box office attraction, regularly selling out Madison Square Garden for races where serious cash prizes were on offer, Cork’s Daniel O’Leary was among the biggest stars and promoters.
On the water, where rowing was another professional occupation sometimes worth $1000 a race to the winner, the Irish were to the fore too in the 1880s and beyond. Such was the diversity of Irish achievement that one wonders whether Cusack and his cohorts knew that the emigrants in America were excelling at so many different disciplines and saw this as further evidence of the national sporting potential to be tapped into by the GAA.
At this juncture in American history, James Naismith hadn’t yet used peach baskets to invent the game of basketball, the construction of the country’s first golf course was four years away, and the only major sport yet untouched by the Irish was the new brand of football gaining popularity across the country. In 1884, grid-iron was an amateur pursuit still largely confined to the Ivy League colleges of the North-East, exclusive bastions which had not yet been stormed by the immigrants and their children. Similar wealth and class barriers prevented the immigrants from participating in tennis which had established its own national association in 1881.
Apart from taking up and mastering so many different sports, plenty of the Irish in America had brought their own games with them to the new country. Decades before the GAA was properly founded, hurling and, to a lesser extent, Gaelic football clubs, existed as far west as San Francisco and as far south as New Orleans. In New York, immigrants often thronged to the handball alleys too where money could be made wagering on their own men. Not sure whether Cusack would have approved of gambling like that though.