Minor celebrity bainisteoir fills void in Manhattan
It was a huge gamble on my part — not just because of the audacity it takes to pick up a hurley again and magically expect to have that all-important first touch.
There was also the weekly worry that no reader outside my immediate family could possibly be interested that New York had given me this second chance.
My increasingly expat sensibilities ushered all those insecurities away and I proceeded to write about the wide-eyed joy of walking through Brooklyn and the Bronx with my hurley in hand before I made my two-goal debut in the red, white and black of Hoboken.
It was a good day and no amount of jibes at my friends’ wedding back in Cork a couple of weeks later could possibly have taken that away from me.
Steeled by those twin states of mind — hankering after home and trying to connect in as many ways as possible — I’ve recently decided to take my New York GAA patronage up a notch.
I have been given the great honour of managing New York’s newest Gaelic football team, The Manhattan Gaels.
I won’t pretend that it didn’t happen by default nor that I did anything in particular to merit it.
I don’t yet have the requisite belly nor the bainisteoir bib to drape down over it. But I’m sure that will come in time. (The bib, not the belly.) The Manhattan Gaels were formed over the winter, the brainchild of a group of Manhattanite Irish and Irish-Americans for whom the north Bronx epicentre of New York GAA was too far removed.
Many more enthusiastic volunteers, too many to mention individually by name, jumped on board with the sort of energy so typical of expats everywhere around the world.
The mission statement was inherently GAA: all-inclusive, local and true to its roots. The colours would be those of the New York flag: royal blue, white and light orange. There would be no budget for summertime players and instead, any money raised would be ploughed back into starting a football team from scratch while also eventually incorporating a ladies’ team.
One of the smarter plans of the Gaels is to bring the association’s version of handball to one of the many alleys dotted around the five boroughs and also to somehow merge rounders with the wildly popular softball at one of the many diamonds.
However, it would be our entry into the ranks of New York junior football that would be the spearhead of our efforts. When I became involved late last year, I had been under the impression that it would be very much a social thing, a chance to kick a ball around competitively while avoiding the, at times, absurd risk to one’s life that goes hand in hand with playing up in Gaelic Park.
Things took a turn in January when Monday night training sessions brought more legit players than had been expected to the freezing cold of Randall’s Island, just over the East River from Upper Manhattan.
Ladies’ footballers trained side by side with the men and the likes of me; former players whose sell-by date had long since passed.
It’s a terrible commute to the island which houses a sewage plant and the modest stadium Pele used to play at when he joined the New York Cosmos. But still they came and all of a sudden they were owed much more than token competition and a few pints afterwards. Being a glutton for punishment with a creeping desire to be the centre of attention (let’s be honest: I wouldn’t be in these pages if that weren’t true), I decided that no proper manager was going to fall out of the sky and shape our panel.
If I have one qualification for this task it’s having the requisite coldness of heart to choose a panel of 25 from our 45 registered players and then a first 15 to run out onto Gaelic Park this past Sunday, wearing that gleaming new jersey.
Suddenly it was all real and a late goal against a young Rockland (a club from Pearl River north of the city and a real bastion of all that is good about the GAA) gave our new club a day to remember.
We’re still a curiosity for what is a largely conservative county board and these humble beginnings arrived in what was ultimately nothing more than a junior league game.
But decked out in our club colours and enjoying our win on a glorious spring day in Gaelic Park, we couldn’t have been happier.
*johnwriordan@gmail.com; Twitter: JohnWRiordan
