US warriors champion the warrior sport of hurling

“THIS is a warrior sport and we are warriors” — that’s how one American soldier explains his love of hurling, a passion shared by fellow members of a United States National Guard unit from Concord, New Hampshire.

Lieutenant Colonel Ray Valas, of the New Hampshire National Guard, has no family ties in Ireland and had never heard of the sport until 2005. That was the year he and his comrades “discovered” hurling — not at Croke Park or any other playing field, but on a television at Shannon Airport passing through after a year’s deployment in Iraq.

“We came through Shannon for the morning refuelling stop and I happened to see a little bit of a hurling match on a TV screen by the bar, and a bunch of us said: what is that sport?”