Camán everybody: Bringing hurling to the Oval Office

WHEN Barack Obama stood on the front lawn of Áras an hUachtarán on Monday morning, holding a hurley in his golfer’s grip and swinging it from the elbows like he was warming up in a batting cage, we all knew how he had come to be there.

We’ve all read the stories of his young life in Hawaii and Indonesia. We learned of his nascent political career on the spit-and-sawdust Chicago shop floor. We saw him win an election and take an oath and duck through the door of Marine One on to the Phoenix Park grass.

On Monday morning, he smiled as he took the unfamiliar stick in his hands, stepped towards the already-charmed press pack and half-joked of ‘paddling’ members of the United States Congress with this Irish ash, if they ever stepped out of line again.

We knew well how he’d reached that point.

But how did the hurley get there? Phil Archbold put it there.

Let’s rewind a little. The Dubliner was working in the post and print room of a stockbroking firm in the capital. But he — bravely — jacked it all in and set himself on another road, one leading towards dual passions: sport and history.

“I’m a tour guide at Croke Park now and when they rang there looking for something to give the president on his visit, I think someone got them on to us,” he said.

Archbold is someone who bookends phone messages with a ‘dia duit’ and a ‘slán’. After two years leading tours through crowds of ghosts in Kilmainham Jail, you suspect he knows why it’s important still. When he moved across the river to Croker, he fell in love with the small ball code.

“I only found hurling in the past few years. I grew up in the Coolock-Darndale area. We would’ve been lads in the late 1970s and 80s. You know, it was a working class area of Dublin, and generally there wasn’t too much hurling around.

“I was always a football or soccer fan and followed it for years but I’m all about the hurling now. I came in one day and said it to the lads — I can’t go on following everything so it’s just hurling now,” he added. Game over, Heffo.

Archbold and his wife noticed a gap in the market sometime later and Heritage Hurleys was born.

“We have a small gift shop and there was no real hurling gift out there, we realised. It’s such a unique thing — hurling — it’s our own 2,000-year-old sport and people love learning about it when they’re here, let me tell you.

“Myself and the wife, whenever we get the chance, are off in the car and we’re down the country and we saw there too that none of the gift shops have anything really to do with hurling. So I looked around the web myself and there was a few guys customising hurleys but we wanted to move it on a bit. We put in our own money and made up a couple of samples and got things going.”

The hurleys are souvenirs — he pitches them to me as perfect for weddings, club awards, tourists, whatever — with customised images, inscriptions or crests. It seems like one of those post-it note ideas; why didn’t anyone else think of that?

“It’s going slow at the moment. It’s tough trying to do everything and hold down a job. I could do so much more but who can afford to jack in the job?

“Some weekends, I might get in the car and use a load of petrol and get them out there a bit more — and no one has not taken one when they see them — but there’s a lot of running in it. But we’ve the website running now and hopefully this’ll make a difference.

“We couldn’t get any investment, the bank wouldn’t even give us an overdraft. But hopefully it’ll move on a bit now.”

All the hurleys are those with bad grain and this was one of John Torpey’s from Clare. Archbold imprinted Celtic symbols — “circles of eternity” from the Newgrange stone — on the shaft.

An inscription reads: “Presented to Barack Obama, President of the United States of America, on the occasion of his first visit to Ireland, May 2011 by An Taoiseach Enda Kenny TD.”

And if one of your products is kept under the Resolute desk in the Oval Office, your marketing budget isn’t so much of a worry anymore.

How’d you manage that one?

“The Taoiseach’s office was looking for something for a nice gift for the president. And there was a lack of gifts out there that relates to hurling — same as we found — so I think someone suggested they contact us.

“I watched [the visit] on Monday morning. It was a very proud moment. I don’t think I realised beforehand how much of a big deal it would be. It was like any customer. I wanted to get it right. But that hurley is part of history now. It was a very proud moment.”

Contact: [e-mail]; Twitter: @adrianrussell