Sport: Irishmen with Clubs

Irishmen have always liked to carry clubs, liked to use them in a fight. Their national game, hurling, gives them a chance to do both. The object of hurling is to belabor a lively little leather-covered ball down a 140-yard field into a goal. Each goal has a cross bar eight feet high; when the ball goes under the cross bar, it counts 3 points; over it counts 1. The implements, heavy shillalahs with a blade at one end, are “hurleys.” Their resemblance to shinny sticks has caused hurling to be thought of as a form of field hockey. But the method in which hurleys are used suggests instead that golf is a form of hurling modified by a more cautious race.

Hurling is a national game because it is played by all Irishmen and by no one else. The game is so old that no one knows how it started; perhaps it began when two Irishmen fought with clubs for possession of a potato and their neighbors took sides. There was hurling in Ireland a thousand years ago and it has been played ever since. Until fairly recently, the whole male population of a town or a village might take part in a game. A few rules and regulations were introduced when the Gaelic Athletic Association was formed in 1884, but not so many as to infringe upon its original character. Sides are now limited to 15 (six forwards, six backs, 2 centre fielders, a goal guard); no substitutions are permitted except when a player is severely injured.

Every county in Ireland has a hurling team to represent it, composed of hurlers who play for love of the game. In the U. S., in cities where there is a large Irish population, the game is similarly played by teams of hurlers who represent the counties where they or their forbears were born. Hurling games in the U. S. are often preceded by Gaelic football, followed by social festivities. Since all kinds of Irishmen play hurling, all kinds of Irishmen watch them play. In the crowd at a hurling game, as in the personnel of a hurling team (see cut), it is possible to see every kind of Irish face, hear every kind of Irish brogue.

Since 1884, Tipperary has won the All-Ireland championship eleven times. In 1926, the Tipperary team visited the U. S., won ten games in a row. All-Ireland champions in 1930, the Tipperary hurling team arrived in the U. S. again last week, began another six-week tour to include Somerville (Mass.), Manhattan, Detroit, Chicago and San Francisco.

The first game, against a selection from 32 teams in & around New York City, was attended by a crowd of 25,000 whooping, yelling Irishmen who shouted loudest when they saw a broken head. They nearly saw one in the first seconds of the game. When Boss John Francis Curry of Tammany Hall threw in the first ball, he was instantly surrounded by a swarm of hurlers struggling to get at it with their hurleys. Boss Curry, who used to be a sprinter, scampered to the sidelines uninjured. Martin Kennedy, called “the man in the hat” because he always wears one, and considered the finest full forward in the world, made three goals for Tipperary. Tom Treacy, famed for a game he played in Dublin with a bloody bandage wrapped around his head, made another, with a shot from midfield that streaked directly into the New York goal. Most spectacular player on either team was Tom O’Meara of Toomevara, Tipperary’s goal guard. He kept his stick so busy fending ball and players from his goal, that New York hurlers though they got 4 points with high goals, were only once able to thrash the ball through under the cross bar. Tipperary won, 17 to 7, began practicing for their next game in Somerville, Mass.

Promoter of Tipperary’s All-Ireland Champions is Dan Breen, famed leader of Sinn Fein riots from 1919 to 1923, onetime Commandant General of the Third Tipperary Brigade in the Irish Republican Army, before that a famed Tipperary hurler.