Fields of Glory, or How the Irish Get Their Kicks

For the great Gaels of Ireland

Are the men that God made mad,

For all their wars are merry,

And all their songs are sad.

--G.K. Chesterton

Dennis Lannon, an El Toro chiropractor, has been standing on the sidelines of the football field watching 30 Irishmen lustily bash into each other for about 45 minutes. Perhaps wondering why he hasn’t yet had any bodily repair work to do, he picks up a beer and waves it.

Tom Heneghan, backpedaling on defense, spots the can and begins to stalk it.

“Is that a mirage?” asks Heneghan. Assured by Lannon that it isn’t, he grabs the beer, takes a sturdy pull on it, turns and trots back into the crush of bodies.

“Isn’t this something?” asks Lannon, shaking his head and grinning. “I’m a chiropractor, a specialist in sports medicine. I’ve studied it for years. And the only thing I end up doing out here is handing these guys beer.”

They get together every couple of weeks--nearly 8,000 miles from their birthplaces in Galway, Roscommon, Cork, Armagh and dozens of other greenswards of Ireland--to carry on a sporting tradition that is in part older than their own culture.

Some of them are among the very best in their sports and have played in great Irish stadiums before tens of thousands of wildly cheering, highly partisan fans. Some of them are relatively new to America, residents for only a couple of years, and some have lived here for most of their adult lives.

But today, as latter-day Irish immigrants, they play their Gaelic football and hurling matches not in the brooding chill of Ireland, but under the warm skies of Southern California.

In Orange County, the home team is the Wild Geese, and their home turf is the overgrown athletic field at the Novitiate of the Brothers of St. Patrick in Midway City, an unincorporated area virtually surrounded by Westminster. There, roughly every other Sunday, the Wild Geese and other Southern California teams meet for Gaelic football matches. Less frequently, hurling matches are thrown together when the few local practitioners of that quick and punishing sport are able to show up at the same place at the same time.

The two sports are almost identical in rules and method of play. In Gaelic football, the object is to score by kicking a soccer-style ball into or directly over the opposing team’s goal. The ball can be caught and held in the hands, but a player may run with it for only three steps before fisting it off to another player, bouncing it on the ground or kicking it off his foot and back into his own hands again. Defensive players may not make any intentional violent contact, but are allowed to try to strip the ball from the hands of the offensive player.

In hurling, the rules are substantially the same but the equipment is different. The ball, called a sliothair (pronounced “slither” with a hard “th”), is the size of a baseball. It is made of hard leather-covered cork, with raised seams that make it easier to grasp. It is propelled toward the goal with a stick made of ash, about the length of a baseball bat but flared to a flat surface at the end. It is called a hurley, and its handle looks distressingly like that of an ax.

The sliothair may be caught on the fly and held in the hand for three steps before being passed or bounced off the end of the hurley and back into the player’s hand.

Both sports are played on a field--or “pitch”--measuring approximately 140 by 80 yards. There are two 30-minute periods and 15 players on each side. There are no timeouts for any reason, and only three substitutions are allowed.

Both sports are known for the rugged style of play necessary to win. Hurling, however, has the added hazard of the constantly flailing, powerfully swung hurleys.

Still, the players love a good set-to.

Kevin Niland, 39, a former top-level hurler from Galway, appears to be unsure whether to laugh or scream. He has just broken his third hurley within five minutes, this time by cracking it over the stick of an opposing player. The two pieces are a comic sight, hanging limply together in his hand, held by several windings of black tape. He opts for the scream.

“For God’s sake, give me another one! There’s no one in the goal!”

Someone hands him one and makes a crack about Niland owning stock in the hurley manufacturing company. Jerry Mackey, 40, a former Ireland footballer whose personalized license plate bears the name of his birthplace, County Armagh, uses the incident to illustrate a point.

“These guys are playing this game for fun because they don’t get together for it that often,” he says. “But you look at Kevin there, and you see intensity; you see dedication. When you get out there, you play all out. And in a big match, like the All-Ireland (the national championships), well, you’d give everything. You’d be ready to get out and give your life for it.”

Hurling, Mackey says, “is without doubt the most dangerous game in the world. Sometimes it seems incredible that no one’s killed. But you actually see relatively few injuries because the players know how to protect themselves.”

In spite of the ferocity of the blows with which the sliothair is struck, few hurlers wear any protection at all, Mackey says. Only a few wear hockey-style helmets.

“Some of those boys, if they meet the ball smack-on, can flick it 100 yards or more,” Mackey says. “It’s the fastest field sport in the world.”

But Niland loves it.

“I’ve been playing now for about 22 years,” says Niland, a furniture finisher from Long Beach, “but I haven’t been actually competitive for about the last 10. It’s more of a social thing now.”

As evidence of his tenure with the game, he stretches out both hands and displays two sets of crooked fingers that have been repeatedly broken over the years.

“You have to start playing when you’re about knee-high,” he says. “You’ve got to be a wee little bopper.

“But now,” he says, grinning broadly and reaching out with his hurley to prod another player, 44-year-old Pat Mulcahey, in the ribs, “we even let our grandfathers play.”

Mulcahey vows revenge.

Gaelic football and hurling were born in Ireland and today are played almost exclusively by the Irish. Hurling, the older of the two sports, is mentioned in Irish mythology and probably predates Christ. Gaelic football was played more than a century before soccer and rugby were introduced to Ireland.

Today the sports are governed by the Gaelic Athletic Assn., based in Ireland. The Wild Geese and other teams in America are members of the association.

Many native Irish players have achieved legendary status in their country and have become, for many Irish, the counterparts of athletes such as Reggie Jackson or Joe Montana. However, one fact will always set them apart from most other public sports figures.

“They’re not paid a dime,” says Mackey, a chemical company employee who lives in Garden Grove. “They’re all amateurs in Ireland. They all work during the day and practice in the evenings and play on the weekends. Sometimes they might get called on to open a sporting goods store or something like that, but no one’s in the game for what they’re going to get out of it, that’s for sure.”

Yet another inflexible rule cements the tradition of the sports: A player must play for a team that represents the county of his birth.

“There just aren’t enough people in Ireland to support a truly professional game,” says Tom Heneghan as he waits for the start of the football game with the team from San Diego, Clana-na-Gael. “Even if an Irishman gets really good at soccer, he’s often grabbed up by England.”

Heneghan, a 35-year-old El Toro resident, has been living in the United States for two years. He played top-level football for the county Roscommon team for 14 years before serving as the team’s coach in 1977. He now works for the Irish Tourist Board.

“These are our national games,” he says. “We grew up with them. They’re a part of our national tradition. And these games were really responsible for a great pulling together of the Irish people in times gone by. They helped keep people’s spirits alive when times were hard.

“It’s still like that today. About 70,000 people show up for the national finals. You drive into a little town in Ireland on the day of a match, and you’re likely to find it empty.”

The spectators at the novitiate field are few but merry--mostly wives, girlfriends and children of the players. A few men set up a makeshift barbecue grill with bricks and cook hamburgers and hot dogs while others unload several cases of beer. Much of the food and drink will disappear before the players adjourn to a local bar after the games for more food and drink.

The women on the sidelines show the same unconcern about the rugged play on the field as one might see at a weekend softball game. At times, they become absorbed in conversation with each other and turn their attention completely away from the field. Still, they know the nature of the games.

Rose Coulter, the wife of Wild Geese coach Tony McCarthy, says, “You see some of the quietest guys come out here and when they get in there to play they become just vicious. But afterward everybody shakes hands and goes out for beer. That’s always the best part.”

John Brown, 24, a shipping company dispatcher from Seal Beach, grew up in New York and was encouraged to learn to play Gaelic football by his Irish parents.

“I’ve been playing since I was 8,” he says. “It’s a really physical game. There’s a lot of hitting out there. I find it enjoyable. I’ve been out here four years now. I never thought I’d find it in Southern California.”

Unlike the many Irish who play both Gaelic sports, Brown is not a hurler.

“I still have a few brains in my head,” he says.

Kevin McDonnell, however, does play both. A Marine fighter pilot from Laguna Niguel, McDonnell, 25, began playing the sports, like Brown, in New York at the behest of his father, who was born in Dublin.

He began playing with Clana-na-Gael while he was living for a time in Arizona. He drove regularly to the San Diego area to play in matches.

Walking off the field after the hurling match, McDonnell shows one of the more visible injuries of the game: knuckles cut and bruised from a hurley swipe.

“It’s a blast,” McDonnell says.

Injuries are mystic occurrences in Gaelic sports. Because play does not stop for an injury, the player must either be removed and replaced or treated quickly and shoved back into the chaos.

In either case, the Magic Sponge comes into play.

“At every football or hurling match, you’ll see someone with a bucket of water with a sponge in it,” says Dennis Lannon, the chiropractor and unofficial team trainer for the Wild Geese. “That’s the Magic Sponge. They use it instead of me.

“Let’s say some player takes a really hard knock, and he’s lying on the ground. Somebody comes out with this sponge--it’s just a sponge with water--and they squeeze it over wherever he’s been hurt. And then they may stand him up--if he can stand--and help him off the field.

“But a lot of guys flat refuse to stand up unless they’ve gotten the business with the Magic Sponge. And if you try to do something actually therapeutic for them other than the sponge, it can cause great dissension.”

Most of the players manage to end up in a nearby pub before darkness finally overtakes the field. There they talk football, hurling, politics, travel, economics, football and hurling. The bar owner, apparently not expecting a huge crowd of thirsty Irishmen, hurriedly adds a second bartender. The talk and laughter over the recent merry war continues into the evening.

And without the sad songs.