A Time and Place Where All Irish Eyes Can Smile
We are too hard on ourselves sometimes. We tend to notice only the bad things. We focus on the racist who shaves his head and condemns anybody who is different from himself and we conclude that our country is hopelessly split by color, by sex, by religion.
We focus on the millionaire athlete who tears up his contract or beats up his girlfriend and we conclude that sports has become too filled up with egomaniacs and spoiled brats and therefore it is not worthy of our passion.
And then two soccer teams come to Claremont from Belfast, Northern Ireland. One team, the under 11s, are Protestant boys. One team, the under 12s, are Catholic boys. At home in Belfast these boys can’t play soccer against each other, go to school together, visit each other’s homes. Here, one Protestant boy and one Catholic boy are paired off and sent to the home of a member of the Claremont Stars.
Which brings us to La Puerta Sports Park in Claremont on a summer night when you see something as silly as an ice-cube fight and hear something as sweet as how Darren O’Neill, Protestant, and Darren Doherty, Catholic, shared a hammock on the patio of Merrill Ring’s home early in the morning before the adults were up.
These teams from Northern Ireland, the Catholic Celtics and Protestant St. Andrews, are in a program called Belfast United. Men like William Smith, a father and a part-time soccer coach, and Joe Kincaid, a bricklayer and father, and Deano Heaney, a part-time soccer coach and father and cab driver and doer of any odd job to help support his family, have chosen to try to get along in a country where many are taught to hate each other.
Smith and Kincaid are Protestant. Heaney is Catholic.
They are all sick about what has become of their country. Kincaid, 40, says his heart was nearly broken when he moved his family to a new home, “as close as from here to there,” Kincaid says pointing across the soccer field at La Puerta, “to the Catholics.” “My son, Stuart, came to me one night and said that he was afraid. Afraid the Catholics might bomb us. That’s not how I want my son to grow up.” Stuart is on this trip.
Heaney, 41, says he watched Catholic little boys play soccer and Protestant little boys play soccer and thought about how all the little boys were the same, really. Heaney says with pride that his family and the Kincaids are talking about taking a holiday trip together. Heaney says this could never have happened 10 years ago.
It was about 10 years ago, Smith says, that the idea of using sports as the negotiator occurred to some youth soccer coaches in Belfast. Merely gathering the parents together the first time was nearly a deal-breaker. “We had a hard time finding neutral territory where both groups could meet,” Smith explains. “We didn’t want to pick the older age groups, the 15- and 16-year-olds because some of their hatreds were too ingrained. It wasn’t easy.”
At first, small trips were taken. To England. Then, Smith says, “to the Continent, to Europe.” But always the dream was to bring these boys who have never known anything but life in the middle of “the troubles,” to the United States.
Last year, with help, both politically and in fund raising, from former Maine senator George Mitchell, the Belfast boys came to Claremont. They are back again this year to play in the Summer Classic Tournament at Cal Poly Pomona.
Samuel McCaw, an 11-year-old from the Protestant team says “it was scary” at first to meet the Catholic team. “The troubles, you know, and people get killed if they are in the wrong place.” The wrong place would be with Catholics of course, but when these boys get together it takes about five minutes for the wariness to go away and for the talk to become all about soccer.
Daniel Hanna, a Catholic, says he was “a wee bit afraid” of what would happen when he talked to a Protestant boy. But now, three days into the 10-day trip, Hanna proclaims this mingling of Protestants and Catholics, “brilliant.”
All the Northern Ireland boys find joy in the same thing. The backyard swimming pools. “Brilliant.” Pro wrestling on TV. “Brilliant.” (And, may we all apologize to parents in Northern Ireland for bringing the WWF to your youngsters). The megaplex movie theaters. “Really brilliant.”
Smith says that wide 11-year-old eyes open during a trip to the mall. “You see all these Asian people and Hispanic people and blacks and whites in the same place. The kids see this. They notice. They ask how everybody can get along. “And they play soccer games against teams with all different kinds of kids. On this trip our children are seeing that it is possible to get along well together.”
Smith says many of the boys from last year’s trip have remained in contact. But only by telephone. “They talk, but they can’t really get together and play with each other yet. Things haven’t gotten better in that way,” Smith says.
Still, Smith says, the boys are talking. And because the boys talk, the parents talk.
There’s not a boy on this trip whose family or neighbor hasn’t been touched by the troubles. One boy on the Protestant team has a father who has been in prison because of the troubles. “We were a little wary of taking the son,” Smith says. “We were afraid he’d be too much like the father. But he’s not.” Heaney says that “thankfully my parents raised me not to hate, but there’s only a small minority of us.” “Through programs like this, maybe we can make a majority someday. Through sports is the best way to start. In the United States, it’s the best way to learn how to get along.”
Diane Pucin can be reached at her e-mail address: diane.pucin@latimes.com.
