This is not your da’s New York football team. They aren’t a rag-tag crowd of misfits. The days of them being a collection of hardy bucks rolling off the building sites to leave a few skelps on the lads from the old country are long gone. Some of them aren’t altogether sure if this is a good or a bad thing.
Johnny McGeeney has put together a side that has by far the most senior inter-county experience of any since New York first entered Connacht in 1999. Of the 15 players who started against Leitrim, 10 have either won provincial medals or played in provincial finals. Granted, Mark Ellis and Johnny Glynn did it in hurling but they did so at the sharpest end. Two of the New York defenders in Gaelic Park a fortnight ago have been All Star nominees in the past five years.
For all that, the team members who have most recently played in Croke Park are actual, born-and-bred Americans. Jamie Boyle and Mikey Brosnan played corner-back and corner-forward in Gaelic Park last time out but they were also on the New York team that lost to Kilkenny in the All-Ireland Junior final nine months ago. They played the curtain-raiser to the Kerry v Dublin semi-final and had the best seat in the house for Seán O’Shea’s free.
“We were right there, right in front of the Dublin and Kerry benches,” says Boyle, team captain then and now. “It was unbelievable. Even just to take a look at the size of all those guys. Everyone in those teams is a large human being. And to see how fast and how smooth they play that game was amazing up close.”
Boyle grew up in Monroe, New York, about an hour out of the city. His people are from Donegal on his mother’s side and Wexford on his dad’s. They met at Good Shepherd GAA club on the north tip of Manhattan before raising their boys upstate. When the Irish-born players try to do his accent, he reckons they make him sound like a hayseed.
He played a bit of Gaelic football growing up but drifted away in his teens. He was more into soccer and because he was good at it, the high school coaches wondered would he be any use if they stuck pads on him and tried to make him a kicker on the gridiron team. Turned out he was – so much so that he made it all the way to Division One college football with the University of Central Florida in the early 2010s.
So why aren’t you kicking in the NFL, Jamie? What gives?
“Because only 32 guys on the planet get to do that every year,” he laughs. “It’s incredibly difficult. The biggest shame of it was that two years after I left college, UCF came to Ireland and played a game against Penn State at Croke Park. That game was in the works for years – when I was there, it was always rumoured that we were going to go to Ireland and play in Croke Park. I guess I was meant to do it another way.”
Though he went the long way round, the road turned out to be far shorter than he could have imagined. Boyle spent the pandemic the same as we all did. Working from home, bored to bits, getting out running to keep his sanity on some bit of an even keel.
Put all that in the blender and what it resulted in was a manically fit human who found that he craved human contact. He had always said he’d go back and play Gaelic again some day. He was 28 and if he didn’t do it now, when was he ever going to? Problem solved.
That was in late 2020. He joined up with St Barnabas, won two New York county titles and was called into the county panel. Last summer, New York played their first match in three years, the very last unit of the GAA to get a game after all the Covid restrictions had been lifted. By the end of the year, he’d played four times – twice with the seniors in Connacht and the Tailteann Cup in May and June, twice with the juniors in July. Couch to Croke Park in the space of two years.
“You guys over there probably think of New York-born footballers the same way I do about Irish guys playing basketball,” he says. “Any time an Irish guy says he plays basketball, I immediately in my head go, ‘Yeah, sure you do. We’ll see.’ So that’s fair enough.
“But going back to play again was such a great decision for me. Getting to go back and being part of a team again, I was welcomed with open arms. Playing in the Tailteann Cup last year was unbelievable for us New York guys. When we played Offaly, we really got to see the distance we have to go to get up to the level of how the game is played. That gave us such a good basis to work off getting ready for this year.”
The uncommonly mild winter just gone did them no harm either. The previous year, as with most years, New York was ice-cold and snow-sprinkled well into the spring. “For the first few months of training, we were basically a running club,” McGeeney told The Irish Times last summer. “There was nowhere to play or train with a ball.”
This time around, while New Yorkers were sunbathing in February, the New York football team was getting its hands on leather at a far earlier point in the calendar than usual. So it all adds up.
Irish-born players with genuine intercounty credentials. Native New Yorkers with experience of playing on both sides of the Atlantic. A thicker than normal wedge of lead-in time and opportunities to put in quality training together. All culminating in an unforgettable night in the Bronx against Leitrim.
“We enjoyed every bit of it,” Boyle says. “We obviously went for a meal on Saturday afterwards and that went late. Then we hung out together all day Sunday and most of Monday too. Then we went back training on Tuesday to get ready for Sligo. We’ve done a lot of talking together as a team. About what we want to do and where we want to go.”
And where is that? It’s hard to know. Every team goes out to do all it can but there has to be at least a little wariness in the New York camp at the prospect of actually beating Sligo on Saturday afternoon. Whatever about making it to a Connacht final, do they really want to be in the Sam Maguire?
Boyle dutifully does the one-game-at-a-time routine but it’s not a small consideration. Crossing the Atlantic for a football match is one thing. Crossing it for three ritual hidings is another altogether.
For a start, it’s not the easiest thing to explain to your employers. Some of the New York players work for Irish companies but plenty of them don’t. Boyle is a project manager in a construction company whose owners are Italian. A few days after the Leitrim win, his boss approached and started giving out.
“He was going, ‘I had no idea!’ Somebody on the job obviously told him about the Leitrim win and he had his phone out scrolling through match reports. He knew I played sports but he has no clue what the GAA is or anything like that. So he got real excited and sent links to articles companywide.”
All of which is bound to help at least a little when you’re looking for weeks off at a time to head to Ireland to play football. New York arrived in Dublin on Wednesday and have been staying in the Great Northern Hotel in Bundoran. On Saturday afternoon in Sligo, they have a chance to do something that has been unthinkable throughout their history.
“We have guys in the panel who have been to the top of the mountain,” Boyle says. “We have such great leadership in there. All-Ireland winners, guys who have played at the highest level. Someone like Johnny Glynn has been through wars, he’s the ultimate leader. So we are very grounded in experience. We can’t wait to go and play and whatever comes of it, so be it.”
This time three years ago, Gaelic football was a memory, something Boyle used to be. Then he made it all that he is.
Look what happened.
