Why this Irish American loves the GAA in Ireland

Love of Ireland's national sport

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Kieran Donaghy fields the ball during the Munster football final against Cork during this years championship

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I can’t actually remember who won the match that evening, but I’ll always remember the passion, commitment and sporting camaraderie of the players and onlookers.  I also remember the non-stop talk about football in the pub after the match, with mini-explosions of temper and howls of laughter featuring in almost equal, sustained volume.

What later struck me was that this club football match in the rural west of Ireland had reignited a sense in me of what sport is, or at least should be, about.  At the match, and at every one I’ve been to since, the love of the game, the loyalty to one’s home and a shared spirit of community were manifest.

Somewhere along the way, I had lost this sense.  As a childhood sports fanatic, my moods were typically linked directly to the fortunes of the Boston professional sports teams and the Boston College football and basketball teams. 

Over the years, maybe owing to so much heartache and precious little success, my fanaticism subsided.  There was more to my growing detachment, however, than the torture inflicted on my soul by the Boston Red Sox (prior to 2004 that is!).

Sport is meant to be fun.  Sport is meant to be a game, not a business.  It’s meant to be a positive influence on the lives of young people.  But after years of reading of multi-million dollar contracts being awarded to grown men who could play boys’ games and whose off-field antics often revealed them to be little more than overgrown boys, I gradually morphed into a casual fan.

Why get excited about a new free agent a team has just signed when he is just as likely to move on as soon as he gets the chance to make more money?  Why be so loyal to a team when the only thing that links most of its players to a city is the jersey they happen to be wearing? 

Why watch a game when, whether due to the luck of extraordinary genes, the drudgery of a life of constant training to the exclusion of all else, the use of performance enhancing drugs or a mixture of all three, there is scarcely a player the average fan can truly identify with? 

Dedicated fans of professional sports in the United States and of English Premiership soccer can certainly articulate reasoned responses to each of these three questions.  Yet each remains.

The sports fan in me came back to life that night in Galway.  Here were athletes who train regularly and commute long distances to do so in many cases, perform at a very high level and don’t get paid a cent. 

They, and male and female participants just like them around the country, are teachers, lawyers, tradesmen and women, doctors, nurses, engineers, Gardaí (policemen and policewomen), publicans.  The GAA is their avocation and they play for love, not money.

This is not to say that the GAA is perfect.  The players, management and supporters are not always sportsmanlike.  There is a creeping sense of professionalism, which is perhaps understandable given the extraordinary sacrifices made by players with no immediately tangible financial benefit.  County boards and management increasingly take a business-like approach to their decision making processes. 

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