Lovely hurling a uniquely Irish game despite globalisation of sports

On the Thursday after the All-Ireland hurling final, the Sports Illustrated morning newsletter landed in my inbox as usual. Of the three lead stories, two were about baseball and one fulminated about the Trump administration forcing the US Olympic Committee to ban transgender athletes. You don’t need to eat everything from the breakfast buffet.

But in the greeting at the top of the email, the curator of the newsletter wrote a tantalising paragraph. It read: “Good morning, I’m Dan Gartland. I’m back after attending what was easily the best sporting event I’ve ever seen: the All-Ireland hurling final. I’m excited to tell you more about it in a story you’ll read in a couple of months.”

Modesty doesn’t stand a chance against flattery and GAA people love compliments. We project an exceptionalism that we like to see confirmed by independent witnesses. Failing that, we say it to each other.

Gartland has been on the staff of Sports Illustrated for the last 11 years, covering all the biggest events in American sports. Part of the gig for a sports reporter is not to be swept away by an event. For that pleasure, you must buy a ticket. Gartland, though, couldn’t resist.

Through a stranger’s lens, everything we regard as commonplace has a different energy. Gartland had seen clips of hurling on TikTok, but he had never been to a match. Excavating deeply, he can trace ancestral roots to Cork and Tipperary through great-grandparents on his mother’s side, but he is a New Yorker by birth, and he wasn’t raised in the milieu of Irish American culture.

He arrived at the All-Ireland final without preconceptions. He was swept away by the atmosphere in the ground and on the streets nearby, by the antics on Hill 16, and what he saw as a visceral “expression of Irishness”. And he was entranced by this chaotic game that he was meeting for the first time.

“It was the speed of it,” he says two months later, “and the physicality. Even how far the ball travels and players being able to catch it. It was kind of like if an outfielder in baseball didn’t wear a glove. The ball travels similar distances, at a similar speed, but when you’re an outfielder there’s not another guy trying to knock you on your ass. That was incredible.”

The responses of people watching a big hurling game for the first time are rooted in bewilderment. Between Sky Sports and BBC more hurling finals than ever before have been broadcast in Britain over the last 20 years and the hot takes on social media are always amusing.

“BBC2 is showing hurling and I don’t think I’ve ever been so invested in a game I know nothing about,” wrote Dan on X when he came across the 2024 All-Ireland hurling final on his telly in Wales.

Another accidental viewer tried to paint a picture by slapping colours on a canvas. “Hurling appears to be a mix of UFC, rugby, hockey, football, baseball, the egg and spoon race all whilst hitting a snooker ball as hard as you can as high into the sky as possible towards goal with what looks like the bones of a tomahawk steak. 10/10. Would recommend.”

Just because we don’t see it like that doesn’t mean that we understand it either.

People have often wondered if hurling could connect with an audience beyond these shores and through the decades some broad stroke attempts were made. Hurling and football exhibitions were played at Wembley Stadium between 1958 and 1975, for example, with at least the tentative hope that the games would pique the interest of curious natives.

America was the destination for the early All-Stars tours and they involved an exhibition game too, but, just like in Wembley, they were events for emigrants to savour.

The only concerted, imaginative attempt to engage an American audience was the Super 11 games played in Boston in the middle of the last decade. With modified rules designed for fewer players and a smaller pitch, the hybrid game emphasised goalscoring in the interests of excitement and engagement. Staged in Fenway Park, home of the Boston Red Sox, the events themselves were a success, but there was no significant breakthrough with the locals.

But is that such a bad thing? The big professional sports are constantly exploring new markets. Football, golf and tennis have been tilling and harvesting in Asia for the last 20 years and it is also why the National Football League (NFL) will be in Croke Park on Sunday.

The NFL now has commercial tentacles worldwide. For the second year in a row, Brazil hosted a game in week one, 20 years after the first regular-season game outside of the United States was held in Mexico City. Last season, there were five regular-season games spread across Germany, England and Brazil; this season, there will be eight games, with Spain and Ireland added to the schedule. That number is bound to grow.

In professional sport, there are always new frontiers. The GAA is not in that game. It is not built for it. So, hurling lives here, a source of wonder to visitors, just like the Book of Kells or Newgrange. That doesn’t make the wonder any smaller.

The first issue of Sports Illustrated was published in August 1954, and just three months later, it carried a short piece on Christy Ring, the greatest hurler that ever lived, who had played a game in the US about that time.

“What Christy Ring does so well,” it read, “is play a game that at first glance looks like field hockey, but which resembles field hockey about as much as a Mercedes-Benz resembles a Baker Electric. Hurling is more like lacrosse played with axe handles or ice hockey with the puck continually in mid-air. It incorporates chip shots off the turf and fungo fly balls, but chip shots and fungos hit left-handed, right-handed or cross-handed on the dead run or in a crowd of fellow bat swingers. It is a game of bruising body contact, constant running and perfect eye-and-hand coordination.”

In Wednesday’s Sports Illustrated, Dan takes his turn to catch lightning in a bottle. Bravo.

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