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 Getting my Irish up
Posted: Wednesday March 17, 1999 02:23 PM
Americans as a general rule have never highly ethnicized sport. Soccer teams probably had the most Old World identification -- a team called the Lithuanians playing the Poles, that sort of thing. And, of course, that's one of the reasons that soccer never caught on in the United States, because it emphasized its immigrant past, rather than the American present. But teams named "Germans" were also fairly common -- at least till we went to war with the Kaiser, when even sauerkraut was renamed "victory cabbage." And in the inner cities, where basketball took a foothold, local amateur teams sometimes highlighted the prevalent neighborhood roots. The current Golden State Warriors can, for example, trace themselves directly back to the Philadelphia Sphas -- S.P.H.A.S: the South Philadelphia Hebrew Athletic Society. But even if this weren't St. Patrick's Day, if I asked you which one nationality was most identified with sport in America, almost everyone would know the answer. No, it's not the Peruvians. Why, going back for more than a century, the number of boxers who called themselves Irish This or Irish That has been legion. And the only two major American teams that boast ethnic nicknames connect themselves to the auld sod: the Notre Dame Fighting Irish and the Boston Celtics. Of course, the Celtics was much more a name of convenience than was the Irish of Notre Dame. The so-called Original Celtics, in fact, had been a New York team, but even early on they were about as Irish as Sri Lanka -- featuring ringers named Dutch and Swede, Lapchick and Holman. Likewise, when the new professional league opened after the Second World War, Boston appropriated the fabled basketball name, but mostly just for marketing reasons. Notre Dame was different. Early in this century, when its football team first began to make a name for itself, few enough Irish could go to college in America. Notre Dame came to matter to Irish, to Roman Catholics of every heritage -- whether or not they'd ever even been to South Bend. "Subway alumni," we called them, snootily at first, then with envy. And, in a very real sense, Notre Dame became our one national university -- far more than Harvard ever did. But as Irish-Americans became real alumni of colleges all over the U.S., the identification with Notre Dame began to fade. A somewhat analagous case could be made for African-Americans and the Harlem Globetrotters. As soon as black players were accepted into the NBA, the Globies lost their singular cachet. Notre Dame had always, proudly, been an independent team, too good for any conference, but a few years ago it admitted that it wasn't popular enough any more and joined the Big East ... in every sport but football. Then, just weeks ago, the school's board of trustees met to decide whether or not to accept an invitation to take the football team into the Big Ten. The trustees voted to stay independent, but where they were meeting seemed more significant than their decision. The board of Notre Dame had assembled in ... London. And nobody really bothered much with that irony. The fact that, at this millennium moment, Ireland as a nation is prospering as never before, just as its grand old namesake Irish-American teams are descending to mediocrity, is a last little bit of melting-pot lore. On this St. Paddy's Day, in America, you've really arrived when you don't need any team with an old-world connection to cheer for anymore. Ah, and may the blessings of each day be the blessings ye need the most.
These commentaries, which appear each Wednesday on National Public Radio's Morning Edition, are posted weekly by CNN/SI.
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