Seamus Leonard

When I left Dublin for Boston last year, I was determined not to be a pining Paddy abroad. It was easy for me to be bullish about this, as I was in the lucky minority emigrating through choice, rather than economic necessity.

However, even though I had chosen to put almost 5,000km between myself and the city of my birth, I found there were some things I couldn’t bear to leave behind completely.

One of those things was the GAA. For most of the previous decade, work commitments had prevented me from actually playing regularly, save for a swansong season of Junior D hurling with my club St Sylvester’s in 2012.

When I landed in Beantown, the process of getting a green card (and the all-important work permission) on a fiancée/spousal visa proved to be tortuously slow. With an abundance of free time on my hands, I decided to resuscitate my football career while there was still some little life left in the limbs.

Despite approaching another club (my introductory email went unanswered), I ended up joining Cork Boston G.F.C. To say the prospect of donning a Rebel jersey didn’t fill me with joy would be quite the understatement. I felt I was somehow betraying my Limerick heritage. However, with no queue forming to acquire the services of an unfit, overweight and woefully out of practice 31-year-old, it was a textbook case of beggars not being choosers.

Boston is a cold city. Not just in terms of its perennial winter snowfall and its famously bitter nor’easter storms, but the people are not particularly friendly. That’s not to say they’re unfriendly. It’s just that they’re generally caught up in their own travails. Maybe it’s due to the transient nature of the population. Not only does the Greater Boston Area accommodate 250,000 college students, but also non-students often live in the region for a relatively short period before moving on somewhere else. My wife and I were no exceptions, having recently moved to Utah.

In such an environment, the GAA community offered a welcome dose of the warmth of home. Sure there was many’s the squabble had on and off the field, but when you were down in Canton (were games are played) for a match people would always, as my Limerick relatives would say, “salute” you at least.

It’s a small thing, but it’s something I had certainly taken for granted beforehand.

And then there’s the camaraderie of the club. Team spirit for Cork was often fostered during the hour it generally took to travel a mere ten miles squashed in a car alongside team-mates in rush hour traffic from Downtown to Quincy for training twice a week. You’d need to get on with each other to endure that recurring nightmare on Interstate 93.

Also, when your clubmates can still find it within themselves to have a sing-song after a 12-point defeat in a Championship final, you know you’re mixing with the right crowd.

Perhaps the most impressive thing about my adopted club was its commitment to developing “homegrown” players. In the two seasons I was with them, it was amazing to see the improvement in youngsters with ridiculously Irish names (Jack Lynch and Declan Harrington, for example) and broad Bostonian accents.

While American-born players are still the exception on Boston-based teams, the recent North American Championships (held in Canton on Labor Day weekend) proved that increasing numbers of natives are being bitten by the GAA bug. Indeed, many of the competing sides were predominantly, and in some cases completely, comprised of non-Irish players.

With a large Irish population still inhabiting the city, the demand was always there for live coverage of the big Championship games from home. Many Irish bars would satisfy that demand, albeit with an extortionate $20 cover charge at the door.

In Utah, however, there is as much chance of a Democrat being elected governor (there hasn’t been a non-Republican in that position since 1985) as there is getting to watch a GAA match in a bar. Thankfully, the excellent new GAAGO.ie service will provide the treasured coverage, and I, like thousands of Irish emigrants around the globe, will be logging on to follow the All-Ireland football final between Kerry and Donegal on Sunday.

My new living room may lack the atmosphere of The Green Briar in Brighton, or PJ Ryan’s in Somerville, but at least I won’t miss a minute of the action.

There’s not much that makes me proud to be Irish these days, but I’ve no doubt there’ll be a lump in my throat before throw-in at Croke Park on Sunday. If we ever become as competent at exporting Gaelic Games as we are at exporting people, the All-Ireland finals would be bigger than the Superbowl.