Clash of the oak resounds in Indiana

Locker Room:Saturday night. You lift the phone and dial the number. A voice says, "Yeah? Quigley." The voice belongs to Stephen Quigley, who is just checking into a hotel in Ohio after a day of hurling with the Indianapolis Hurling Club. He plays centre back.

Time to check your preconceived ideas into the left-luggage area. You hear Quigley and the word "hurling" and automatically your mind paints the picture of some homesick seed of the diaspora, a Yellabelly from strawberry land no doubt, lifting a stick in America and feeling like he hasn't felt since he was a kid out gambolling on the green, green grass of home. Wrong.

Steve's folks are from Indianapolis. He reckons a great-grandfather emigrated to America as a cooper, but it's all pretty vague. Sometimes if people ask the family members they'll say, yeah, they hail from Mayo. Other times they might say Wexford. They have no idea really. The answer depends on who's asking and who's listening.

While he was at Indiana University getting ready to do some teaching practice in Ireland though, Steve remembers an afternoon when they were being given some cultural orientation. They were talking about Gaelic games and this guy flashed up on the screen. The guy looked curiously like he was in an egg-and-spoon race as he soloed down the sideline of some distant field.

Steve thought nothing of it. He wound up later in Cork at Glanmire Community College, where he taught and took the kids for basketball. Back then Steve was a cycling fanatic and his priority was a pilgrimage to Carrick-on-Suir to see the town Seán Kelly first rode out of. Then he travelled to some of the spots the previous year's Tour de France had rolled through while it was in Ireland and was still a vaguely credible entertainment.

At Glanmire Pat McKelvey was Steve's supervising teacher. Pat looked after the hurling in the school. Steve followed him to a few games that winter. Got a little taste.

Fast forward two years. Steve has moved to Chicago. Living in Lincoln Park. Teaching on the southside. A bicycle courier in summer. Still a devout cyclist. Getting married to Cassie. Heading back to Indy for the wedding.

His mind turned to the business of gifts for the people he is close to. Eureka! He set about making 30 hurls. Out of oak. All junior hurls. From his time with Pat McKelvey, a juvenile stick was the only model he had. And oak or ash? He knew no different.

He gave the sticks out the night before the wedding. By coincidence Steve's brother-in-law, who had spent some evenings listening to Steve running his mouth about the wonder of hurling, had decided to get a few Torpey hurls shipped in at the same time. Hurls and two O'Neills sliotars. Hey. Hurls and a sliotar. Things which bring out the boy in any man.

They played ad-hoc games. Steve was working at North Central High School and he took a bunch of kids out and started showing them how to play. He rounded up everyone he knew and got them playing too.

One day a guy from Waterford, a Peter Mackey from Passage East, showed up and started schooling guys informally. They would play on a rugby pitch. They got to like it and their skills grew.

And so for Steve? Well for an Indianapolis cycling enthusiast with a talent for making hurleys out of oak the next step was obvious; he moved to Cambodia.

To Phnom Penh he brought a dozen sticks and half a dozen sliotars and went out and hurled among the snakes and the dirt. He brought some kids out with him. Why wouldn't you? The only trouble at North Bridge International school was that there were no helmets and no neurosurgeons on standby. Steve had to tell them to go handy.

(This past weekend, by the way, while Steve was in Columbus, Ohio, playing, some of the kids he had taught to hurl in Cambodia happened to be there and showed up to watch. The Cambodian kids are starting to network with a Wexford guy who lives in Ohio and they hope to get a team going there. It all goes full circle.)

Home again two years later Steve started showing up at Irish festivals, just digging the music. He'd loved those times he'd spent some three years earlier hurling and trying to get a proper club going in Indianapolis but it had never quite stuck. Pieces kept tearing loose. One day at an Irish festival he took a flyer off a guy from Bloomington. The guy was looking to start up a hurling club. He'd just given his flyer to the right man.

Cassie looked at Steve. Her face said, oh no, here we go again. Her face was right.

Steve from Indiana and Tim Fick from Bloomington and Neil Mulrooney from Dublin and Shane Powell from Longford got together. That autumn, after intense evangelisation, they forced the numbers and started hurling again.

In the Indianapolis Hurling Club now some 40 seniors have paid subscriptions and there are about 25 kids active down at the high school where Steve used to teach and they have their own club getting together every Tuesday and Thursday. Kids from Poland, Nigeria, Mexico, Russia. Kids who played ice hockey know how to pull and kids who played baseball have the hand-eye co-ordination but not much use of their wrists. Interesting coaching challenges.

And the Indianapolis Hurling Club fields two teams now. Only six of the guys involved are Irish; everyone else is US-born.

Steve's restless mind keeps moving on though. A while ago he applied to Eli Lilly, a large pharmaceutical company, for a grant to travel to Ireland and study Irish culture and sport and its relevance to Indianapolis. He called the study Irish Hurling and the Emerald Ash Borer, and his work touches on a crisis which could yet affect us all.

All the ash trees in America are dying right now. All the ash is being turned into firewood. The borer, an exotic beetle, arrived in the US, it is reckoned, in shipping pallets from China just five years ago. It has knocked out most of the ash trees in Michigan, Ohio and Illinois and has moved on to Indiana. Twenty-million trees have been destroyed so far. States are quarantining their ash to prevent the moving of infected wood. Portable sawmills have to be brought to infected woodlands.

The spur of the tree, where the wood for hurls is found, is lost. If you want to make ash hurleys in Indiana you're in trouble.

In Ireland though Steve opened himself up to the world of hurling. In Wexford he went to the hurley makers Philip Doyle Junior and to Albert Randall, who makes most of the sticks for the Wexford seniors.

Albert was working by himself in a foot of sawdust with a mountain of scrap wood in the sideyard. Steve wanted to know about the old way of making sticks. Albert took out an axe and started hewing a hurl old-style. No lathe. Steve had known about spoke shavers and wondered would they have been in use. Nope. Albert just took the axe and start going at it. Back in the '40s, he said, his father had made a whole batch of oak hurls for Wexford. Heavy and stiff but they could do some damage.

He went to Rosslare and saw the pitches near the sea and wondered how they could hit points in that much wind. He stopped by St Martin's and trained with the minors. Loved the speed and intensity of it.

"I was at St Martin's three nights straight," he wrote home to the club in Indy, "and saw how the club is the heart and soul of every community. And what is crazy to me is that there was a club just like that down the road at the next town and another at the next."

He watched Wexford train at Wexford Park. Then saw them mauled in the Leinster final. Kept moving, with Cassie and his boys, Séamus and Teague. Scouring YouTube for hurling, he came upon a documentary on the Glens. He had to go north to meet Sambo. First though he stopped in Belfast and trained with St John's on the Falls Road. They nearly finished him, "I couldn't sleep from hurling overload," he wrote.

He has taken it all back to Indianapolis. His head full of plans for a clubhouse and nets behind goals and new drills and how to get or make more of the big-bos hurleys he bought in Wexford.

So. How long before Indiana, which gave Larry Bird to basketball, starts fretting that it's losing hardcourt warriors and hoop dreamers to the word's greatest game?

And by the way. If you want the coolest GAA accessory money can buy this summer click onto indyhurling.com and order one of the T-shirts. Indianapolis Hurling Club on the front and the legend We Hurl, Then We Drink in Celtic lettering on the back.

All proceeds to the club.