We need to talk about America. For the casual Irish sports fan, the US looms over this weekend like very few that have ever gone before it. The NFL is taking over Croke Park. The Ryder Cup is bubbling away. An Irish kid got signed to an NBA team on Wednesday.
Meanwhile, the real world is spinning, swirling, sparking into flash fires everywhere. So many lives are turning on the whims of a giant orange baby in a Make America Great Again hat. How do we find balance in it all?
For some of us, America has always been this mythical, mystical sporting arena. It’s not just the megastars, although they’re a highly potent gateway drug. Ali, Jordan, Tiger. Serena, Mia Hamm, Simone Biles. Sportspeople who make you drop everything and sit and watch and goggle. But it’s always been more than them too.
Something about how sport is so baked into American society, so naturally the wallpaper of everyday life, is very appealing to the sports addict in us. Turn on the TV every night in the States and there’s a ball game on somewhere. We’re sliding into that golden month of October where the baseball World Series kicks in and the NBA season kicks off and the NFL kicks everything else into the clear blue yonder. The glorious decadence of it.
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I fell for American sport in college. Not really by watching it – this was the end of the 1990s and there wasn’t the same panoply of choice back then. It was more by reading about it. The internet was young and stupid so when Sports Illustrated started a website and immediately put every word that had ever been written in it online for free, I gorged myself.
There were hundreds of old articles about sportspeople whose names meant nothing to me and whose sports were a total mystery. For years, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you the difference between a triple play and a foul ball, or between a linebacker and a tight end. But there was something beguiling in the way they were written about, as if America itself had pushed these people out front to show them off.
It didn’t actually matter that they were – and are – as flawed and damaged and human as everyone else. It was more that, rightly or wrongly, American society placed such a value on their sports and their sportspeople. I was just as young and stupid as the internet and thought this was a very cool way of looking at life.
You get older. You wise up. You realise that everything is a construct and everyone has their agenda. You take things with a dumptruck of salt and you understand that making any sort of judgment on a society through the lens of the games the people play is always a reach. You won’t necessarily be wrong but you’ll never have the whole story.
But when you break it right down, how do most of us engage with America? Three broad areas probably make up the vast majority of how we think about it – sport, popular culture and politics. In 2025, it has become increasingly hard to enjoy either of the first two without the grinding intrusion of the third.
The idea of a sportsperson being so infantilised as to hail the arrival of a politician onsite as something that might turn a match around is just so eye-bleedingly ludicrous
The Ryder Cup is one of the great sporting weekends every two years. Because of its bulletproof format which more or less guarantees that things will be close all the way to Sunday, it’s 72 hours of drama that grabs you from the first tee shot and doesn’t let go. It’s perfectly silly and thoroughly ephemeral and still you can’t miss a minute. You couldn’t want anything more from a sports event.
But of course now, because of How Things Are, we have to put up with the whole thing being shot through the lens of all the worst rah-rah gobshitery possible. Midway through the first foursomes session on Friday, you could see everyone on the course stopping to look up as Donald Trump, aka the world’s most famous golf cheat, made a point of flying Air Force One over Bethpage Black to announce his arrival.
“Things aren’t going exactly how we planned it,” said Keegan Bradley, the American team captain when interviewed a couple of minutes later. “We’ve just had the president fly overhead so I think things are going to turn.” He was deadly serious saying it, too.
On this side of the world, we can only watch this stuff in abject horror. Even if it wasn’t someone as odious as Trump, the idea of a sportsperson being so infantilised as to hail the arrival of a politician onsite as something that might turn a match around is just so eye-bleedingly ludicrous. But this is seemingly where America is at now.
[ It costs just €63 to play at Bethpage but Ryder Cup prices go a different wayOpens in new window ]
And what about the NFL coming to Croke Park? What are we supposed to do with that? The Steelers and the Vikings are renting the hall for the day and the Irish Government has spent damn good money to make it happen. But much and all as some of us love the sport, it’s hard not to feel uneasy about it all.
There’s no getting away from the fact that the NFL is America and America is the NFL. It’s obviously a stretch to blame a sports league for all the ills the USA visits upon the world but at the same time, there’s no getting away from the nativism and nationalism that drips from its every pore.
Does that mean we can’t enjoy Aaron Rodgers and Justin Jefferson on a Sunday afternoon on Jones’s Road? For some people, probably the answer is yes. For others, the very idea will sound idiotic. For the rest of us, floating somewhere in the middle, it’s complicated.
Truth is, it always was and we probably just weren’t paying enough attention. An option that isn’t open to us anymore.
