The first Sioux Hurling team. These boys took a few famous scalps.
WITH ALL THE talk of one of Ireland’s leading institutions introducing a degree in hurling and of adding hurling to school curriculum, the question on everyone’s lips is whether the game is an art or a science.
That’s enough to keep the professors going for a year or two and good enough for them. They certainly have enough material if history is anything to go by. Certainly the Medicine Men of the Sioux saw much to commend it, but more of that anon.
The game has evolved since Cusack and the lads first put pen to paper back in Lizzie Hayes place down in Thurles in 1884. We are told that the first All Ireland Championship in hurling was held in 1887, the game played on pitch of 196 yards by 140 yards. Goals were 21 feet apart, and the crossbar was ten and a half feet off the ground. Even with 21 players a side that’s a fair bit of turf to cover by any standards for fellas togged out in heavy boots and swinging hurls that are a distant relative of the wands we see boys use these days.
Because early hurling finals were such low scoring affairs, despite the gaping goals, we can only speculate that defenders were in the ascendency. Archaeological evidence points to the typical full back as a pure savage with forearms like hams, hands like a navvy’s and a swing of the hurl that in another age, may have made him an executioner.
Thor’s hammer would have swang with less power than our man’s widowmaker-caman, as he sundered flesh from bone and knuckle from finger. Woe betide the nippy forward indeed. Historical evidence suggests that the farthest man forward was known as an extreme forward, and it is fair to deduce that either great stupidity, extreme courage, or both, were part of the full package in them days.
Indeed our research has shown that some of the leading members of Custer’s Seventh Army were hurlers, who faced into the unknown in the New World, carving out new territories and facing peril at every turn, and that was only among themselves.
In fact Wounded Knee, the scene of the famous battle, derived its name in Indian legend from an excruciating hurling injury sustained by Captain John Woodlock, formerly of Tipperary, whilst he and his comrades in the Seventh were waiting on Sitting Bull and the lads to put up or shut up. Playing on a pitch made of cleared brushland, they hurled long and hard under the desert sun, no quarter asked or given.
With seconds to go, and as the roughly fashioned sliotar of sun-hardened buffalo dung and coyote leather hopped a few inches off the ground, a galoot from North Antrim pulled wild, high and loose, dislodging Woodlock’s kneecap into a nearby peyote cactus. The pain was excruciating and his screams terrified and stampeded several herd of buffalo comprising half a million beasts over a nearby cliff.
Two advance scouts from the Sioux Nation were so put out at the act of savagery they had just witnessed that they reported back to their elders that the white man was so ruthless, they were disembodying their own men alive.
Luckily for them, a young buck from Clare who had gone native some years earlier, recognised the description from his distant youth in the emerald isle and was fit to tell the elders of the strange game played with a stick and ball called hurling. For several days as the Seventh rested and hurled, unbeknownst they were watched from afar by the Sioux Nation who decided that whilst it was a great game, there just weren’t enough ash trees on the Great Plains.
Now, together with members of the Sioux Hurling Nation, we are starting a campaign to take a future All Stars tour to South Dakota, for old time’s sake you understand. When we’re there, we plan to bury a hurl at Wounded Knee.
For all things Gaelic and Athletic, read Talking Balls at www.squareball.com.
AYE, YER MA. The term of abuse has often been heard on the fields of gaeldom emanating from gobshites. But now, Ulster Games development manager Sheena Tally, has been getting’ busy with a novel idea of getting mothers, elders sisters, aunts and probably even grandmothers out palying ladies football. The scheme is called Gaelic 4 Mothers.
