So, who was playing when hurling made its live TV debut in America?
On 20 August 1948, Barry McElroy took out his pen and wrote a letter to the owners of the Munster Express newspaper in Waterford, writes
McElroy lived on the Henry Hudson Parkway in New York city, but the story he had to tell was one that was most Irish.
And, although now long forgotten, it was a landmark moment in Irish sporting history: “On August 15, under a brilliant summer sun, and with television cameras grinding away, the hurling match between Kilkenny and Waterford took place. This is the first time, as far as I know, that a hurling match has been televised. This particular broadcast covered an area within a radius of 250 miles of New York City.
“The television arrangements were conducted by the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) and delighted the hearts of many Irish who could not attend the game, but were, however, fortunate to own television sets.
The very popular Father Sean S. Reid, pastor of the Carmellite Church, New York City, played on the Kilkenny team during the first half, and was asked by NBC to report the play of the second half. Fr Reid is a native of Ballyhale, and is well-known in Waterford and Kilkenny circles in New York.
Barry McElroy’s letter was unearthed by Dr Tom Hunt, a brilliant researcher and historian, and it is overflowing with history.
At its core is a hurling match played in New York City in the summer of 1948, and it would, indeed, appear to be the first live broadcast on television of a hurling match.
By 1948, the broadcast of filmed reports depicting great hurling matches — and, indeed, documenting the game itself — was not at all new. For several decades it had been captured on Pathé Newsreels and by Hollywood directors. This work was shown in cinemas across America as the sort of news features or short film that typically accompanied the main feature movie in the years between the two world wars.
But, in 1948, the live television broadcast of sport was very much in its infancy. Baseball was by a considerable distance the most popular sport in America and it played a pioneering role in the extension of sports coverage on television.
There were two great restrictions on this extension — the first was the technical difficulties in capturing and relaying live action and the second was the fact that only a tiny minority of American households could afford a television set.
But in the years after the war, both of these things were changing. More and more Americans could afford televisions and the industry was developing new technologies to allow it better cover sporting events and broadcast them live.
This was a process whose very early stages were captured by Marilynne Robinson in her wonderful novel Gilead.
The central protagonist in her story is the Reverend John Ames who is given a television by his congregation as a mark of respect in his dying years, so that he can watch baseball, a game he adores.
In time, the spread of television networks across America forged a new culture of watching live sports on television. In the process — and over the decades that followed — it dramatically altered the sporting culture of America. Unprecedented riches flowed into every sport that could establish a meaningful presence on television in America. It took until much later into the 20th century before dedicated sports channels brought this process still further.
And, in the way of these things, it was a process that was imitated in every meaningful television market across the world — only with a delay of decades and on a smaller scale than could be managed in America.
In America, hurling did not manage to build on that first televised match. Of course, it wasn’t in a position to do so. The sport was too marginal, too rooted in an immigrant culture to translate into mainstream television gold. Instead, the game was shown just occasionally — with years between broadcasts.
Basically, hurling did not have the infrastructure of schools and clubs and grounds that is the foundation of every sport that moves from the margins.
There is another aspect to the story of the match between Waterford and Kilkenny that was reported to have been played on August 15, 1948.
There’s no easy way to put this: no such match was played between Kilkenny and Waterford.
In fact, Waterford did not then have a hurling team in New York. There was a senior football team named Waterford playing in the city in the 1930s and a junior hurling team played under that name in the late 1950s, but there is no record of one playing in 1948.
Fergus Hanna’s fascinating book — The History of the GAA in New York — lays this point out with clarity.
Gaelic games in New York were thriving in those years. The emigrant communities in the city were teeming with new arrivals who were escaping from the poverty and disillusion of the post-World War II Irish society. They joined the ranks of previous waves of emigrants and second and third-generation people whose presence was so central to the life of New York.
Just the previous year, the 1947 All-Ireland football final between Cavan and Kerry was played in New York and a plan was being pushed for the 1949 All-Ireland hurling final also to be played in the city.
This plan ultimately was left unrealised, but Sunday after Sunday, Irish people thronged to see hurling and football matches at the Gaelic Grounds up in The Bronx.
Sometimes they had the boon of watching teams who travelled out from Ireland to play. But not on this occasion.
And it can’t have been the Waterford team that travelled out from Ireland. Because on the day of the televised broadcast in America, Waterford’s senior hurlers were busy in Croke Park in Dublin defeating Galway in the All-Ireland hurling semi-final. It was another step on the road to Waterford’s first All-Ireland title — one of the great shocks in GAA history, the story of which is in itself the stuff of a Hollywood psychodrama.
So who was it played in New York on that day?
The teams who competed in the New York championship in that year were Kilkenny, Tipperary, Offaly, Galway, Cork, Clare, as well as a team representing Boston.
The championship began in April and wound its way on through the late spring and summer — eventually the winners were Tipperary, with 6,500 people turning up to see them defeating Boston in the final.
And the records do show that Kilkenny did have in their ranks a Fr Sean Reid, so that part of the story holds up.
But, despite what the Munster Express wrote, it was obviously not Waterford who they played. Presumably it was simply a slip of the pen on behalf of the person who wrote the story about the televised match — although a local aspect to every story has never been known as a burden and the Express is, of course, a paper embedded in the life of Waterford.
Attempts to find an answer in the American press and in the records of the NBC archives will continue.
In the way of these things, it doesn’t really matter — it would just be nice to know.
Anybody know anybody who was there on that Sunday in the hot summer of 1948?
