By Patrick R. Redmond
Since 1896 the modern Olympic Games have been plagued by controversy. Besides Nazi manipulation, political boycotts and terrorism, there has been other low-level petty bickering; accusations of cheating and boorish displays of nationalism have also overshadowed this celebration of global sporting friendship.
ONLY NATIONAL TEAMS FROM 1908
The first three Olympics were largely free of these antagonisms, however, because athletic clubs, universities and individuals were also permitted to enter, but from the 1906 Athens Intercalated Games—celebrating a decade of the rebirth of the Olympics—only national committees could provide competitors. The first Olympiad to be completely nation-supplied was London in 1908, where the pugnacious ‘czar’ of American athletics, James E. Sullivan, son of an Irish construction foreman on the New York Central Railroad, became the pantomime villain of the British press through his constant complaining. It is unsurprising that this would be the last Olympiad in which home-town officials would be trusted to judge events.
Perhaps the event that best encapsulated this festival of antagonism was the dramatic climax to the marathon. As Dorando Pietri struggled to complete the final yards of the race, two men—one with a loudspeaker—rushed to assist him across the finish line. Naturally, Pietro was disqualified, but his assistants had other motives than gallantly aiding the Italian in his last few steps to glory. Their mission was to prevent the second-generation Irish immigrant New Yorker Johnnie Hayes, some 100 yards behind them, from taking another athletic gold for Uncle Sam. As fellow American high-jumper Ray Ewry would later comment, ‘If … it was [sic] a runner from the United Kingdom who was in second place, they would have been willing to hit Dorando over the head rather than have him cross the line’.
IRISH VS WASPS
Hayes’s gold was one of the remarkable 24 individual track and field medals—nine golds, plus two golds in the medley relay—that were supplied to ‘Team USA’ by members of his athletic club, the Irish-American Athletic Club (I-AAC) of New York. But while the games exposed the growing rivalry between the hosts and the United States, the presence of the I-AAC’s athletes in London was threatened by an equally bitter mutual enmity between the Irish and White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs) in contemporary American society.
A row had broken out over the appointment of Sullivan’s cousin, the New York Athletic Club’s (NYAC) front man, Matt Halpin—himself an Irish-American—as coach in December 1907. Months of threats and counter-threats followed until Halpin was finally replaced by another Irish-American, Mike Murphy. Athletics was one of the last bastions of amateurism in American sport, having successfully fended off a professional long-distance running ‘Pedestrianism’ faze in the late 1870s. And while American interpretations of amateurism were not as rigid as in Britain, defending the unpaid athlete came at a price: clubs like the NYAC across America fought hard to keep out the supposed ‘shamateurs’ of the lower orders.
The I-AAC had been founded in January 1898 with the initial and rather grandiose title of the Greater New York Irish Athletic Association, changing its name to that of the city’s two previous Irish athletic clubs in 1904. By then the ‘Winged Fist’, as the club was nicknamed, had just taken its first national championship. Except for 1905—hosted in far-off Portland, Oregon—it would win every national title until 1915, while also defeating the NYAC in the annual regional Metropolitan Championships every year from 1904 until 1916, except in 1910.
I-AAC/NYAC RIVALRY
Like the defunct entities of 1879 and 1890, the I-AAC was founded partly in response to élitist athletic clubs barring the Irish working class. The gulf in wealth between them and the NYAC reflected their constituencies. The NYAC possessed a yacht club and tennis courts, while the Irish clubs could count on at most a boxing gym or a bowling alley. Membership fees also mirrored members’ earnings: joining the I-AAC in 1910 cost $10, while the NYAC charged $200—if you weren’t blackballed. Meetings between the I-AAC and the NYAC thus became bitter class- and ethnic-based clashes, with the Irish constantly accused of taking backhanders. In his response to the I-AAC’s demand that he be removed as coach for London, Halpin scathingly snapped that ‘the cleaning up of the semi-professional element [in New York athletics] is not relished by the Irish-American Athletic Club’.
While clearly less affluent, the I-AAC had one advantage over the NYAC: a superb athletics stadium.By May 1898 the club had obtained a patch of land in remote Queens, and soon temporary stands were installed for what would become Celtic Park. It became home not only to the I-AAC but also to every New York Irish labour, political and county organisations’ annual ‘picnics’ and Gaelic games, invariably held on Sundays in defiance of New York’s Sabbatarian ‘Blue Laws’.
OPEN-DOOR POLICY
Virtually from the start, the I-AAC adopted an open-door policy. While most of the city’s top Irish athletes would pass through the club’s doors, there were also Anglo-Americans and Jewish members such as Myer Prinstein and Abel Kiviat. The club also became the primary stop-off for visiting European athletes enjoying a sabbatical in the Big Apple, like Irish long-jumper Peter O’Connor, Hannes Kolehmainen, Frans Johansson, John Eke and Emilio Lunghi. Britons Harold A. Wilson and ‘Baldy’ Jack Monument also competed for the club instead of for the NYAC.
Crucially, the club admitted African-Americans, although this was not without some protest. In 1907 the sprinter John Baxter Taylor joined the club, becoming a year later the first ever African-American to win an Olympic gold. The New York Mail reported the club’s president, Limerick-born Patrick ‘Pay-Jay’ Conway, in mock Irish brogue, fighting racism with racist language:
‘Our name is the Irish-American Athletic Club, and under that wurrud, American, comes our justifcableness in having these Dootchmin and Jews as our fellow-members, an’ where there’s room for Dootchmin and Jews, there’s no excuse in this wurruld for keeping out a man like this excellent naygur, more power to his lungs and speed to his legs.’
LONDON OLYMPICS
On 27 June 1908 the American Olympians set sail for London, arriving eight days later in Southampton. The squabbles began almost immediately. There was the absence of the American flag on the opening day, followed by the infamous ‘snub’ to Edward VII. The journalist Arthur Daley would later embellish this story with the line that ‘this flag dips to no earthly king’. ‘The backbone of the United States team [in 1910] was supplied by the brawny weight-men from the Irish-American Athletic Club of New York’, Daley wrote in the New York Times on the eve of the 1952 Helsinki Olympics, ‘all with deep roots in the Ould Sod. They took a rim stand and issued explicit orders to the flag-bearer [Ralph Rose, an athlete who was neither Irish nor an I-AAC member]: “Ye won’t bow the American flag to a British King,” bellowed Martin Sheridan, the discus champion. “It didn’t bow then and has not bowed since”.’
The marathon was not the only event marred by controversy. The tug-of-war quarter-final defeat of the US team containing three I-AAC members—John Flanagan, Bill Horr and Lee Talbott—by Britain saw Sullivan lodge a complaint about the British ‘illegal’ heavy boots. The 400-metres final, with three Americans joining Britain’s Wyndham Halswelle, also ended in farce. Running into the final stretch, a trackside judge began shouting at John Carpenter that he had obstructed Halswelle’s efforts to pass and immediately stopped the race. Eventually Carpenter was disqualified and the race was rescheduled, with Taylor and fellow I-AAC member William Robbins refusing to run against Halswelle.
Despite coming second overall, the Americans triumphed in the athletics events, sparking off two months of celebrations in the Big Apple. Hayes’s employer, Samuel Bloomingdale, ordered his store to be decorated in Hayes’s honour, although ‘Johnny Half Portion’ decided to make a detour to see his grandfather in Nenagh, Co. Tipperary, where he was ‘seized by his admirers … carried, shoulder high, to his carriage to an accompaniment of cheers and the discharge of innumerable fireworks’.
The City of New York also arranged a victory parade when all competitors were expected to have returned. On 29 August almost a quarter of a million people lined Broadway, from 46th Street to City Hall, with GAA teams and Irish regiments acting ‘as a guard of honour’ for the athletes as they were escorted by 15,000 troops and civic workers. Acting mayor Patrick McGowan greeted the heroes, concluding: ‘But you won. You won! All the people of the United States are proud of you, and this great demonstration in your honour is the best evidence of the gratitude of the American people.’ Two days later, President Teddy Roosevelt invited the American team to his home at Sagamore Hill, Long Island, before the I-AAC honoured its own members with a banquet at the Waldorf Hotel in September.
DECLINE
In 1908 the Irish-American Athletic Club was at its summit, undoubtedly the greatest athletic club on the planet. James E. Sullivan would address the Waldorf Hotel banquet by declaring: ‘I would like to pay a tribute to the most remarkable athletic team that was ever brought together. Too much credit cannot be given to the Irish-American Athletic Club … [it] could have won the world’s championship without the assistance of any other organization …’.
From there, however, a slow decline began. When the United States entered the First World War in 1917, Conway immediately pledged the club’s assets and men to the war effort, and the club lost its top athletes. Celtic Park’s viability was put in further doubt by prohibition. In June 1922 Ruth Curley, an eighteen-year-old Irish woman, barely in the US two months, was shot there in the stomach during crossfire between bootleggers and police.
Losing business from the GAA, who opened Innisfail Park (now Gaelic Park) in 1926, was perhaps the final straw. The last event at Celtic Park before it was bulldozed for housing was a football match between the city’s county teams of Roscommon and Kerry on 5 October 1930. In 2012 a part of 43rd Street, Queens, was co-named ‘Winged Fist Way’ in the club’s honour.
Patrick R. Redmond is the author of The Irish and the making of American sport, 1835–1920 (McFarland & Co., 2013).
Further reading
J. Bryant, The marathon makers (London, 2008).
G. Kent, Olympic follies: the madness and mayhem of the 1908 London games (London, 2008).
K. McCarthy, Gold, silver and green: the Irish Olympic journey, 1896–1924 (Cork, 2010).
P. Redmond, The Irish-American Athletic Club of New York: the rise and fall of the Winged Fists, 1898–1917 (Jefferson NC, 2018).