Sunday, May 13, 2007

hurley making

There are two native Irish sports: Gaelic football and hurling. One of the three television stations we received was devoted almost exclusively to programming in the Irish language, and I caught a few minutes of a Gaelic football match. From what I could tell, it was a combination of rugby and soccer, with two different kinds of goal posts and players could touch the ball with their hands. Just before dinner the following evening I caught a short documentary called Hurley Making in English on one of the RTE (national) channels. Hurling has the appeal of being an indigenous ancient sport, whose tools were once hunting weapons. I thought this gave an added dimension to the opening of Ken Loach’s brilliant recent feature, The Wind That Shakes the Barley, which shows a game of hurling and the subsequent fallout with British soldiers for an “illegal assembly.” Could the game itself, like the forbidden Irish tongue, have been a palpable threat?

The documentary was focused instead on the craft of making hurleys (bats) and balls. The film started with the felling of an ash tree, whose roots had to be cut a particular way to ensure that the grain of the hurley heads could withstand the impact of the ball. We moved among small family workshops, with different tasks assigned to members of various generations. As the narrator recounted the history of the sport (and myth plays an integral role in the telling of history in Ireland, regardless of its subject), we watched a younger craftsman repair the hurley of a star player. We moved to a renowned workshop for hurling balls in Dublin, and as we watched a man stitch the leather with mitted hands and an aggressive needle, I had to think of sail makers on the great mast sailing ships, which not too long ago, would run afoul on Fastnet Rock off Mizen Head, “the most southwesterly point in Ireland.”

Our last day in West Cork was spent on Sherkin Island, and as we boarded the ferry back to the mainland after a day of strolling through cow pastures and rambling by the ocean, I exchanged places with a boy of ten or eleven returning to the island after school, hurley stick in hand.

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