It was Jerrold Casway who coined the phrase ""The Emerald Age of Baseball"" to describe the 1890s, when so many Irish names dominated teams' rosters. But one can easily agree-and expand-that the period from the mid-1830s well into the first decade of the 20th century and assign the term to American sports in general. This book covers the Irish sportsman from the arrival of James ""Deaf"" Burke in 1836 through to Jack B. Kelly's rejection by Henley regatta and his subsequent gold medal at the 1920 Olympics. It avoids recounting the various victories and defeats of the Irish sportsman, seeking instead to deal with the complex interaction that he had with alcohol, gambling and Sunday leisure: pleasures that were banned in most of America at some time or other between 1836 and 1920. This book also covers the Irish sportsman's close relations with politicians, his role in labor relations, his violent lifestyle-and by contrast-his participation in bringing respectability to sport. It also deals with native Irish sports in America, the part played by the Irish in ""Team USA's"" initial international sporting ventures, and in the making and breaking of amateurism within sport.

At the turn of the century, Track and Field was the bastion of the rich and privileged. While baseball and prize-fighting attracted the top sportsmen from the lower orders of society, athletic clubs generally filled themselves with the America's top sporting graduates from private colleges and the sons of the rich. Except one! The Irish-American Athletic Club was a New York organization that bucked the trend. Founded by immigrants and their sons, it was populated by immigrants, the sons of immigrants, and not necessarily the sons of Irish immigrants. Jews, African-Americans, Scandinavians, Italians, even a handful of Englishmen joined the club. It would dominate New York and American athletics for over a decade, forcing the renowned New York Athletic Club into perennial second place. It would lay claim to the title of best athletic club in the world following the 1908 Olympic Games. It would break the "color-line". It would bend the rules on amateurism. It would challenge the ban on Sunday entertainments and succumb to the fallout from the First World War, Prohibition and a growing city swallowing up real estate for urban housing, yet endow us some of the greatest myths and legends in American athletics. This is its story.