U.K.-based journalist Patrick Redmond’s book on the Irish in the sport of the United States from the middle of the nineteenth century to the 1920s began as an undergraduate dissertation on the Irish in American boxing, and here he has expanded this initial piece to cover all angles of the Irish and Irish-Americans in organised athletic endeavours. Rather than arranging by sport, however, Redmond takes a topical approach, looking at a myriad of themes to highlight just how Irish immigrants and their immediate offspring dominated the early American sports scene.

Boxing still, however, does take up a large portion of the work because it was the first sport where the Irish, literally, made their mark in their new homes. Men like John Morrissey from County Tipperary and Irish Americans such as John L. Sullivan and ‘Gentleman’ Jim Corbett became the first Irish-American heroes. Redmond goes beyond the famous though to highlight others who made their names, and sometimes fortunes, in the rough and tumble world of nineteenth-century U.S. boxing. Some, like Morrissey, parlayed their fame into other fields; in the Tipperary man’s case, machine politics. He made the transition from pugilist to politician via saloon keeping. Other Irish boxers who opened bars included James Ambrose ‘Yankee’ Sullivan (no relation to John L.), Owney Geoghegan, Mike McCoole, Joe Coburn and Paddy Ryan. They often promoted fights too, clearly indicating that unregulated sport and liquor provided managerial opportunities for Irish immigrants and their offspring. Indeed, in a whole chapter dedicated to the Irish in ‘sporting management’, Redmond shows how many got in ‘on the ground floor’, so to speak, in the early professionalisation of American sport. As a result, they often shaped major sports such as baseball. Along with dominating the early playing rosters of professional baseball teams, owners such as Charles Comiskey (of the Chicago White Sox) the son of a County Cavan immigrant, were pioneers in popularising ‘America’s favourite pastime’. In athletics too, various Irish athletic clubs led the way in producing winning athletes but also organisers. James E. Sullivan, for example, born the son of an Irish railroad foreman in New York, went from athlete to sports journalist to president of the American Athletics Union. Sullivan was key to American participation in the revival of the modern Olympic movement though he eventually created controversy when he tried to seize the movement from founder Pierre de Coubertin.

Notoriety seemed to follow many of the Irish-American sports stars/entrepreneurs. Alcohol abuse, corrupt gambling, and excessive violence all get chapters here. The Irish connection with boxing particularly upset many genteel reformers. Even prominent Irish journalist John Boyle O’Reilly could not escape their ire when he tried to reform the sport by writing Ethics of boxing and manly sports. To some progressives, boxing, like political machines also run by the Irish, was irredeemable and O’Reilly received serious criticism for his support of it.

Not that this criticism mattered much to O’Reilly and his Irish readers. In the most interesting chapters Redmond examines sports and Irish identity. These are the most analytical, displaying how the Irish used sporting prowess as a way of defining themselves in America, and countering some of the negative views that natives often held. The aforementioned James Sullivan tried to entwine American sporting triumph with Irish sporting strength even to the extent of organising an attempt to send a Gaelic football team with the U.S. Olympic squad to the 1900 Paris Olympics. More successful were the baseball promoters like New York Giants manager John McGraw who tried to turn his team into ‘the Irish club’ (p. 284) in the city and the country as a whole. Thus, the team from sophisticated and wealthy Manhattan became an Irish team too. Like James Sullivan some tried to promote Gaelic games which, though they had some success, never became as popular with Irish Americans as baseball, boxing, athletics, and even cricket.

Redmond’s book concludes in 1920 which, Redmond believes, saw the move of the Irish away from ‘baseball and the ring’ to the more ‘bourgeois’ sports of tennis and golf (p. 381). Here he points to the likes of Jimmy Connors, John McEnroe and Mark O’Meara. Precisely how this transition occurred he does not say. Indeed, apart from the sections on identity, there is a lack of analysis throughout the book. Firstly, it could be one hundred pages shorter and more effective for that. There are lots of vignettes and anecdotes which seem to cover everything every Irish/Irish-American sportsman achieved between 1835 and 1920. Secondly, a more careful selection better organised, perhaps by sport or by chronology, would have helped, as would some placing of sport in the larger context of Irish and the immigrant America of the period. Finally, a deeper secondary reading would have helped. For example, Redmond fails to use Tim Meagher’s Inventing Irish America (2001), an excellent study of the significant changes between 1880 and 1920 in Worcester, Massachusetts and one source that might have provided more of the larger picture. Ultimately then, this book is very useful for those seeking a nice synopsis of what the Irish did in organised American sport before 1920 but it fails to analyse properly what all this activity and achievement meant in the larger story of the Irish immigrant experience in America.