Smash-mouth Irish sports you must watch: Editor’s Note

With Mick Kelly’s, a new Irish restaurant and pub coming to Kent’s Riverbend Golf Complex in coming weeks, I’ve been excited on several fronts.

There’s always the food – you can’t beat Irish fish and chips or corned beef and cabbage. And there’s Guinness ale, which may be an acquired taste for some.

But the other big one is sports – Irish sports, to be exact.

According to Mick Purdy, who co-owns the biz with cousin Adrian Kelly, you’ll be able to watch the Setanta Sports network at their new Kent eatery.

Setanta (the more spellable name of Irish mythological figure Cúchulainn) is where you can watch sports that are the national rage in Ireland – Gaelic rules football, rugby, soccer, hurling. Foremost among them, in my book, is hurling.

For those of you who don’t know about this specialty of the Emerald Isle, I’ve got a suggestion: you need to watch it at least once. And you need to see the way the Irish, who invented this severe form of field hockey, play it.

I had the luck of playing for a season on a local hurling team – the Seattle Gaels. I was god-awful but game, an older woman among young, fast athletic guys who were kind enough not to flatten me. But even from my vantage point (looking through a face mask covered with dirt wads) it was a beautiful thing to see.

Hurling (NOT to be confused with curling) is called the world’s fastest team sport. It has the same positions as soccer or field hockey, and it’s played on a real grass field. And like field hockey, each player is trying to move a ball to the goal with a wooden club (a hurley). But whereas field hockey is more about jabbing a ball around with a stick, hurling is like the smash-mouth stuff you might get carded for elsewhere.

In hurling, players are moving wicked-fast around the field, not only hitting the ball (called a sliotar) on the ground, but popping it off the ground with their hurley and smashing it through the air. Sometimes they’re hitting from one end of the field through the goal posts on the other end, if they’re strong enough hitters.

They’re also hand-passing the sliotar onto their hurleys and running full tilt, with the thing balanced on the club, seemingly defying gravity. All the while, they’re evading defenders who are equally armed with clubs, and who probably won’t get called for a foul if they happen to put their hurl in front of the runner’s throat as they’re trying to catch him from behind. He ran into it, right?

At its best, hurling is a spectacle, a pitched battle played by athletes with the finesse of dancers, who occasionally crash into and flatten the other. They do it all without padding (although most will wear a helmet.)

So, once our Irish pub is up and running, give the sport a go. See it for yourself on television while tipping a pint. We’ll let you know when that’s going to happen. And if you want to see what our own hurling (and Gaelic football league) is up to these days, log onto the Seattle Gaels’ Web site at www.seattlegaels.com.