Letter from America: Made it to Manhattan
The Manhattan midtown skyline is seen in the background as cars move along the Queensboro bridge and a train rides by the Queensboro Plaza Station in New York. Picture: AFP via Getty Images
Something new, something borrowed.
The new? Beginning to type this aboard the NJ Transit from Newark Liberty International Airport to Penn Station. The borrowed? The title.
The Proclaimers classic isn’t only damn catchy, it’s a fine and powerful song of emigration. Scotland exported to the New World too.
Ellis Island is no longer a point of arrival, it’s a tick on the to-do list of sightseers. And there’s nothing surer but that hundreds of Mayo folk will this weekend drop into that incredible museum and archive in the upper part of New York Bay to search for the names and records and voyages of their forefathers who went not for football but for survival.
When you go will you send back a letter from America?
Time was you could be waiting weeks, months even, and nor could you be sure someone hadn’t seen its contents (or taken them!) before you. Now it takes as long as to click send. Not that that’s been all for the good either.
I used to marvel at the artistry of the handwriting of my mother’s cousin whenever she’d write her news from Hoboken, the Jersey side of the Hudson. Let’s just say she was born a lot closer to Mayo’s first All-Ireland victory than their second but even she emails now instead. Another tradition gone. Just like Mayo beating Leitrim in championship football.
If in time this is earmarked as the week that truly made Andy Moran the manager, how ironic it came a year to the week that could just as easily have broken him, as manager of a Leitrim team who became New York’s first-ever championship victims.
Moran’s masterminding of Leitrim’s victory over Mayo in the Connacht U20 Championship this week is seismic and represents a far greater upset than anything that happened in Gaelic Park in April 2023 because, put simply, Leitrim just aren’t supposed to bate Mayo – particularly a Mayo team that with some amount of style, had gone unbeaten against both Roscommon and Galway over the course of the previous fortnight.
Coupled with steering the senior team to Division 3 for 2025, Leitrim Football is making tangible progress under Andy’s enthusiastic hand.
The question is, has that news from home thrown a tinge of tension into the New York air? You’d need some fine sense to smell it above the gasoline and pretzels. But if Mayo can lose to Leitrim at U20 level, that the senior team might have everything their own way on an Astroturf beneath a subway track in The Bronx against a buoyant Exiles outfit is no given either. Remember London in the Air Dome last January anyone?
Were the unthinkable to happen on Sunday, a letter from America might be the only thing that arrives home.
