The game in Ireland, seen from both shores

On Thursday, 4 August 1887, John Lawlor of Dublin and Phil Casey, a former Brooklyn alderman, began the Cork half of a match for the championship of the world in a racket court in Grattan Street. The match was twenty-one games, ten to be played at Cork and eleven at New York. The Sun printed the cable from Cork the next morning under the heading "The Great Handball Match Stopped." In the ninth game of the day a cry went up that the gallery was falling, a panic followed, and play was postponed, Lawlor ahead five games to three. A Timaru paper of 17 October carried a paragraph that named the street and gave the same score. By the Sun and the Tribune of 30 November the Cork series ended six games to four for Lawlor. The Tribune put the series in July, against the cable's 4 August. No Cork paper has been read for this chapter.

The match was finished in Brooklyn, not at Sweeney's racket court on 35th Street. An Irish news column printed in the New Zealand Tablet on 6 January 1888 gave the arrangement as it stood before the match: the remaining eleven games at Sweeney's, 159 East 35th Street, on Tuesday, 22 November. The game was put off, and on 24 November the Sun reported Casey and Lawlor's backer signing an agreement to play the deciding games at Casey's new court in Degraw Street. The Sun and the Tribune of 30 November both put the last games there, on Tuesday, 29 November, at the court of the Brooklyn Handball Club, whose president was Casey; the Sun printed the scores, Lawlor's best being thirteen aces. That rests on two New York papers of the next morning and the Sun's report of the agreement; the one source for Sweeney's is a plan. The Sun also gave each man's birthplace, and the labels were reversed: Casey was born in Queen's County, Ireland, and Lawlor in Pennsylvania of Irish parents, taken to Ireland at eighteen months and raised in Dublin. The Tribune agreed.

The two men settled the question of the ball by agreement, and the Sun's account of the Brooklyn finish says how: the ball was changed every game. The first game used a black ball of American pattern, an inch and three-quarters across. The second used a smaller Irish ball, white as snow, and a voice from the upper gallery asked whether the players meant to play with marbles. In July 1897, when William Carney beat James Fitzgerald of Tralee at Casey's court in Brooklyn, a wire said Fitzgerald was at a disadvantage in the American game because "at the back of the Irish court there is an open space, while under the American rules there is a solid wall." No paper says that the courts explain the balls, and no Irish source of the period read for this chapter describes the Cork alley or any other.

The record first ties the game to Irish players among emigrants. On 5 October 1867 the Fenian Irish Republic of Chicago printed a letter from Minneapolis, signed P. F., asking why young Irishmen, "unquestionably the best ball players in Europe," did not form clubs for base ball and foot ball and also handball and hurly.

In New Zealand the papers describe alleys. The Auckland Star of 18 October 1880 called a match at Gleeson's hotel the first establishment of the game in Auckland; its issue of 27 October had described the court as prepared for the American game of handball. In November the North Otago Times described a court 60 feet by 27 at the Shamrock Hotel in Oamaru, with a gallery for a hundred, and called the pastime a popular one in the old country. On Saturday, 18 March 1882 Hogan won the handball champion cup at Auckland, and the Star of 21 March said he had been "some years ago the champion of the south of Ireland." A Hogan of Auckland, probably the same man, lost to McAuliffe of Timaru, 25 a side, on 30 May 1883, by a wire in the Evening Post.

The Irish game, liathróid láimhe, is given an old pedigree by GAA Handball's own history page, which says forms of it were played for "over a thousand years," cites the 1527 Statute of Galway against ball games at town walls, and names a court at Ballinrobe of 1776. No dated contemporary source read for this record that ties handball to Irish players goes behind the Chicago letter of 1867, and none of the page's claims has been checked against an Irish source. The same page says that when the Gaelic Athletic Association, Cumann Lúthchleas Gael, was founded in 1884, handball was included among the sports to be promoted. An Irish Times account of 2025, published in Irish, says handball was not in the Association's first constitution and became an official part of its activities in the 1920s, when national championships gave it structure. Both are modern summaries, and neither cites the constitution of 1884, which I have not read; I cannot choose between them.

Of the Association's own rules before 1923, the record holds only what American books printed. The same twenty-eight rules appear under the heading Gaelic Rules in a handball book of 1903 and in a printing of 1914, and under an Irish-handball heading in Brokaw's book of 1915, apparently all set from the same plates, and again, reset, in Spalding's guide of 1923 as Rules for Irish Handball or the Hard-Ball Game. The American publisher's headnote introduces them as "the rules of the Gaelic Athletic Association of Ireland," and the rules are summarized here as the American guides printed them. By those rules the floor was to be 60 feet long or as near it as possible. A short line lay between half and two-thirds of the floor's length from the front wall. The ball was hard and covered with sheepskin or other leather, between one and a half and one and three-quarter ounces. A game was fifteen aces where the American game was twenty-one, and a judge who found one player obstructing another could give a hinder. The headnote says the rules were drafted for alleys of every size and shape. No printing carries a date of adoption; the rules were presumably adopted between the Association's founding in 1884 and the first printing in 1903, and I have found nothing narrower.

On 12 July 1890 the Evening World reported Casey, McQuade, Dunne and others sailing for Ireland, Scotland and England to give exhibitions. Casey wrote to the Sun from Cork, in a letter printed on 1 August, that a local handball club had met the party. In August 1895 the Sun reported that a Cork paper proposed a conference of handball players from the world over to draw up a code of rules. In September it reported Casey's challenge, for himself and ex-Alderman Dunne, to Fitzgerald, the Irish champion, for a home-and-home doubles match at Brooklyn and Tralee. By 27 January 1896 it said the match had not been arranged and called Fitzgerald a convert to its own system of play. On 5 April it reported a convention of handball players planned at Cork for July, with Casey and Dunne for America, and said the Sun's own code, used by the experts in America, would probably be adopted as the standard.

After Carney's win in 1897 Irish players kept appearing in the American papers. In March 1900 the Jersey City News reported that P. J. Corby, from Tralee, and Ed. Lawlor of Greenpoint had beaten Mike Egan and P. J. Scott, three games to two, at the Greenpoint court. In June 1903 Egan of Jersey City won the American half of a match against Timothy Twohill of Kanturk, and the Worcester Spy of 24 June said the rest would be played at Kanturk on 12 July; I have found no report of that half. In June 1906 the Sun reported that James Dunne, Brooklyn's superintendent of sewers, and his son were on their way to Ireland to meet all comers at handball; no report of a match has been found. In January 1909 the Richmond Palladium reported a series between John J. Bowles of Limerick and James Kelly of Brooklyn, seven games at Limerick in July and the rest at Brooklyn in September. A Dublin dispatch of 12 July said that at Limerick the day before "the Irishman outclassed Kelly." The Brooklyn half has not been found, and the series is the last in this record billed as Ireland against America.

To American papers the game stayed Irish. The San Francisco Call of 25 February 1912 described the old Irish game as fast coming back in the Mission district, with Sunday games on McHugh's court. On 7 February 1916 the Evening World reported 4,000 New York schoolboys entering a tournament in "the famous Irish game of handball." On the Irish side the record holds one act of the Association's governance for these years, and it too came by way of Chicago: the Chicago Citizen of 16 May 1914, in a report credited to the Gaelic Athlete, said that county committees had been instructed to start a handball championship in each county. A Carlow motion to let professional handballers play as amateurs, the report said, could not be permitted, and the congress felt the Association had not done all it might for what it called the second oldest of Irish pastimes. The date of the congress is not printed there.

No Irish newspaper of the period, GAA Official Guide, county rule book or GAA archive has been read for this record. The catalogs of the National Library of Ireland and Trinity College Dublin were reachable, and no item from either was read. Every Irish event in this chapter rests on American or colonial papers or on GAA Handball's own page and one modern Irish Times article. A Cork newspaper reaches the record only as clipped by others: a New Zealand paper of 2 September 1887 quoted the Cork Examiner of 1 July, which said Lawlor, "the champion player of Ireland," had come to Cork to take charge of the ball-court in Grattan Street. The rules and bye-laws of the Co. Dublin Handball Committee of 1905 are at the National Library of Ireland, unread. The date of the twenty-eight rules and whether the Cork convention of 1896 met are open.

In 1922 the New York Herald named Joe Heaney and Bill Bryan, who claimed the world doubles championship, as likely to be the American team at the Irish Olympic games in Dublin, having "defeated all comers at Casey's alley, Brooklyn." In 1923 Spalding's guide printed the Irish rules for American readers, and on 26 December the Washington Times printed the A.A.U.'s list of national championships for 1924, which put a hard-ball handball championship at Brooklyn beside the four-wall and one-wall events, dates not yet selected. The list does not say which rules the hard-ball event would use, and I have found no report that it was held. GAA Handball's page dates its first championships sponsored by the Association to the same year, 1923, and the founding of the Irish Handball Council to 1924.