Hurling's on at Philly pub: There will be blood

The Olympics may be on the big screen at Tir na Nog at 16th and Arch Streets but not for long on a Sunday morning. Ask a bartender if it's possible to get the hurling on at 10:30, he'll say, "It will be."

On the big screen, and the little screen across, and the side screen, and also in the back room. You need to listen to the pregame or postgame show? You can hear it in the men's room.

That's why Mick Daly - born, he said, in the lobby of the Granville Hotel in Waterford on Christmas Eve, 1962 - was in Tir na Nog on a Sunday morning.

Daly had driven down from Flemington, N.J., to see his home county in the all-Ireland semifinals.

What about the Olympics?

"Who cares?" said Daly, who explained that his research told him this bar was the closest pub to Flemington guaranteed to show the hurling. His castle for a morning.

Similar research brought Pio Ryan to the bar Sunday morning, since Tipperary was taking on Galway in the all-Ireland semifinals and Ryan, visiting his girlfriend's family in Cinnaminson, is from Tipperary and a man from his parish was on the squad.

That's the thing about hurling. It's all amateurs, headed back to work on Monday, and if your parish contributes a player who makes it to the national semifinals at Croke Park in Dublin, you have a piece of it, even if you now play tenor banjo at Disney World as Ryan does.

"Bravery," Ryan said when asked what it takes to be a good hurler. Name another sport where "blood replacement" and "blood replenish" are official terms. The players, 15 to a side, carry sticks with flat rounded ends and they are allowed to use them for ill intent, in addition to sending the ball, or sliotar, toward the goal, either under the crossbar for three points or over it for the more common one point. A 75-meter shot that goes through for a point is routine in this sport. Holding the ball, you can take four steps, more or less, but if you can balance it on your stick you can run forever down the 145-meter pitch.

"Instincts and intelligence," are other keys, Ryan said. Technique learned from the womb. It's still common, Ryan said, for children to carry their sticks all over town, and see piles of sticks outside shops, since the shopkeepers draw that line.

When the final score Sunday was Tipperary 2-19, Galway 2-18, Ryan was a happy man. (You do your own math in this sport. Two late three-pointers for Tipperary proved the difference. We'd call it 25-24).

The Sunday before, Waterford and powerhouse Kilkenny had tied after 70 minutes. So what happened next? Five more minutes? Some kind of shootout?

"Replay next week," Mick said, finishing his pint of Guinness and walking out for a smoke.

The Gaelic Athletic Association will tell you that hurling is older than "the recorded history of Ireland," brought to the country by the Celts, played with the same fervor for more than 2,000 years. There is a Philadelphia Hurling Club, and one of its players was at the bar, and ready to go to Seattle for the upcoming national tournament.

Nobody was sheepish about being in the pub for any of this. Chris Cooke of Lansdale and Jon Moran of Levittown were at the bar both Sundays. They can trace their heritage to the old country - and are Irish enough to stand for the national anthem played on the television pregame - but both were born here. They started coming to Tir na Nog for the hurling a couple of years ago, for a chance to get together. The games are short, they pointed out. (Seventy minutes on the clock, less than two hours in real time.) And the basic customs of the game are easy to pick up, if not the nuances.

The bar isn't open early just for the hurling. English Premier League soccer brings heavier business.

Kilkenny, trying for its third straight all-Ireland title, barely outlasted Waterford in this weekend's replay, so they will be favored over Tipperary next month in the final back in Dublin. Expect buses from both counties to fill up the roads all weekend. After all these centuries, this remains an Irish sport for the Irish.

Why not have it in the Olympics?

"Probably not a lot of competition," said Cooke of Lansdale.

"And they couldn't risk losing," mentioned Moran of Levittown.

mjensen@phillynews.com

@jensenoffcampus