MY first experience of playing Gaelic football outside Ireland was in the summer of 1994, the summer of the USA World Cup, Ray Houghton in Giants Stadium and OJ on the freeway.

I was living in a ramshackle old house on Dorchester Street in south Boston. There were 25 Irish crammed into two two-bedroom apartments – I was on a floor downstairs with the 90 percent Cork contingent and upstairs was 90 percent Dubs.

We used to have a gang of street winos gathering outside our place after the weekend ready for when the empty bottles would be brought out.

The last thing I wanted to do was play football but work was proving elusive so in the end it was over to the old reliable Irish bar with glowing stories about my kicking and catching abilities.

Within the week I was working with Feeney Bros Sub-Contractors for the relatively princely sum of $11 an hour and had signed up for the Shannon Blues Gaelic football mission to win the Boston Senior Championship.

The first shock about the GAA in America was that you had to pay in – even when you were playing.

It wasn’t enough that you were going to run up and down for an hour or more with a screaming hangover in the blistering hot sun – it was the hottest summer in 40 years in Boston – walloping and getting walloped on a rock-hard, grassless pitch where high catches were possible on the third bounce. You also had to pay $20 for the privilege.

It was to prove a difficult season for Shannon Blues. Before I had arrived, we had already lost one of our main men – Ciaran Maher, who had come on as a sub for Dublin in the All-Ireland final against Galway in 1983.

He had got a six-month suspension from the North American GAA Board for allegedly mooning the Bishop of Massachusetts while intoxicated at a wedding. It seemed clear that God was not going to be on our side this year

Football was very, very physical when I played in Boston. The referees were usually players from other teams with an axe to grind so all sorts of mayhem was possible. It was only 13-a-side then because you’d be playing on an American Football pitch.

The combination of blow-in GAA county superstars and permanently hungover and resentful illegal alien plumbers, painters and carpenters made for some tasty collisions.

I remember once catching the ball round the middle of the field and turning ready to deliver a visionary pass when the guy marking me quite openly just whacked me with his fist across the jaw in a completely matter of fact manner.

I was lying on the ground, a bit stunned but not hurt, waiting for yer man to be sent off or arrested or something. All was quiet. Eventually a harsh voice carried on the windless air from the grandstand: “Are ya waitin’ fer yer mammy Sonny? Get up ta f**k.” I got up already convinced that my ‘hardy Gael’ genes were proving somewhat insufficient for the task in hand.

After a winless first month of the campaign, Shannon Blues brought over Kieran McGeeney and Des Mackin from Armagh.

Des, who I had played against at minor, was a good laugh. McGeeney was scary. Early on he told Des: “Don’t talk to that f**ker” – I had scored the goal against Armagh in the 1992 minor final. I think he was joking but…on the field he was amazing. I remember he’d come steaming up from centre-back and growl “gimme the ball” without unclenching his teeth. Off with him then at about 40 miles an hour into a dense forest of flailing fists and boots and snarls with the ball wrapped under his arm. He was in his element.

For the record, Shannon Blues, proud stalwarts of the Boston GAA scene, won precisely zero matches that season. I had by the halfway stage completed an inexorable evolution from midfield to wing-forward to the corner to the bench. My job with Feeney Brothers Utility Services was following a similar trajectory.

We were working to replace Boston’s old copper gas pipes with shiny new plastic yellow ones. On my first day at work for Feeney Bros I was presented with a heavy jackhammer and told to cut one side of a road so a trench could be dug. Soft Arts student that I was,  I had honestly never even heard of the concept of ‘a jackhammer’ much less seen or used one before. After two hours of pathetic fumbling my contemptuous American foreman thrust a sweeping brush at me. I had found my niche.

After about two months it was pretty clear that I wasn’t, to put it mildly, going to set the world of American GAA on fire so I was quietly relieved of my labouring duties also. I still, however, nervously await the news bulletin which brings word of a major gas explosion in the city of Boston.

McGeeney went on to lift the Sam Maguire Cup for the Orchard county. I went on to represent Seattle in the Junior C North American finals in San Francisco in 1999.

Playing in Seattle was totally different to the Irish-America fest in Boston. We would occasionally play a friendly against the boys in Vancouver but usually it was just a bit of practice once a week and a few beers down at the Irish Emigrant on University Avenue near the University of Washington.

In September, the Seattle boys flew down to San Francisco to represent the Pacific North West in the North American finals. Unlike in Boston, if you played for Seattle, or somewhere like that, you could just go straight to the North American finals as that would be your only competitive games of the year.

It was the first time we had played on a Gaelic pitch together. Before that it was jumpers as goalposts and visionaries as umpires.

I was actually a ringer on that Seattle team not having arrived in time to officially register, so I was supposed to be Sean O’Neill from Gorey or somewhere. If that wasn’t cloak and dagger enough, before the throw-in both teams had to line up, togged out clutching your registration card complete with photo.

The opposing coach would walk up the line like a zealous East German secret policeman at the Berlin Wall, gazing suspiciously at each photo and the face it purported to represent.  Sean was a handsome fellah and I was, and am, not, but after some tension and misdirection from the Seattle trainer, we made it.

Over the next two days we won two games against Florida and Denver, who had Colm O’Neill, the great Cork player who had earned serious respect in Meath for being sent off for punching Mick Lyons in an All-Ireland final. However, ravaged by injuries and alcohol, we lost an exciting final to Washington D.C.

The most interesting thing was playing GAA for the first time ever with non-Irish people.  On our team we had a few Americans and a few Canadians, including Jimmy Owens from New Brunswick, Canada, of Tyrone ancestry – tigerish in the tackle, word perfect on every old rebel song in the book, moose hunter and a devout Catholic – a potent mix!

The Seattle girls’ team had thrown the recruitment net far and wide and, as well as Americans and Canadians they had a few Japanese girls. It is a rather surreal experience to be harangued by a Japanese GAA player about the inept GAA tactics of their Wexford coach who had insisted on a short hand-passing game. All the players, she assured me, wanted to kick it long and let the ball do the work.

That conversation took place in a small Italian restaurant in downtown San Francisco where the Seattle men’s and women’s teams met for a meal and a drink before we all made our various ways back to grunge country.

We drank 42 bottles of Italian red wine that night and in the end the tables were moved back and every man and woman, waiter and waitress from Carrickmacross to Cagliari danced and sang until 3am.

Next door to the restaurant was a strip club and we could see people arriving for the night-shift occasionally wiping some of the steam off the window outside, trying to peer in to see what was going on.

No doubt much more than Michael Cusack conceived in Hayes’ Hotel all those years ago.