Couch to Croke Park – how Jamie Boyle went from getting fit in lockdown to captaining New York via IrishTimesSport
Boyle grew up in Monroe, New York, about an hour out of the city. His people are from Donegal on his mother’s side and Wexford on his dad’s. They met at Good Shepherd GAA club on the north tip of Manhattan before raising their boys upstate. When the Irish-born players try to do his accent, he reckons they make him sound like a hayseed.
Though he went the long way round, the road turned out to be far shorter than he could have imagined. Boyle spent the pandemic the same as we all did. Working from home, bored to bits, getting out running to keep his sanity on some bit of an even keel. “You guys over there probably think of New York-born footballers the same way I do about Irish guys playing basketball,” he says. “Any time an Irish guy says he plays basketball, I immediately in my head go, ‘Yeah, sure you do. We’ll see.’ So that’s fair enough.
The uncommonly mild winter just gone did them no harm either. The previous year, as with most years, New York was ice-cold and snow-sprinkled well into the spring. “For the first few months of training, we were basically a running club,” McGeeney told The Irish Times last summer. “There was nowhere to play or train with a ball.”
“We enjoyed every bit of it,” Boyle says. “We obviously went for a meal on Saturday afterwards and that went late. Then we hung out together all day Sunday and most of Monday too. Then we went back training on Tuesday to get ready for Sligo. We’ve done a lot of talking together as a team. About what we want to do and where we want to go.”
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