How Irish American Athletes Slugged Their Way to Respectability
Sportsmen with roots in the Emerald Isle reshaped the image of the shantytwon ruffian. In his 1888 book The Ethics of Boxing and Manly Sport, a high-minded treatise on the ennobling effect of sports, the journalist, poet, and Irish exile John Boyle O’Reilly wrote that “there is no branch of athletics in which Irishmen, or the[…]