My St. Paddy's Day Screwup
Seven years ago I was wrapping up a book with U.S. soccer star Carli Lloyd, a project written in the wake of her hat trick in the championship game of the 2015 World Cup in Vancouver, Canada. The first sentence in the book was, “I don’t do fake,” and if you know anything about Carli, you know that pretty much drills down to her essence. Anyway, we were close to the finish line when I arranged a lunch meeting with my editor in the Herald Square area of New York City. (That’s where Macy’s is, for the uninitiated.) The editor was Susan Canavan of Houghton Mifflin. The meeting was my idea, and it was idiotic. It was a Friday, but that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that it was March 17, which meant that roving hordes of green-clad teenagers, all of whom should’ve been in school, descended on midtown Manhattan, with their beverages and green derbies and leprechaun outfits, and more beverages. This was not the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, mind you, a grand New York tradition that dates to 1762, when, according to the parade’s website, the marchers were a band of homesick, Irish ex-patriots and Irish military members serving with the British Army in the colonies.
It was also not about St. Patrick himself, the patron saint of Ireland, a man whose formal name was Padraig. (If you want to abbreviate it, please call it St. Paddy’s Day, not St. Patty’s Day.)
This was just hundreds – no, thousands – of underaged, overserved people, marauding through the West 30s with mostly happy mayhem on their minds. Once St. Patrick’s Day was a solemn religious holiday, observed on the date of the saint’s death, but it has somehow devolved from a celebration of Irish culture in America into an orgy of excess – an excuse to get wasted and drink green beer and hope you find your way home safely.
I hope this doesn’t sound harsh. I have a lot of Irish in my blood, and Ireland is a place I love. It is a land full of warm-hearted people, world-class porridge and the greenest pastures I’ve ever seen, along with pubs that feel more like community centers than places to go and get drunk. After I finished covering the All England Lawn Tennis Championships (a/k/a Wimbledon) a mere 30 years ago, my wife and I visited the adorable, seaside town of Dingle in County Kerry.
We had our daughter, Alexandra, 15 months old, with us, and by the time our week was over, I think she had been held by every set of arms in Dingle. My wife, Denise, was getting very pregnant with another baby, our son. We biked the Great Blasket Island, just off the west coast of Ireland. My wife powered up every hill the island had to offer, even with an infant who turned out to be nine pounds, 11 ounces. I knew then I was out of my league. We named the baby Sean.
At our ill-fated St. Patrick’s Day book meeting, Susan and I crammed into the front corner of a bar, the only two seats available. We ordered food, but I don’t believe it has arrived yet. We didn’t order drinks; there was enough of that going on around us. “I hope you appreciate my planning, scheduling a meeting on St. Patrick’s Day in Manhattan,” I said. Susan was good natured about it, and she said she did. The packs of teenagers kept on, and the marauding continued. Carli’s book – When Nobody Was Watching – became a New York Times bestseller. On her author tour, she did a book signing at a Barnes & Noble in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, not far from her home. Almost a thousand people – mostly young girls in their soccer jerseys – showed up, no matter that there was a raging stoirm baisti – Irish for rainstorm – outside and a parking lot that looked like a lagoon. The line of bookbuyers snaked all the way around the store. Carli probably went through ten Sharpies that day. My role was to open the book to the title page. Carli doesn’t do fake, and I have learned my lesson: I don’t do meetings in Manhattan on St. Patrick’s Day.