In the late fifties and early sixties, Roxbury’s Dudley Square housed five ballrooms of romance that teemed with the emigrant Irish at play. From all around Boston they came to cut a rug, to hear familiar music, to savour the reassuring accents of home at The Hibernian, Winslow Hall, The Rose Croix, The Opera House and the Intercolonial. On the dance floor of the last of those establishments, John Walsh from Carna met Mary O’Malley from Rosmuc. Just 18 miles separated their town lands across the Connemara Gaeltacht, but it was in a city far from home, the so-called “American capital of Galway” that they fell in love and were married.
Someday very soon, their eldest son Marty is expected to resign as Secretary of Labour in the Biden Administration to become executive director of the National Hockey League Players’ Association (NHLPA). Swapping one powerful gig for another. The 55-year-old will go from fighting for the nation’s workers to representing professional athletes he’s spent his life admiring. His salary will rise from $221,400 (€206,000) to $3m a year but money may well be the least of the attraction. A diehard Boston Bruins fan who grew up playing street hockey in Dorchester, Walsh was seven and battling cancer when Bobby Orr, his hero on ice then and now, visited the ward.
“I was leaving the hospital, I was waiting for him and he wasn’t coming,” said Walsh, then in the early stages of a four-year struggle with Burkitt’s lymphoma. “My mother said, ‘C’mon, we’ve got to go.’ And as we got to the elevator, the elevator opened and there he was. I don’t think I said anything, I think I was more shocked. He was like the first famous person I ever met in my life. I was little, and at seven years old, you know who the superstars are, and at the time Bobby Orr was at the top of that list, boy, I’ll tell you that. He was the list.”
Decades later, a grown man yet still a fan boy at heart, he got Orr to autograph anew the fading signed photograph he gifted him that day. By that point, Walsh was Mayor of Boston, a Bruins’ season ticket holder since he was 21, and somebody whose idea of relaxing after a hard day politicking was to stick on whatever hockey match happened to be available on the NHL cable package. The sport courses through his life and was instrumental in transforming it.
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On April 23rd, 1995, he went to watch the Bruins take on the New York Rangers at the old Boston Garden. A Sunday afternoon game that fell right in the middle of the usual weekend-long skite. He got so drunk that, eventually, he was asked to leave by security. Staggering across the street into The Harp, he went straight back to drinking. By the time his friends found him, he was asleep and needing to be carried home. Again. The next day, he was talking to a counsellor, on the way to rehab and about to begin the rest of his life.
Two years later, sober, he ran for office, was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives for his home district and became a rising political star. As Mayor of Beantown, he was invited to address the 2016 Democratic National Convention and began his speech as he would any appearance at an AA meeting, “My name is Marty Walsh and I’m an alcoholic.” After Trump started his crackdown on immigrants, Walsh gained national prominence after promising to open City Hall to the undocumented if necessary. What else could the son of emigrants be expected to do?
“Every summer I’d go over as a kid to my grandparents’ house in Rosmuc, where my mother is from,” Walsh told the Boston Globe “I loved it there: planting cabbage or sowing potatoes in the fields, feeding the chickens or fishing on the pier.”
One of 14 children, John Walsh did six years paving roads in England to finance a more permanent move to America. An older brother Pat had already made his mark in Boston, becoming business agent of Laborers’ Local 223, an influential position in a construction trade union, enabling him to give generations of newly arrived Irish well-paying jobs. Marty followed his father and uncle into the family trade, although a degree from Boston College as a mature night student allowed him to move off the sites and to rise through the ranks of the labour movement.
[ Boston mayor welcomed back to the land of his parents (2014)Opens in new window ]
Heading up the hockey players’ union marks a return to those roots, albeit on a different scale. The average NHL salary is $3.5m, yet the perception is they are underpaid, and he will be expected to change that. It is a measure of how badly the NHLPA wants him that, apparently, they are willing to allow him to live in Boston rather than Toronto, where the union’s head offices are located. A major concession.
Since the Cold War, it has been customary during the State of the Union for one member of the president’s cabinet not to attend the address. Instead, he or she is taken to an undisclosed secure location and, in the event of a catastrophic attack on the Capitol killing the rest of the government, that person assumes control of the nation. When Biden spoke last Tuesday week, Marty Walsh was the absentee named Designated Survivor. As good a description of him as any.
