America At Large: The Winter Wonderland atmosphere only made it more surreal. The blizzard which had begun two hours before kick-off had dumped six inches of snow on Foxboro Stadium last Saturday night, and now, in the ninth minute of overtime, several New England Patriots availed of their final time-out, feverishly kicking the snow away to clear a spot where the ball would be placed for a game-winning field goal attempt.
From across the line of scrimmage, several Oakland Raiders were simultaneously doing their level best to kick the snow right back from whence it had come.
Despite the treacherous footing - imagine an ice-skating rink with half a foot of snow on the surface - the Patriots kicker had miraculously booted a 45-yard field goal with 27 seconds left in regulation to bring his team, which had trailed 13-3 with eight minutes to play, level at 13-all, and now he capped the dramatic comeback by drilling the kick home.
As the placekicker was borne off through the driving snow on the shoulders of his team-mates, the stadium rocked with delirious glee. Over 60,000 had remained rooted (and possibly frozen) to their seats, and now they positively exploded in delight at the realisation that the Patriots, who opened the season a consensus pick for the AFC East cellar, were one game away from the Super Bowl.
New England was still basking in the afterglow two days later when I chanced, on my car radio, to hear the Irish-American folksinger Tim O'Brien perform a song called Mick Ryan's Lament. O'Brien, a Virginia-born musician now living in Nashville, explored his Irish roots in a recent album entitled Two Journeys, on which he was accompanied by, among others, Kevin Burke, Paddy Keenan, Tríona Ní Dhomhnaill, and Maura O'Connell.
The song in question, sort of a "Willie McBride comes-to-America", is ostensibly the first-person account of a young fellow who flees Ireland in 1848, presumably one step ahead of the authorities. Voicing his disdain for his cousins who escaped the Famine by taking the King's Shilling, he and his brother arrive in "Amerikay", where they enlist in the Union army to fight in the name of freedom at the battle of Vicksburg.
Mick survives this encounter (his brother, Paddy, does not), but remains in the army one war too long, and perishes, ironically, at Custer's Last Stand in June of 1876. Only belatedly does he recognise that in going off to subdue the Sioux he has in the end "turned into something I hated", and given his life in the service of a cause not terribly unlike the one he left Ireland to escape.
The catchy refrain, as enunciated by the now-deceased Private Ryan, goes:
The band, they played the Garryowen
Brass was shining, flags a-flowin'
I swear if I had only known
I'd have wished that I'd died back at Vicksburg.
A noble sentiment, to be sure, but historically an inaccurate one.
In his liner notes to the album, O'Brien says of the Robert Lee Dunlap-composed Mick Ryan's Lament that "the tune Garryowen was George Armstrong Custer's marching theme, and was likely heard by Sitting Bull and his tribe at the Little Bighorn".
While the Garryowen air was in Custer's time and remains to this day the regimental anthem of the Seventh US Cavalry, quite certainly neither the Hunkpapa Sioux chief Sitting Bull nor Custer heard it played on the day of the battle - and, moreover, if they had, the New England Patriots would have lost, or at least would have had to figure out a different way to win last Saturday night.
Born in Turin in 1834, Felix Villiet Vinatieri trained as a classical musician at the conservatory in Naples before emigrating to America in 1859. He served with the Union army during the Civil War and was discharged in 1870 at Fort Sully in the Dakota Territory, where he chose to settle. Marrying a local girl, he earned his living teaching music while pursuing his greater dream as a composer.
When the Seventh Cavalry, under the command of Custer, arrived in the Dakotas three years later, the town of Yankton staged a ball. Custer was sufficiently impressed by the sophistication of the music performed that he summoned the band's leader.
Custer explained to Vinatieri that his present military bandleader had requested to be relieved, and offered him the position of chief musician. Vinatieri agreed, and, after travelling to Minnesota to be officially sworn in, was appointed bandleader of the Seventh Cavalry.
Although Vinatieri and his musicians accompanied Custer on many of his forays through the west, the 1876 Little Bighorn excursion was not one of them. While it seems unlikely that Custer fully comprehended the danger lying in wait for him (if he had, he most assuredly would never have marched off that morning), he understood enough about the circumstances to realise that announcing the operation with a marching brass band probably wasn't a great idea.
At Custer's direction, Vinatieri and his 16 musicians, most of them Germans, remained behind with the regimental supply steamboat, moored on the Powder River, under orders not to engage in the battle; thus it was that none of the musicians was among the 276 men and officers killed that day.
(Since the Sioux were of the belief that separating a decedent from his privates would deny him entrance into heaven, all the bodies save Custer's were scalped and mutilated, a circumstance somehow overlooked in Mick Ryan's somewhat sanitised message-from-the-grave.)
Eventually captured, Sitting Bull went on to tour Europe as part of Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show. Felix Vinatieri was honourably discharged later that year and returned to his adopted hometown to resume his life as a civilian musician and, perhaps even more significantly, from a football standpoint, to father several children.
A composer of some renown, Felix wrote marches, polkas, waltzes, overtures and two of America's earliest light operas before dying, of natural causes, in Yankton, South Dakota in 1891 - a year after Sitting Bull, and 81 years before his great, great-grandson Adam Vinatieri, the place-kicking hero of last Saturday night's win against the Raiders, was born in the same city.
