I had the Kansas State game in Dublin, Ireland, circled on my calendar since it was announced last year.
My alma mater was scheduled to play in the country that I hoped to be living in, and I’d be damned if I was going to miss that. I started scouting tickets, talked the game up to my Irish friends, explained what a big deal “Farmageddon” was, and how if they just let me explain the game to them, they were going to enjoy the hell out of it. I was beyond excited. It was serendipitous. I took it as a sign that Ireland was where I was always meant to be. My stars had aligned. The universe had sent a deafening transmission. This was kismet.
Then a funny thing happened. I was granted the visa, sold all my stuff, settled into a house in the west of Ireland, and began to wonder if I even wanted to go to the game at all.
To be an American living in Ireland—“blow ins” as the Irish call us—at this particular moment is an interesting yet bewildering experience. Not a day goes by where I’m not asked my opinion on the current administration, tariffs, or foreign policy. Most of the Irish are equally fascinated and baffled by our nation’s politics as they are disappointed and dismayed. Considering the lengthy history between our two nations, I understand their concern and interest—but I’m tired of talking about it. It’s exhausting. I perform enough mental gymnastics attempting to reconcile my own nationality—how am I supposed to justify it to anyone else?
Somehow I had begun to disassociate from my American-ness. I tucked it away in a far corner of my chest, hidden behind the heaviness that presses on my lungs and creates a shallowness when I think of home. I was embarrassed, ashamed, and angry. I avoided American tourists (and believe me, there are loads of them here), softened my accent to avoid conversation, replaced my beloved cowboy boots for a pair of Sambas. Not only did I not want to be an American, but I didn’t even want to be associated as one. There was no way in hell that I was going to travel to Dublin to attend a game with 24,000 of them. I simply couldn’t do it. I was afraid for what it might resemble. Humiliated by something that hadn’t happened yet. I resigned myself to the fact that I’d make a passing attempt to watch it on TV, if possible. I told myself I’d be okay with not watching at all—that I was no longer interested.
And that’s when I learned that no matter how long you let ’em, sleeping dogs won’t remain that way forever. About a week before the game was scheduled, I started to notice an increasing smatter of purple amongst the crowds in town. It was unmistakable—Irish people don’t often drape themselves in color. First it was a t-shirt tucked underneath a rainjacket, a scarf wrapped around the neck, then the jacket itself. It wasn’t long before there were clowders of purple hoodies and hats fumbling with maps all along Shop Street. I might not be traveling to Dublin—130 miles away from my home in Galway—for the game, but that didn’t mean I was going to escape it either. The Powercat had come to me.
That Tuesday, as I was finishing my morning run, I passed a table full of older K-State fans at the local café. They were pointing in my direction and shouting, although I couldn’t understand them over my headphones. And then one of them made the unmistakable Wildcat hand signal. At first, I couldn’t figure out how on earth they’d identified me. Was I that American? Had I done that poor of a job disguising who I really was? Then I looked down at the t-shirt I had blindly plucked from my closet in the early dawn light. KSTATE in purple, block lettering was emblazoned across my chest.
There are some things in life that I just can’t resist. Putting myself into awkward, unenviable situations is at the top of the list. An almost automatic impulse to occupy several highly contrary positions all at the same time is a close second. The third is, well, the third is an incomprehensible desire to prove myself wrong. I pulled out my headphones, approached the table, and began to shake hands. By Saturday, I was on Lansdowne Street in Dublin searching for the media entrance to Aviva Stadium.
For the next few hours, I utilized my press pass to its full potential. I took the opportunity to walk onto the field at Aviva, I stood in the tunnel as Kansas State took the field, I watched the rain-soaked game from the comforts of the media tribune and the hospitality suites. I walked the concourses and spoke with fans, team staff, stadium employees, bus drivers, and security. The game itself was unremarkable. It was a sloppy, plodding affair. As I returned to the media center at halftime, I overheard an Irish photog remark to his colleague, “ah jaysus, it’s a long game, isn’t it?” and I couldn’t help but laugh.
If it were up to me, however, that game would maybe never end: those hours that I spent in and around Aviva Stadium were the first time since I had moved abroad in which I hadn’t been asked about American politics; I hadn’t felt the need to defend something I wasn’t sure merited a defense; I didn’t need to feel like I needed to be an ambassador for an entire nation; I didn’t need to remind folks that a society is defined by its people—and that we aren’t all that bad. It was the first time in months in which I hadn’t found myself hiding my cultural identity, but instead, I was embracing it. And you know what? I was happy, really really happy.
It required traveling all the way to Dublin and wading into 24,000 midwestern American fans to have a moment in which I could forget about the turmoil in my country and just talk to people about football. About their holiday. About their homes. Ask them if they knew so-and-so in Alma, tell them my father’s people came from Junction, discuss the sale barn in Paxico, and schools of Johnson County. Sports is politics, there’s no doubt about that. The photographs of Irish revolutionary leaders that line the lower tunnels of Aviva is proof that the two are inexplicably intwined in ways that are far better suited for a dissertation rather than a blog post. But sports are also community and people and culture, and a chance, for some of us, to rediscover an identity in places we hadn’t ever thought to look.
I won’t say I felt a sense of closure as I settled into my seat for the long, midnight bus ride back to Galway. I hadn’t had any sort of epiphany, or any of that BS, about what it meant to be an American, but I did feel a sense of relief. It was okay to feel the way that I had. I didn’t need to completely abandon my national and cultural identity just because I was struggling with it. I could continue to confront it. I could grapple and embrace it at the same time, and very possibly, I might discover a new sense of identity on the other side.
I’d rested my head against the window and was watching the rivulets of rain trace new paths across the exterior glass when I felt someone drop into the seat next to me. An Irish woman, soaked to the bone, wiped her face and offered me a sip from a half-full plastic cup. It was whiskey and coke, she explained. Her sister and she had just come from the Robbie Williams concert across town. It was mad gas, she said in a thick Connemara accent. She hit her vape and bent down between our seats and exhaled. She looked me in the eye, surrounded by a diaphanous cloud of smoke and said, “C’mere to me now, lad, where did you get those boots? They’re deadly.”
— Tucker C. Newsome (MA ’23)
K-State English 