and father were bakers and I worked in the bakery as a boy – I was used to heat.’
Next after Johnny, and within the year, his brother Willie was born. Then two sisters came along: Harriet and Alice, who were six and eight years younger than Johnny. Finally, baby Dan joined the family when Johnny was already 11 years old. There might have been more but when the next baby, Philip, died in his mother’s arms, Ellen knew she would need all her energies to keep her family alive.
Life was hungry and tough, but in Manhattan you could always feed on dreams and no little boy could walk along the quayside in the New York of the 1890s without being mesmerised by all he saw and heard. Sometimes, Johnny would walk past ships being docked, watch cargoes being unloaded and study the faces of the seamen as they swung down the gangplank. For a moment, he would be a sailor, voyaging out to take on the world. He would weave these men into his adventures, playing out the hero, drinking in their excitement.
Ambition was a fire inside him, and Michael and Ellen Hayes, both exhausted long before their time, took some comfort in realising that their eldest son shrugged aside this poverty and still burned with the unquenchable energy of the young. Exactly what he wanted to do they couldn’t be sure, but still they admired the way he was not scared of hard work. They smiled with fondness at the effort and the hours he would put in and at his happy-go-lucky self-confidence.
But that confidence and thirst for hard work were about to be tested to destruction. Michael and Ellen, old long before they had reached middle age and wrung threadbare by the effort of surviving in New York, both died within weeks of each other in 1902. There was no money for a tombstone.
At the age of sixteen, Johnny Hayes found himself head of the family with two brothers and two sisters to support, the youngest of them just five years old. The children were taken into a Catholic orphanage and Johnny did what he had to to support them all there. He took the toughest, most dangerous job he could find, but a job that paid well for your sweat. It was working underground, digging tunnels for the New York subway, and shovelling sand until you dropped. They called the labourers ‘sandhogs’ and the work of the sandhogs was tedious, not to mention perilous and claustrophobic.
Johnny, and sometimes his brother Willie, worked shoulder to shoulder, straining to earn as much in a day as other labourers might bring home in a week. They needed the money now they had a family to keep. Each morning, the two boys would marvel at the tangle of derricks and scaffolding. There would be gangs of 60 or more men gulping hot coffee. Following a roll call, they would walk single file to the mouth of the shaft. Most of the men wore nothing but their shirts and trousers with waterproof boots reaching above the knees.
Just entering the tunnel took a long time. Crews would go into airlocks, one at a time, after which the doors at each end were sealed. An air pipe would start hissing and the men’s ears popped as the air pressure climbed until it was the same as in the adjoining locks which took them underground. Then the workers were able to open the connecting door and crush into the next chamber, where the entire ordeal would start all over again. Once they got to the far end of the tunnel the men had to work quickly because they could only handle the pressure for a short while.
‘Pinch your noses, keep your mouth shut and blow!’ the foreman would yell. ‘It helps your ears.’ Sometimes eardrums would rupture and bleed, and the two Hayes boys soon learned the dangers of working too fast in these conditions.
‘You need to pace yourself,’ Johnny would say to his brother. ‘Don’t go so fast at the beginning.’ Above all, the job was wet, and the dampness seemed to seep into their very bones. Half-remembered warnings from his now-dead Irish mother niggled away at Hayes’ weariness. ‘Keep yourself dry, Johnny boy,’ he could still hear her saying, ‘the rheumatism is a terrible thing – it’s the ruining of the joints.’
When he wasn’t working, Hayes would catch up on his sleep and fool around with the other Irish lads, sharing stories of sports heroes, throwing a ball, swinging a bat and sometimes for fun taking part in an impromptu foot race.
When Johnny was just ten years old, he experienced the ballyhoo that surrounded the return of the Americans from the first Olympic Games in Athens. No boy could forget the excitement of the crowds and bands, the flag-waving and the cheering, as New York saluted their conquering heroes. And among those heroes was the very first winner in those 1896 Games, an Irish-American boy like Johnny himself and a fine all-round athlete called Jim Connolly.
Connolly had won the hop, step and jump, and a year later he went on to become a prolific writer on sport, an author of sea sagas and a newspaper man for the Boston Globe and the Boston Post. But the ten-year-old Johnny Hayes never forgot the sight of him draped in the Irish tricolour on his way through Manhattan. Connolly made a huge impression on Hayes and all the other Irish-American boys in New York.
Aggressively proud, not only of his Olympic victory but of his Irish roots and sporting heritage, Connolly had been raised in the predominantly Irish-Catholic neighbourhood of South Boston. ‘We were a hot-blooded fighting lot, but also clean living, sane and healthy,’ he wrote. ‘The children grew up rugged and just naturally had a taste for athletics. Among the boys I knew as a boy it was the exception to find one who could not run or jump or swim, or play a good game of ball.’
Local sporting heroes figured prominently in the young Jim Connolly’s life. Among them was John L. Sullivan, the ‘Boston Strongboy’ and a world heavyweight boxing champion from 1882 to 1892. Another was a neighbour by the name of Gallohue, who enjoyed fame as a circus acrobat, and it was to him that Connolly attributed his earliest interest in track and field athletics.
‘Our curious jumper of whom we were all very proud,’ he wrote, ‘was a true picture of an athlete six feet in height and weighing 190 lbs stripped.’ On one occasion, Gallohue came home dressed in a superb new suit, which Connolly estimated had cost at least $60 – ‘a lot of money for a suit of clothes then’. It turned out that the suit was a pay-off for a bet made by the circus manager and that to win it, Gallohue had to jump over a baby elephant.
‘It was the professional athletes who were our role models,’ said Connolly. ‘In those days the Scotch and Irish societies used to run great festivals in the summer and the big drawing cards were the professional athletics games. We had schools of professional running then, not one but many. Every shoe town, every other mill town, had its champion. Towns would go broke backing their man.’
In May 1896, Johnny Hayes had seen his hero Jim Connolly wave his way across New York through a double line of policemen with crowds from kerb to kerb. Red, blue and green ribbons were everywhere and skyrockets flared from drug stores, homes and bar rooms, while a band beat out ‘See the Conquering Hero Comes’. Hayes cut out a newspaper picture of the scene and kept it in his pocket until it fell to pieces.
In the years that followed, Connolly would hand out training advice to any young Irish-American who dreamed of emulating his deeds in track and field.
‘Practise easily, but regularly,’ he would say. ‘Over-training is worse than under-training. After exercise, take a cold, quick sponge bath and rough towel rubbing. Eat any plain food you like, drink as little liquid as you can during the day of a race outside of your usual allowance of tea or coffee. Do not run the day before a race. From four to five in the afternoon is the best time to exercise and about five times a week usually gives the best results.’ It was good advice and not wasted on boys like Hayes.
Connolly was convinced that his Irish lineage was in large part responsible for his sporting successes, but he was also proudly Catholic. ‘It is in the blood and training of our Catholic boys to be not merely American,’ he wrote, adding, ‘These Catholic youths, patriots and athletes out of all proportion to their numbers are mostly such because of good
