like my boys to grow up like Jim Connolly.’
Growing up like Jim Connolly, with his fierce pride in sport and Ireland, captivated the young Hayes. The job as a sandhog had toughened up Johnny and Willie a lot. They learned how to pace their young bodies over the long, exhausting hours spent underground. There, they learned it was fatal to start shovelling too fast and they learned to build up their stamina slowly, for you still had to be on your feet at the end of the day.
Their work did not leave them a lot of time for relaxing, but when the priests at the orphanage organised ball games and foot races, the two boys, toughened by their underground work, showed their strength. Hard physical work was making Hayes fitter by the week. When he had a few pennies in his pocket, Johnny still had energy to burn, and with his friends he would go dancing at the Manhattan Casino in Harlem. They would happily jog all the way home at two in the morning.
These boys could run and the priests noticed it. ‘Look at young Jack Hayes,’ they would say, ‘he could be a champion, a fine Irish boy like that. Get him out of shovelling sand all day and you’ll see him run like a racehorse.’
No one would question the pull that the Irish-Americans had in New York at the turn of the century. If an immigrant needed naturalisation papers, a Tammany Hall man was there to pull the right strings; if a poor Irish boy got himself arrested, a Tammany lawyer bailed him out. Whenever an old widow couldn’t pay the rent, Tammany money would come to the rescue. It was a simple enough deal – it was tit for tat. And all the Irish had to do to meet their end of the bargain was to vote the right way. With a word here and a word there, it was simple enough to get a promising young athlete onto a payroll, where the duties would be minimal or even non-existent.
Johnny Hayes, they decided, needed time to train, to rest, to race and to be coached. They had a word with the man who was president of the Irish-American Athletic Club, Patrick J. Conway. A close friend of the mayor, he joked about the Irish-American lad working every day in water up to his knees, saying how rheumatism might ruin a fine athletic career.
‘We’ll find him a dry job,’ declared Pat Conway, and before he knew it, the young Hayes was on the payroll of a New York store then called Bloomingdale Brothers. When he showed up for work, the store said Mr Conway had suggested that he work in the dry-goods department. For Johnny, anything had to be better than ruining his health as a sandhog, and while at Bloomingdale’s, his duties were variously described as a messenger, an odd job boy, an assistant in the caretaker’s office or even a shipping clerk.
But his real job was to collect his money. Later, when he had found success and fame as an athlete, the store collected on their investment, plastered the place with pictures of him and put out stories of how he had trained on a quarter-mile track on the roof. In fact, Hayes rarely got to work in Bloomingdales, much less train on the roof. His so-called job was one of convenience arranged for him by the Irish-Americans and Pat Conway. The truth was that from the moment Johnny stopped being a sandhog, he became a full-time athlete. He drew a steady salary, reported to be $20 per week, but instead of working he spent his time training for long-distance running in the parks and roads beyond Manhattan.
Already, John Joseph Hayes had stepped way beyond Baron de Coubertin’s romantic dream of strict amateurism; already he enjoyed unlimited hours to train and professional coaches to train with. But he was not the only one…
Even in faraway Britain, they hadn’t managed to kill off the professionals.
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