Monday, January 16, 2012
SOME things haven’tchanged at the basketball.
The long lines of parked cars remain outside Neptune Stadium when there’s a game on. Yesterday they were snaking up the North Monastery Road as far as Sunvalley Drive, and along Redemption Road, spilling down along Gerald Griffin and Great William O’Brien Streets. Bumper to bumper, wedged across footpaths as haphazardly as ever.
If a neutron bomb detonated a mile over Blackpool, it would hardly leave the unmanned cars strewn as randomly around the streets.
Naturally, it was getting cold and dark outside as well: the contrast between the heat and flash of a Demons-Neptune game in a heaving hall, and the gloom and murk of Cork winter outside so marked as to be almost cliche.
Of course, some things have changed. The Ritmos and Capris that used to occupy the footpaths of yesteryear are not to be seen, though they were much in evidence the last time your columnist was a regular at Neptune, or the Parochial Hall further up the hill.
Margaret Thatcher was a figure to be burned at the stake back then, rather than the latest target of one of Meryl Streep’s soulless impersonations.
That’s one of the great dangers of writing about basketball in Ireland: the two sports venues mentioned above occupy a notional space in the collective sporting memory on a par with the GPO, and your credibility needs to be established early doors in any discussion.
Usually you need to establish your bona fides early on, protesting that yes, you too were there the night Tony Hafley took the ball out with a behind-the-back bounce that went the length of the court, that you too can produce his nickname on demand, and that you too were turned away from the door of Cott’s on the grounds that your fresh complexion — which now safely takes five years off your actual age — was far too smooth then to allow you to drink illegally Back In The Day (if you were genuinely too young to have been there, you’re left facing Brendan Behan’s immortal putdown, issued when someone in the pub said he wasn’t even born in 1916: "excuses").
You’d wonder at times if this grates on current players a little, the constant harping back to a golden age that took place before they were born, to judge the fresh complexions on show in Neptune yesterday. After all, basketball must be one of the few sports in Ireland which many people believe was more glamorous and better attended in the grim 1980s.
That said, this prodigal son noted some crucial differences yesterday. The entrance of the players onto the court has been sexed up. What those of a certain vintage refer to as the Old Spice music now heralds the arrival of the gladiators into the playing area (culture vulture that you are, you know the theme in question is not just incidental music from Excalibur — the 80s, once again — but in actual fact Carmina Burana by Carl Orff. You knew that).
It’s not clear whether the participants need the heart rate raised by loud music, mind you. Yesterday Neptune took on Demons in the men’s National Cup semi-finals, for instance, a match-up to make the mouth water in the 80s and no less attractive even now. Even the colours worn — blue versus red — form the classical contrast of local rivalries all over the world.
What really made the games of the 80s worth going to was the fervour of the crowd, and by any standards that was at the requisite level yesterday: the walls of the venue didn’t quite steam up with sweat, but they didn’t have moisture streaming down them at every game 30 years ago either.
Whatever about the players, I hope the spectators nowadays aren’t mauled with stories of their predecessors’ passion outweighing their own, though I do recall a player on a Kerry team finding it difficult to disentangle himself from the crowd after slipping out of bounds under a basket in the Parochial Hall, so keen were the spectators to ‘help’ him back to his feet.
Yesterday’s match? Neptune were underdogs, having shipped a heavy defeat at the hands of Demons earlier this season, but they surfed their adrenaline through the first quarter, ending it one-point ahead; in the second quarter Demons asserted themselves more than somewhat, and at half-time they were four points up, 45 to 41. By the end of the third quarter Demons had 13 points to spare and didn’t look like losing that lead late in the game. Ron Thompson’s struggle with an injury didn’t help Neptune’s cause and Demons eventually won by 18.
Afterwards, back out to a wintry present. Driving past a few minutes later on the way back into town and the big time machine on the northside was shutting down, more memories created.
* Contact: michael.moynihan@examiner.ie. Twitter: MikeMoynihanEx
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