Time has come to inject new life into SuperLeague

Jasper McElroy couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Neither could Paudie O’Connor.

Tue, 20 Mar, 2012 - 00:00

Kieran Shannon is an award-winning sportswriter renowned for big interviews, insightful columns and an unrelenting focus on high‑performance sport.

The pair of them were in a hotel in Charlotte, along with Terry Strickland and Tony Andre, to recall for a television documentary a time when they were kings and the Irish basketball league was the most exciting in all of Irish sport. They were aware that the league had declined sharply from where it was in the 90s, let alone the 80s, but some measures of and factors in that decline alarmed them.

O’Connor, a resident of Las Vegas for almost two decades now, once made the all-star five of a European qualifying tournament Ireland took part in, in 1976. Now the man who first brought American pro players into Ireland was pained to learn that Ireland haven’t even got a senior team playing in international competition.