Kieran Shannon: Neptune-Demons and the right to be the kings of Cork
RIVALS: Burgerlands Ray Smith trying to get by Tim McCarthy Team Britvic during the national cup final at Neptune Stadium on 20/01/85.
‘The Neptune-Demons rivalry is peerless in Irish basketball and it delivered yet again on Saturday evening with an overtime classic.
We were treated to a chaotic, entertaining game that was as good an advertisement for Irish basketball as anyone could hope for. Big personalities delivered, all in front of a packed house.
It’s the sort of game that you wish was televised live to the wider sports world in Ireland and have as many people see into this entertaining world that we have.’
For more than half a century now, multiple writers have been penning passages like the above, extolling the brilliance of one of Ireland’s fiercest and finest and most enduring sporting rivalries.
Billy George. Brendan Mooney. Noel Spillane. Yours truly. John Coughlan.
The name of the reporters may vary, the venue too. The Hall. The Stadium. The Mardyke. At times, like a Cup final 20 years ago this month, the Arena, or even the RDS as was the case 40 years ago when Jasper McElroy and Terry Strickland graced its playing surface the day before John McEnroe would play a Davis Cup game under the same roof.
Even the name of the paper has changed more than once. But not the nature of the rivalry. What Conor Meany wrote just three weeks ago reflecting on the latest league game between the two clubs could have been taken from almost any of the past 50 seasons.
Time and space doesn’t allow us to go through each of them, so let’s just take those like this one that ends with a 4.
In 1973-74 basketball in this country went properly national; for the first time there was a fully-fledged round-robin men’s national league, which in the end was won by Blue Demons. Yet even that landmark achievement was clouded by the parochial.
Their first night back training to get ready for a Cork championship final against Neptune, they found both baskets of their outdoor court at the One Na torn to the ground.
“Now,” one Demons stalwart would say to me while I was researching Hanging from the Rafters, “nothing can be proved. But you can make up your own mind who would have done something like that.”
Demons clearly made up theirs, while being mindful too that there Neptune clubmen like Michael Finn, who’d help build the Neptune Stadium, would give them a hand scrubbing the floor of the Parochial Hall and putting up the seating when Demons hosted the Major Extra Size International tournament (Neptune weren’t invited, on the grounds that they weren’t considered good enough at the time).
And so since the 1980s on multiple Americans, hailing everywhere from Alabama to Chicago, have been briefed about what happened one spring night on an outdoor court on Wyse’s Hill and why they’ve had to beat this crowd called Neptune.
The memory of that episode would fuel some great Demon wins but not that particular week in 1974. As the buzzer was sounding in that Cork championship final and Demons a point ahead, Neptune’s Martin Walsh was fouled taking a Hail Mary shot.
With no one else but himself and the two refs on the court, he clung both free throws, triggering Dave Cody, a then player and later one of Neptune’s greatest administrators, to run up to his opposite number, nemesis and eventual friend in Demons, Jim Dineen.
“Jim,” he’d roar to Dineen who could only grit his teeth, “ye might be champions of Ireland but we’re f****** champions of Cork!”
That wouldn’t have been the first time a Demons die-hard would have to swallow a bitter pill at the hand of Neptune.
Seán O’Sullivan’s voice is one most of the country would be familiar with, being the calm and accompanying one to Timmy McCarthy’s commentaries every Olympics, but before that he was a leading player and administrator with Blue Demons, and before that he was born in the same estate where Neptune grew out of: Barry’s Place, a terraced corporation estate off the Cathedral Road.
When Seán was only 11, his father died, prompting the family to move to Blarney Street. By the time they returned to Barry’s Place he had already started playing with De Paul-Blue Demons. Torture.
Anytime Neptune would win – which was most of the time in the early and mid-60s – their brethren in Barry’s Place would make a point of stationing themselves outside the O’Sullivans to gloat with their Cup. To counter, whenever Demons won a big game or trophy, O’Sullivan would invite the whole Demons team over to a party in his house.
One year he raised the bar and temperature even further. The two sides made it through to a Munster Cup final that was to be played over two legs.
When Demons won the first leg by 20 points, O’Sullivan booked an upstairs room in the Top of the Hill pub with a piano player and trays of sausages and sandwiches all laid on for the inevitable celebrations that would follow the second leg.
In the second leg up in the Parochial Hall Junior Ryan hit a basket to give Neptune a 21-point win on the night. “I was the only fella in the Top of the Hill that night,” O’Sullivan would still wince many years later.
“I ended up paying the piano man, cancelling the bar and eating as many sandwiches as I could before heading home to all the taunting awaiting in Barry’s Place. They got great glee in that episode and I had great shame in it and it created in me this fervour that would never happen to us again.”
It would happen again but that fervour, only matched by his neighbours’, would propel not just a rivalry but an entire sport in the 1980s. Something originally northside would go nationwide, its tentacles even extending Stateside. Okay, you’re being sponsored by Burgerland, we’re sponsored by Britvic.
You recruit Lennie McMillian, we’re going to recruit Mike Pyatt. You recruit Pyatt and Strickland, we’re going to recruit Jasper McElroy.
It was 40 years ago, 1983-84, that McElroy and Strickland first came here. Within a week they were playing in front of a national television audience; O’Sullivan and other visionary administrators both clubs were blessed with at the time sold RTÉ on the idea of keeping the cameras they had all rigged up for McEnroe and the Davis Cup around for McElroy and Demons-Neptune.
Demons would win that game by a point, 89-88; in the closing seconds Strickland had the ball stolen off him by McElroy who duly ran down to score the winner. Demons would go on to win that year’s league too: in their final game they’d beat Strickland and Neptune in what Meaney could and Bily George would describe as an overtime classic, only it was in the Parochial Hall.
Strickland and Neptune though would have their vengeance. The following season they would build the Neptune Stadium. Rob Demons in the Cup final with a Strickland steal and lay-up on the buzzer, and then rub it in with him scoring again on the buzzer a month later to clinch the league as well.
For a period of five years the sides met 17 times in national competition and in only one of them more than nine points separated the sides.
The thrillers and buzzer-beaters and overtime classics would stretch beyond the 80s and into the following century. Take this month 20 years ago: 2004. That year the two sides met in another National Cup final, this time in the Arena, and it would all come down to plays by two of the finest players either club and indeed the Superleague has ever produced: Stephen McCarthy and Shane Coughlan.
There was no one either side would have wanted more to have the ball. In the closing seconds with the sides level, McCarthy would uncharacteristically miss a pair of free-throws while down at the other end Shane Coughlan would ice a shot to clinch and retain the Cup for Demons.
The rivalry would extend into, and enrich, the following decade. In 2010 the 25th anniversary of the opening of the Neptune Stadium coincided with both clubs being drawn in the Cup semi-final, triggering Basketball Ireland to move it from Dublin to Cork and where the Cup semi-final weekend has basically stayed ever since.
Now this Friday night the pair of them go at it again, their fifth semi-final showdown since the three McElroy would have had back in the late 80s. Again the place will be packed. Again both parties will be dying to slag and sicken the other, but similarly, there will be that Michael Finn-like spirit of mutual respect.
A standout performer in that 2004 Cup final was Neptune’s Gordon Fitzgerald. Yesterday morning his wife Ursula was claimed by cancer. When there will be the likely minute’s silence in the Neptune Stadium, Demons die-hards will observe it as solemnly as anyone from Neptune.
Gordon’s brother Paul played and won with both clubs. Gordon himself won six leagues. Ursula’s father is Junior Ryan, the man who hit that shot and made Sean O’Sullivan eat all those sandwiches on his own all those years ago. It sickened them then but intuitively they know: if it wasn’t for Junior, a Gordon, Neptune-Demons wouldn’t be Neptune-Demons.
Then the ball will be thrown up and both sides – northsiders, Europeans, Americans alike – will scrap like mad.
Not just to be one game from winning a national title, but to be, as Dave Cody put it so colourfully 50 years ago, , “f****** champions of Cork” - or at least of each other, for one night anyway.
