The Big Interview with Timmy McCarthy: 'My mortality had been challenged - then my humanity was'

Two years after a prostate cancer diagnosis, Irish basketball legend Timmy McCarthy is back living as normal and full a life as he could wish for. “I wanted to keep on this planet as long as I could and do everything I could do to enjoy time with my family."

Sat, 10 Oct, 2020 - 07:00

Kieran Shannon

Maybe it’s because he played and coached in the one team sport where the clock works not just in seconds but milliseconds – like when he ghosted in to receive a Jasper McElroy pass and scored on the buzzer to win a national championship semi-final against Dublin St Vincent’s in a packed Neptune Stadium back in ’85 – but Timmy McCarthy remembers exactly the date and time when he and his wife Anne sat down in front of Dr Eamonn Rogers.

It was 11.01am on February 28, 2018, a day when the country was in the grip of a big freeze. The previous year McCarthy had found he was going to the bathroom at a frequency that was becoming “ridiculous”. He went to his GP and some specialists for a range of check-ups and scans that showed up nothing of concern, but then Rogers, a consultant urologist, suggested he undergo a biopsy, as he put it, “just to be sure to be sure to be sure”.