Do domestic club loyalties trump support for the Ireland senior basketball team?
Captain Jason Killeen leads the Irish celebrations after they won the FIBA Men’s European Championship for Small Countries at the National Basketball Arena in Tallaght last August.
There's something about win-or-bust that is simply irresistible to sports fans so when basketball’s cup weekend rolls around every January, interest in the domestic game always peaks.
Thousands of neutrals will tune into TG4’s live coverage over the next three days and, if not for Covid, the National Basketball Arena in Tallaght would be jammers with club players, coaches, and fans kicking up a storm.
But interest in the Irish senior international teams?
Meh.
If you offered people a free ticket for these Insure.ie cup finals or an Irish international game, which do you imagine they’d take?
Can you imagine Irish soccer or rugby fans making the same choice?
Domestic club loyalties still trump support for Team Ireland, even though the senior men’s and women’s teams have recently stepped back into their highest level of European competition in years.
There’s a disconnect with the Irish senior men’s team that can be traced back historically to the recruitment of — and eventual over-dependence on — Irish-American players from the early 1990s.
Some of them played at the highest level in Europe and even in the NBA and helped Ireland, who didn’t win one international match in 1977, to the European semi-final stages in 2002 where they held their own against super-powers like Germany and Croatia.
But, in those pre-streaming days, most Irish fans rarely saw them play, and their recruitment lessened international opportunities for domestic players so disconnection and resentment festered.
Conor Meany, a Superleague veteran for Marian and under-age international, admits even he lost the love for Ireland when they went so far down the ‘American pro’ route.
But, with time to kill during Covid lockdowns, he decided to explore that, contacting those first and second-generation Irish players, to flesh out their roots, motivations, and experiences.
His research just resulted in him writing a completely different book.
“I had about 50,000 words on those guys but I thought I’d do a disservice to only focus on them. I needed to tell another story, to give a general picture of the international team.”
Hoops Across the Ocean — the rise and fall of the Irish Basketball Team which he has self-published, charts the entire international history of Irish basketball.
It traces its army roots (the Olympic team in 1948 was entirely army personnel), the highs and lows of the Irish senior men’s and women’s programmes, the nadir of withdrawing from all international competition in 2010 because Basketball Ireland was €1.2m in debt, and its recent resurgence.
It inevitably examines the Irish-American connections including the philosophy of seminal Clare man Enda Byrt, whose pursuit of emigrant players as Irish coach proved contentious for some in the domestic game.
Byrt, he says, intended using Irish-American links to improve the standard of domestic players through scholarships and finance, as well as bolstering the national side with some US-born players.
He didn’t want to replace Irish players, rather just fill in some obvious gaps in his rosters.
Meany points out that it was significant international rule changes— Bosman in 1995 and a subsequent FIBA shift which accelerated the process of international allegiance — that saw other coaches take Irish-American recruitment to its extremes.
For two European qualifiers in 2004, Ireland’s men had only one Irish-born player in their 12-man roster and that was Pat Burke, the NBA player who was born in Tullamore, Co Offaly, but moved Stateside aged three.
He has uncovered great yarns and insights, including Burke’s favoured response to people questioned his allegiance: “I fart shamrocks. F off!” When Byrt’s team played a scrimmage game with USA at the 1995 World Student Games, their opponents included future NBA stars like Allen Iverson, Ray Allen, and Tim Duncan; Iverson reportedly asked one Irish player if he spoke English.
The story of how Basketball Ireland accepted 3,000 balls from Benetton Treviso as compensation for not releasing Alan Tomidy for international duty in 2000 is particularly gob-smacking and instructive.
Meany wonders why Ireland embraces non-Irish-born players in soccer and rugby but not in basketball and looks at the chicken-and-egg dilemma it faces: Do you invest in the international team to grow the grassroots or vice versa? How do you fund it?
He is currently Basketball Ireland’s commercial manager so accepts he has biases.
His father, Paul, is a former association president who also stepped in, voluntarily, to help sort things out when it hit the financial skids in 2009.
The book is clearly a labour of love and does Irish basketball considerable service as its first recorded international history, even if written in a non-academic conversational style and without an index.
It is an even-handed reflection that gives good context to the challenges facing current senior managers Mark Keenan and James Weldon.
“Enda Byrt wanted to support and develop young Irish talent through Irish-American links but then the rules changed (Bosman and FIBA) so it ended up going much further down that route than he ever intended,” he writes.
“When you talk to Irish-Americans like John O’Connell and Dan Callahan, Irishness is their fabric — they just didn’t grow up in Ireland. They weren’t just these hired hands who came in to help us internationally.
“The other thing that struck me is just how cyclical things are. We’re again trying to figure out how to fund and progress national teams and whether to look to America for support or players. We’re not doing stuff now that hasn’t been tried in the past.”
What is inarguable is his undiminished passion for the game and its future. He played in four cup finals and only won one (2011). He’s now a father of two toddlers and returned (temporarily, he insists) to Superleague action this year to help UCD Marian transition their talented U20s into seniors.
And today at 6.15pm, you’ll find him on the sideline in Tallaght, helping Marian’s U20 coach, Fran Ryan, as they take on UCC Blue Demons in the first of the 2022 cup finals.
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