To win just once: The Galway basketball story

Galway has produced some of the best players in Irish basketball history but never won silverware at the Superleague level. Now Maree are on the verge of changing that

FINAL-BOUND: University of Galway Maree’s Rodrigo Gomez celebrates after the semi-final. Pic: INPHO/Ryan Byrne

He was right, you know. Your boy Tolley. Winning is everything and nothing else matters. I mean, I’ve said that so many times myself, I’ve lost count. Doesn’t matter what sport, what country, any coach worth a darn believes those words. Fact.

And then I came here. And for the first time in my life, maybe for the first time in the history of sports, suddenly it’s just not true anymore. At least not here, not now. You see, Red, it doesn’t matter if we win or if we lose. It’s not even about how we play the game. What matters is that we play the game. That we take the field, that we suit up on Saturdays and we keep this thing alive. We play the game, Red, and I’m telling you one day, not today, not tomorrow, probably not even next season but one day you and I are going to wake up and suddenly we’re going to be like every other team in every other sport where winning is everything and nothing else matters.

Jake Lengyel (Matthew McConaughey), We are Marshall (2006) 

Before there was Titans, or before Maree or Moycullen ever entered a national league, there was Democrats. They were the first from the city, men’s or women’s, to take the big leap.

How did they land? Did they make any splash? Well, they stumbled and stuttered at first but by ’87 had found their stride to top the second division. The season that followed is almost legendary for how hard and rough it was on them; they weren’t so much mixing with the big boys as devoured by them. By 1993 they were gone, having propped up the bottom of the second division for a couple of consecutive years.

But just because the band broke up didn’t mean they stopped playing music. In fact almost to a man they went on to teach it and a lot of them still do. So not just the memories live on, so does the legacy. When you’d characters as colourful and large as Joe ‘the Dunking Monk’ Coughlan, James ‘Crazy Horse’ Burke, Ciaran Murphy and current U16 national team coach Mike Lynch now in his late fifties but still sporting a ponytail, they weren’t going to disappear or let Galway basketball disappear either.

We caught up with Coughlan (the founder of Titans) and Murphy (for decades the principal and head coach in St Mary’s College, a renowned basketball academy), to talk about hoops in the home of the Tribes, past, present and future. From the days of the Democrats to no national basketball in the city for 15 years to now where NUIG Maree and Mystics and Moycullen and Titans all play at that stage and Maree are just 40 minutes away from bringing the first-ever bit of Superleague-level silverware to Galway.

TALKING TACTICS: University of Galway Maree's head coach Charlie Crowley. Pic: INPHO/Ryan Byrne

J COUGHLAN: There were no kids’ leagues in Galway until the late 1990s, early 2000s. Before then you could be 14 playing in a men’s league, like I did with St Vincent’s de Paul, Celtics, Dolphins – the name kept changing. You had schools basketball alright but even in my case we didn’t have basketball in the Jes [Coláiste Iognáid] until I was 15.

A couple of years later I was playing in America for a few weeks that summer with the likes of Tom O’Sullivan and Paul Fitzgerald and making the U17 national team. After school I went into the seminary to be a Franciscan monk. It was down in Killarney and three months in I’m on the altar when [former St Paul’s and Kerry football manager] Pat O’Shea spots me and has a word with Paudie O’Connor. Well, I can tell you, when you’ve been praying like a bastard all day, reading, meditating, levitating and barely able to get out for a walk in the sun, and suddenly you’re allowed to play basketball with the local team, it was like manna from heaven.

They called me The Dunking Monk. But of course if they allowed me out to play, they’d to let the other friars out; whenever I’d be playing you’d 14 friars going with me, a line of them sitting courtside in their brown dresses.

Then my parents and grandmother got sick so I took a year out to go back home and mind them. When I went back to the Franciscans they told me they had lost 26 guys so there’d be no student intake, so I said I’d wait another year and did some social work instead. Plus, by then I was playing with Democrats.

C MURPHY: Democrats started as just a local league team with a few lads like myself who took up the sport in the Jes or some lads studying in college [UCG back then]. I remember us going out to play Maree and the Burkes one evening in the pissing rain on the old Brothers of Charity outdoor court. You had other basketball pockets like Moycullen and Oughterard but after we’d won a few local leagues we kind of asked ourselves, ‘Surely there’s got to be something else?’ So we went national league which was a huge struggle. A lot of craic too though.

COUGHLAN: You had the Americans of course. David Beckom smoking cigars and dunking the ball. One year we had Ed Randolph, dunking on a 7’1 American Killarney had, John O’Donovan. Then there was Skip Barry. What a fucking player. 6’10, out of Boston College. Scored 69 points for us one night, 11 the next week. Depended what Skip you got and how the Pepsi Cola he was addicted to would go down.

And then there were the local lads, and players from other Galway teams falling in with us. James Burke, John Finn, from Maree. James, he’d score – a lot; he was leading Irish scorer in the first division one year. Passing, not so much. I remember one game in 1989 giving out to him, asking him why didn’t he pass it to me when I was free under the basket. He said ‘Sure I passed to you in ’87 and you missed!’ We actually topped Division Two in ’87. But that then meant we had to go up to the top division.

MURPHY: We actually had a good American that year we went up, a 6’8 lefty from Toledo, but at Christmas he had to go home and was too expensive to replace him. You might remember the franchising system Dan Doyle set up. Well for some clubs it worked and the money came through but ours didn’t. I remember going to Manhattan myself to talk to an attorney and tell him, ‘We’re on the brink here, this money was promised to us.’ It left a sour taste and made it very tough.

COUGHLAN: The second half of that 87-88 season we had no Americans. Our last game we played Roadspeed [Corinthians] in the Oblate Hall. It got overshadowed because it was the same day Gerald Kennedy scored that miracle shot to win Neptune the league but LaVerne Evans went for 80 points against us [still the most points by a player in the top-flight in the Irish league]. They never took him out of the game. They gave him about an extra 10 minutes just the way they kept stopping the clock. It was disgraceful, humiliating; they beat us by 60 in the end. After the game a well-known figure in Dublin basketball at the time came into our dressing room, telling us we were a joke and why are we even in the league. I told him, ‘What do you mean? We outscored your Irish players by 50 points! All you had over us was Americans and money!’ 

MURPHY: Eventually we ran out of money. It was just tiring on people like myself who were on the committee as well as playing would be putting chairs from Leisureland into the boot of my van to bring to Renmore for spectators to sit on. And once we lost the shop window of national league, the club kind of petered out.

COUGHLAN: I spent a lot of the 1990s working and coaching around the country – Killarney, Tralee, Sligo. No, I never went back to the Franciscans, though I always say they never left me, I still do some work for them and they still do a lot of great stuff. Anyway I eventually came back to Galway and in 2003 I was wheeling my son around a westside Dunnes Stores car park when I spotted a group of foreign nationals playing on the basketball court beside it.

There must have been 14 of them. A few weeks later there were only four of them. So I went over and asked where the others. They said some local soccer lads had beaten them up and their parents felt they were too vulnerable without any parent supervision. So I said, ‘Why don’t you just join a club?’ They said ‘There is none.’ Maree – 12 miles away. Moycullen – 10 miles. Claregalway the same. No car, no basketball. There wasn’t a single club in the city itself.

At the time I was coaching a bunch of door men. All Polish or Lithuanian, all 11 of them bouncers but eight of them may I quickly add with postgraduate degrees. I told them about the boys and so they said ‘We’ll coach them if you coach us to be coaches’ and so that’s how Titans started.

MURPHY: I remember coming back from coaching a Connacht schools team that lost heavily to teams from Cork and Dublin and telling the committee, ‘We won’t go anywhere until we start coaching kids at a much younger level. If I’m having to teach a first year in secondary school how to lay up the ball he’s at a big disadvantage to the kid coming in who already has been part of a team setup.' And if you look at Maree and Moycullen, they have that. They’re rooted in a community and they’re part of that community.

Maree have Mary Rockall, Claire’s and Eoin’s mother, going into the local national school and introducing kids to the game. For decades they’ve had the link up with St Calasanctius College whereby the school would give them the hall and the club would coach the school teams. They’ve a really good system there with the likes of John Finn and James Burke and Josephine.

COUGHLAN: You’ve always had good schools teams in Galway and some real good coaches in them. Kevin Walsh still raves about the coaching he got from Mary Nihill in St Paul’s. My old coach Dominic King coaching Cheathrú teams; he was a baker from six in the morning, then finish at one and then coach kids in the afternoon. And that has continued with the likes of Murph in the Jez, Tom O’Malley in the Bish, Mike Lynch. If you look at the schools finals this past week, Galway teams are winning a lot of them across A, B and C.

What you’ve had over the last 15 years or so is Galway clubs being very competitive at underage level. I remember us in Titans starting out getting beaten by 30 by Moycullen and Maree. Then we got a last-minute invite to a blitz in Cork, won a couple of games there and realised, you know, it’s not that we’re shit after all, it’s that Galway is really strong.’ And that’s been the case for a while now. Now we’re winning in Galway and getting to national cup semi-finals. The competition has definitely raised the standard in the county.

For years you had a lot of players leaving Galway to play or study in the likes of Dublin and Cork and Limerick. But now with the links Mystics and Maree have with NUIG, you’re keeping the local talent and attracting players from elsewhere. A few Titans are now playing with NUIG this year. It’s part of why I’d like to see them win this weekend.

MURPHY: It’d be lovely to see a team from Galway take away the Cup. It would be a great boost for basketball in the west.