Glory be to the enduring faith of Demons and Killester
UCC Demons’ Elijah Tillman and Killester’s Paul Dick take part in media day at the National Basketball Arena ahead of Saturday's Pat Duffy National Cup, which is live on TG4 from 1945 Mandatory Credit ©INPHO/Dan Sheridan
Glory be to the Fathers, and to the sons, and to schools like Holy Faith. As it was in the beginning, is now, and possibly ever shall be, their worlds seemingly without end.
The first club to win the men’s national league in this country were Blue Demons from Cork. On the first weekend of April in 1974, they headed up to Dublin for a series of back-to-back games in the Oblate Hall, beating Killester on the same Saturday evening Abba won the Eurovision. “At the time we just didn’t know how to stop someone as powerful as Andy Houlihan,” says Killester’s Martin Grennell.
The following season though Demons met their Waterloo; Killester, coached by a Corkman called Fr Eamonn McCarthy, were too strong for them and everyone else. The same the year after. And the year after that. If Demons were the first champions the league had, that Killester side were its first dominant team.
It was a remarkable achievement, given the club would only have been 10 years old when it pulled off that three in a row. In 1967 a Fr Mick Casey was stationed in the parish and quickly identified the carpark across from the church as a possible court for some of his altar boys like Grennell and Eamonn Molloy to play the same sport he had played a bit in his native Rathmore in Kerry.
Then again almost every club and player was young back then. Demons were only founded the year previous, albeit their juvenile feeder club, De Paul, had been providing basketball since 1959.
Their origins were similarly godly and noble. The Vincentians that ran the church in Sunday’s Well set up a boys youth club to help keep local teens out of harm’s way, and even exhumed the remains of their predecessors in the church’s Crypt to accommodate it. The core of that Demons team that won the league in ’74 – Peter Coughlan, Barry Deasy, Noel McCarthy – had been altar boys and De Paul boys before they graduated into Demons and later inaugural national league champions.
The sport continued to rapidly grow and in line with it so did Demons and Killester. Demons were the first club to respond to Killarney parachuting in Americans by bringing in Dave Beckom and Wayne Williams to sweep up every title going in 1981. The following summer Mick McCormack went over to Chicago and duly recruited a Jerome Westbrooks to join Killester.
Then when the National Cup was established, Demons contributed hugely to its popularity by reaching its first three finals, propelled by local ‘norrie’ fire and the star power of one Jasper McElroy. Losing the first one in ’84 to St Vincent’s in the Oblate Hall didn’t deter them. Nor losing to Burgerland Neptune and that immortal Terry Strickland steal in the new Neptune Stadium in ’85 (“Just remember the real Steal that day happened on the table!” quips Jim Dineen; 40 years later and the memory of an error on the scoreboard and scoresheet is still as fresh as he is sharp). In ’86 though Demons and Dineen would have their vengeance.
The following year their sequence of contesting every final was broken, fittingly enough by Killester; after some barren years the Dublin club were again a force, not least because they had as forceful a player as one Kelvin Troy among their ranks and had paired him with another bona fide rock star, Mario Elie. While their worst hour would be the Top Four semi-final against Demons in Sligo when Troy infamously pushed Elie, probably their two finest hours were the Cup overtime semi-final win over Demons.
Each club has had its lean periods. Demons have even dropped out of the league several times, first from 1993 to 1998 and again then in 2019 to 2021. But even when they’ve stepped away it’s been with the view to a relaunch.
In the middle of their 1990s hiatus from the league they reached a couple of memorable U19 National Cup finals. Their opponents each time? Killester. The Cork club won the first in 1997, coached by Timmy McCarthy, building on the sterling work of a key figure of the ’74 breakthrough team, Seánie Murphy. In ’98 then Killester won, coached by the former altar boy Martin Grennell, and featuring his son Johnny.
Those respective minor teams formed the nucleus of possibly the two finest Superleague teams of the 21st century. Shane Coughlan would go on to win six Cups, contest another four finals and claim four leagues. The Killester side of Paddy Kelly and Johnny Grennell won five leagues and three Cups.
Several of them were naturally at the other’s expense. In 2009 Demons beat Killester in both the Cup and league final only for Kilester to hockey them the following year in the last Cup final RTÉ would televise live. Of all the titles Demons won between 2014 and 2016 the sweetest has to be the 2014 Cup semi-final comeback, crowned by Adrian O’Sullivan’s late freethrows. Yet even that year Kilester would come back to pip them in the league title chase.
“Both those sets of players would have huge respect for one another,” says Mickey O’Leary, who has chaired Demons for most of the last 30 years. “I remember one night we had what you could call a pub survey where we asked Shane Coughlan who was the best Irish player he came up against. Everyone assumed it would be an Adrian Fulton or a Stodser [Stephen McCarthy of Neptune] but Shane said he’d put Paddy Kelly ahead of even them.”
Now almost a decade on from Coughlan’s retirement and half a century on from his late father Peter captaining and coaching the first Irish national league champions, here are Demons back in another Cup final: their 16th in the 41 years of the competition. No one has won more than they have (eighth). In fact win this and they’ll go ahead in the ‘majors’ roll of honour (a ninth Cup to go with their eight leagues would see them overtake Neptune with their 11 leagues and five Cups).
“The whole atmosphere seems to change around Cup games,” says O’Leary. “It’s this mindset, ‘It’s the Cup next week.’ I mean my own daughter was reared on just assuming we’d be going up to Dublin for the Cup every year. If it wasn’t the Superleague team it would be an U20 team or the intermediates.”
During his Olympics commentary Timmy McCarthy, upon seeing a Dutch player scramble for a loose ball, namechecked his old coach and friend Jim Dineen and cited a term he coined: Dive On Glass. “Look,” says Dineen himself, “I was more an administrator than a coach and when I was coaching I was more of a motivator than an X and Os man. But what I’d always try to instil in anyone that has played for us is if that ball is on the ground, it’s our fucking ball, not theirs. Even if there’s glass between you and that ball, you dive on that glass to win that ball.”
Killester though bring their own desire and even glass to the party, as polished and more refined as it may seem. The same Mick McCormack that recruited Jerome Westbrooks sponsors the team: he owns Pryobel Glass which is why his beloved team are known as Pryobel Killester. Coaching the team is Jonathon Grennell, star of that ’98 minor team and father of Martin. Playing for him is his cousin Paul Dick and Isaac Westbrooks, son of Jerome who coached four other members of the current team in St Fintan’s just as he coached five of the current women’s team in Holy Faith.
And watching in the stands will be Mick Casey, just as he was in the Neptune Stadium last week for the semi-final win over Éanna.
He left the priesthood some years ago, burned from being moved from one parish to another. But his love for Killester? Like so many others connected with the club and indeed Demons, that is as it was in the beginning and ever shall be.
CONNECT WITH US TODAY
Be the first to know the latest news and updates
