SIDELINE CUT:A new book captures that time in the 1980s when a hallucinatory venture in Irish sport, basketball, more through accident than design, seemed to explode upon the consciousness of an unsuspecting public, writes KEITH DUGGAN

BEFORE BOBBY Sands was Bobby Sands, he was a promising young football player who sometimes moonlighted on juvenile basketball teams for the iconic Belfast club Star of the Sea. This was the 1970s, and Sands played for just a couple of seasons before life and circumstance propelled him towards a fast adulthood spent in conflict with the Crown and, of course, the most strange and international of deaths.

But there are still people who recall Sands' fleeting adolescence, when he was just another mop-top city kid drawn to Irish basketball, then a cult sport in Ireland. Sands' part is merely a walk-on, but, nonetheless, he joins the genuinely fabulous cast of characters who fill Hanging From the Rafters: The Story of Neptune and the Golden Age of Irish Basketball.

Researching and writing a 500-page book on a subject as obscure as Irish basketball could be interpreted as an act of eccentricity in itself. But author Kieran Shannon is one of the thousands of Corkonians whose teenage years coincided with a hallucinatory venture in Irish sport, when basketball, more through accident than design, seemed to explode upon the consciousness of an unsuspecting public.

The sport had always had its hotbeds in Ireland – Glasnevin, Killester, Cork, Sligo, Killarney, Belfast and Ballina – but in the 1980s it entered a new realm. The realisation of Neptune stadium in Cork was undoubtedly at the heart of it. It may have seated only 1,500, but it had two tiers, it had a polished floor and it had bright lights: it seemed like an imported mirage rather than the home venue of an Irish ball club, and it was nothing like the battered gyms/bingo halls which had provided homes to Irish teams for decades. Neptune set new standards and had substantial financial backing and energetic people.

They also initiated the fashion for importing a series of brilliant American players, many of whom had spent college years playing the burnished arenas against future global superstars like Larry Bird or Michael Jordan, only to miss out on the lucrative NBA draft because they were an inch too small or half-a-step too slow or just plain unlucky. Few knew anything about Ireland when they arrived – Ray Smith famously demanded to know how close the Russian border was when he landed in Shannon.

“I know we’re in Poland man,” he told the slack-jawed officials.

But the Americans not only accepted the reduced circumstances – the cramped changing rooms, the after-work training schedules, the interminable bus/car trips across country – they embraced the Irish basketball scene as if their hearts depended on it. Because for some it did: many of the young American men who were recruited to play in Irish provincial teams were, in essence, playing out their last chance.

Some did not make it and shed tears at the news. The best became bone fide, no-jacket-required celebrities in their respective communities. Basketball was, without question, one of the first experiments in multi-cultural harmony. The cream of the American players became known in basketball circles by their first names – Jasper, Terry, Ray, Kelvin, Jerome, Deora – and some of them adapted to the Irish lifestyle with such ease they simply never left. Nobody really appreciated it at the time, but these were players of staggeringly high quality knocking around Ireland in the 1980s, and they were supported by a charismatic cast of Irish players, from Liam McHale to Tom O’Sullivan, who put as much time into perfecting his smooth and lethal jump shot as any fellow growing up in the basketball towns of Indiana.

So with these stunningly athletic American ball-players and home-grown guards local kids could hope to emulate, with music and warm arenas – important on damp winter nights when nothing was happening other than the pub – basketball seemed dazzling and faintly unreal.

It fizzled out, of course, and reading about the games which Shannon brilliantly recalls with the help of the protagonists – old fouls still bitterly contested – makes you wonder what it was all about. There was something of a beautiful fluke about the way Irish basketball just soared during that period. Why it fell to earth again doesn’t really matter: the truth was, it probably had to. And Italia ’90 and all that madness probably hastened its gravitational pull.

The whole thing was really about escapism. Anyone who made that journey from the dark Irish streets – street lights glistening, everyone broke and nothing happening – to those crammed, deafening basketball halls and supremely gifted ball-players within touching distance can vouch for that. For Neptune stadium regulars, those years must have been overwhelming. This was a dreary, broken-down decade for the country and, as if in response, Irish basketball became aggressively and loudly flamboyant: Irish razzmatazz. It was weird and it worked.

In many ways, Hanging From the Raftersis a book about Cork. It explains the complexity of Cork and of Cork sports people to bemused outsiders, that ineffable gift Cork folks have for marrying intense parochial squabbling with a majestic national outlook, a belief that they can beat anyone.

But it is also a wonderfully entertaining and poignant portrayal of Irish society during that period. The striking thing is that almost everything – the games, the drinking, the rows, the friendships, the yarns – takes place at night. Basketball was a nocturnal sport and many of the after-hours high-jinks are recorded here. It is a safe bet that if you asked the many hundreds of Irish men and women who became obsessed with basketball in the 1980s why that was, they would be at a loss to give an explanation. It was just an instinct and the allure of the game.

Late in the book, the famous Belfast coach Danny Fulton recalls travelling home from a match in Ballina one night. It was a Saturday and most of the team decided to avail of the Ballina hospitality, but Fulton wanted to get home. He had promised Tony McGee of the Irish Newsthat he would phone him the result, and, because he often had difficulty with the Southern phones, he waited until he crossed the Border at Blacklion into Belcoo. He asked a British soldier where the nearest phone box was and had just reached it when a shot rang out. The soldier was killed instantly and Fulton was crouched in a phone box as army materialised from nowhere.

The story itself is a grim reminder of what the country was like then, but so too is the reason behind it – the sheer effort Fulton had to go to simply to make a phone call.

It is a book about ghosts, too. Anyone who saw Dan Trant play basketball for Sporting Belfast or Marian left in the full knowledge that they had witnessed a born entertainer. Trant held the distinction of being the last pick in the 1985 draft – No. 228 – selected (and quickly released) by the world champion Boston Celtics. He was a shooter, extravagantly skilful, relentlessly flash and as brash as Tom Cruise in Risky Business.Trant was so happy-go-lucky that his story is among the most poignant: he was working for the stock firm Cantor Fitzgerald in the Twin Towers and died in that abomination.

The struggles of his widow to deal with the trauma, by basically blowing her multi-million compensation as quickly and illogically as she could, led to her appearance on an Oprah Winfrey show. But Trant is remembered fondly in Irish basketball circles, as is Mario Elie, who left here to enjoy a wonderful second act as a late-coming NBA star who won three championships and is now an assistant coach.

Elie spent a long conversation with Shannon reminiscing about his Irish days, one of the countless faces from the past that he has tracked down. Veterans of that faded hoops scene must sometimes wonder if they dreamt it all.

Hanging From the Raftersis the definitive proof that, no, it really happened and, yes, it was as good as they remember.