Balla Ball another small step for Dubkind

LOCKER ROOM:A novel Wall Ball game can help Dublin close the gap between themselves and hurling's aristocracy, writes TOM HUMPHRIES

THAT NOBLE and benevolent body, The Friends of Dublin Hurling, are expanding their brief beyond the mere befriending of hurlers in order to conduct a competition in an activity which they like to call Balla Ball.

I have learned friends in Cork who laugh and titter helplessly when I mention the phenomenon of Wall Ball. Not that they are against such a past-time per se, but they find the name amusing and very much the sort of thing which only a county with very little blue blood could come up with. You have a Wall. You have a Ball. You strike the latter against the former and you play, uhm Wall Ball.

Hey boy, ye mean going to the alley is that it? Wall Ball! If they scorn our simplicity when it comes to wall ball, lord knows what they will make of Balla Ball. I imagine we will be mocked in coruscating short stories and Balla Ball will become Cork slang for a repetitive activity performed by the simple- minded.

Anyway I’m not ashamed to say that I like Balla Ball. And, yes, the idea is simple. Balla Ball just involves three targets at which the player must drive the Wall Ball ball (if you get my drift!). Hitting the target posted above the bar earns 10 points, hitting the top corner of the net (as painted on the wall) yields 20 points and bottom corner the jackpot of 30 points. You stand behind a line 25 feet from the goal and you have a minute to amass as many points as possible by shooting for the targets in rotation.

What could be more simple than that? The Friends (I always think the name sounds like a Mafia cover group, the Friends of Italian Opera or something) are staging an adult and an under-14 county competition in Balla Ball starting soon (check \ www.fodh.ie for updates and details) and although the hurling aristocracy might find mirth in that small step for Dubkind they will also know that it is another step in replicating the conditions which grow fine hurlers.

Those conditions are best found in the country, preferably in a non-urban setting. How many of us city people watch the video film of DJ Carey’s life story a few years ago gazing in awe as he flicked his wrists again and again and from across the road drove the sliotar repeatedly against the exterior chimney breast of his house in Gowran. We were duly impressed by the hurling but really bewildered by the fact that DJ wasn’t knocked down by boy racers, accosted by drug dealers, tripped up by Jehovah’s Witnesses or just concreted over in a planning scam.

Terrain is the reason why the country has always produced hurlers and the city has mainly produced knacky soccer players with attitude problems. The two pivotal personalities in any hurling autobiography are the kindly but stern local teacher who gave everybody a love of hurling and The Field wherein everybody who had come into contact with the stern but kindly teacher would gather every evening.

On those eternal amber evenings they would hurl forever without slipping on used condoms, puncturing themselves on old syringes or getting their sliotar scuffed on the glass from broken beer bottles.

In Dublin there are no fields. Not one. Fields are the places where empty apartment blocks now stand. If your GAA club has a field of its own, the field is in use every minute of the day, teeming with people from mini-leaguers in one corner to the senior hurlers in another, all grabbing their allotted hour and doing drills in tiny little spaces just in case the rules are ever changed and the playing surface for GAA games takes on the dimensions of a tennis court. You might get between eight to a 100 touches of the ball in your hour and that’s it. Home you go.

There is no field to gather in. Nowhere that people play just for the fun, no scenario where a fella gets in from work, ditches his overalls or whatever and heads straight out to play.

Soccer is different. It breeds in the city, makes its home there. When I was young we played endless games of Three n’ In (you score three goals and get to go in goals, get it?) running ourselves ragged on the little patch of the field opposite the house which was flat and bare and devoid of builders rubble. And then when the numbers got bigger we picked teams (out of politeness I always permitted myself to be picked last to avoid squabbles) and we would play the ingeniously devised game of “five half-time, 10 the winner” (another winning title from the people who gave you Wall Ball and Three n’ In).

The participants would range in age from seven-year-olds to a lovely man called Jerry Woulfe who was a painter and decorator and about the same age then as I am now but in better shape. He just loved to play football. If the times had been different we could have hurled out there. It would have required not just the times to have been different though, the environment we grew up in would have needed to have been flattened and razed. Our soccer pitch was the tiniest patch of ground. Too small to hurl on.

And when we tired of playing in the field the tar seams on the road lent themselves to games of road tennis. Or we would stand either side of the road and play kerbs or headers. Without even trying you gathered most of the skills necessary to become a decent soccer player before Leeds United ever came to scout you.

That’s how it was then and how it is now and, in terms of closing the gap in hurling between Dublin and the bluebloods, that fact of life is the biggest challenge the city faces. Between the terrors of Gaelic football and city traffic there is only so much hurling you can give a young fella. He can play his 12 league games and maybe four or five championship matches in the year but without the field he’s not getting what his counterpart in the country is getting. He isn’t getting evenings and afternoons of just playing and playing, a lifestyle where fitness is a given and the skills just attach themselves like lichen.

The hurling walls, the proliferation of which might one day (long after we have pulled the plug on this experimental community we call Ireland) baffle archaeologists, just as the statues on Easter Island once did, are a chance to change that. Boy racers don’t tend to drive very fast near hurling walls. The infinity of games which can be played in the relatively short area of space makes the wall a decent substitute for a field. Dublin County Council could usefully be erecting a few in parks, they are durable, simple, useful and culturally relevant.

And you can play Balla Ball on them. Three n’ In may well have had its day.