Gimmickry won't help basketball make the leap

TIPPING POINT:Sorry, Denis Rodman: no amount of toplessness is going to help sell the sport to the Irish, writes BRIAN O'CONNOR

‘FECK.” IS there a more anodyne, watery, cup-of-weak-piss word in the entire vernacular? Dara O Briain says “feck”. And then winks at you like some gigantic school prefect, eager to let you know he’s a bit naughty, but not naughty enough to utter to the headmaster the whole-hearted, bile-flecked “f***” he merits. “Feck” is swear-lite, the curse you bring home to daddy: saying it, but, you know, not saying it. “Feck” is Ronan Keating. There: two hugely successful international stars in one par.

Of course there is an obvious contradiction in advocating foul-mouthed invective and then using these *** symbols in order to presumably prevent your eyes falling out in horror at what’s appearing on the back page. But it’s not like there’s any confusion about what’s being got at. Presumably, “f***” doesn’t immediately generate images of ack-ack fire when you see it – or cutlery. It’s not like when Dorothy Parker was introduced to Norman Mailer whose publishers had convinced him to replace everyone’s favourite Elizabethan word with “fug” in The Naked and the Dead. “So you’re the man who can’t spell . . .” Well, you know.

Sometimes, you see, there’s no getting away from the merits of just calling it as it is. The basketball legend Denis Rodman has an attention-seeking history of not giving a hoot about subtlety. We’re talking about a man who dyed and/or pierced most parts of his body, wore a wedding dress to promote his biography and claimed to be bisexual so he could marry himself. Introverted he ain’t.

But even at 50, Denis The Menace can still capture the headlines with trademark colour. This time his hook is topless women’s basketball. Rodman reckons it’s the future.

“I don’t know too many men that don’t like a good-looking woman running up and down the court,” he says. Denis is even holding auditions for buxom young women of 5ft 10in and over. “You don’t have to have too much experience, just know how to throw the ball into the hole.”

For a man who was once plagued to father a child by no less a feminist icon than Madonna, this is disappointingly boorish and recidivist behaviour, and hardly the radical chic that Denis represented to some fashionistas during his NBA peak. But what it does have is the quality of directness. Denis doesn’t give any kind of “eff” any more. He has his eyes on a franchise and knows that when it comes to publicity there’s no gimmick like a sex gimmick.

And he’s right. There aren’t many men who wouldn’t look at topless basketball. There aren’t many men who won’t look at topless anything. Just cast your mind back to topless darts. But the thing about gimmicks is that they have a desperately short shelf-life. Unless there’s a fundamental merit and substance to the product, one that connects to people, the gimmick generates plenty initial light but precious little heat.

No crass cynicism that Rodman comes up with will ever alter how basketball is engrained into the American sporting psyche. Basketball matters in the US. It’s the second most exciting indoor activity there is, and the first one shouldn’t really have spectators, unless maybe you’re Denis. But it is a feature of world sport that almost anything Americans love is treated with disdain or disinterest by everyone else.

Admittedly that might be a bit strong when it comes to basketball. It’s not like baseball, which outside the US is only played in Cuba and bits of Tokyo. Basketball has huge global participation rates and numbers are pretty impressive in Ireland too. But on the back of that is resentment about a lack of publicity here. Like many sports, basketball’s devotees are devout in their devotion. And it’s true that, in athletic terms, basketball can be a gruelling test. Some of the big games can generate an incredible atmosphere too.

But basketball, in Ireland – it doesn’t really fit, does it? It’s not like we’re talking ghetto bling out in the Killester hood, or demonic drive-bys in Gurranabraher. And then there’s all those grating Americanisms – all that “deee-fence” and “aawww-fence” stuff.

No doubt the devotees right now have steam coming out their ears, flinging accusations of ignorance around the place. And they have a point. But what basketball and so many other sports that are completely meritorious in their own terms continue to fail to do is make the general sporting public in any real way interested in becoming more informed about them. When it comes to sport, the public really does get what the public wants. And no amount of hard sell will change their minds.

How many of you remember William Perry? What if I said “The Fridge?” Those of a certain vintage are now nostalgically nodding “oh yeah”. And I’ll bet a pound to a pinch of anything you like that practically none of them give a flier about American football.

Often those sports classified as “minority” try to crack what they believe to be some revelatory code that will take them to the promised land of air-time, first-person columnists and shirt advertising.

But it doesn’t work like that.

Out there right now is some middle-aged PR guru telling a governing organisation that what will sell them will be personality; a couple of spiky-haired, snarling adolescent proteges with a tabloid-suitable penchant for “outrageous” clothes and plastic-boobed models – “edgy”. The kids will love it, don’t you know.

Except possibly the most iconic sports team in Ireland is the Kilkenny hurling team, a collection of hugely skilled and determined young men who remain largely anonymous to the greater Irish public behind their helmets, regulation crew-cuts and disdain for public profile. How much of the latter is fear of what Brian Cody will do should they utter even the most banal of comments is an interesting but separate question. More pertinent is the fact that Tommy Walsh could French kiss Eddie Brennan on centre spot of the national basketball arena and both could be 99 per cent assured of their anonymity remaining intact.

It remains a reality that the hard sell only works with those who have at least some interest in buying and no amount of proselytising will alter that. Rodman’s stunt will generate headlines – lookee here – but it will soon be forgotten, just like the darts, those weather dwarves bouncing on the trampoline and the innumerable other stunts created to engineer profile for stuff most of us don’t want to know about.

Because people like the stuff they like. And that’s fugging fact.