CROSSOVER BASKETBALL: Passing the ball to a team-mate from the 'other'side can make more than a passing difference. Keith Dugganon a bright Belfast initiative

ON A sleety evening in Belfast, we drive down the gloomy fluorescent miles of the Lisburn Road looking for a basketball gym. An Italian place, suitably named Bella Italia, is our signal to turn right and leave the lights of the city behind.

In Poleglass, a hoops game is going on. But we can’t find it. Ben Honan keeps ringing pretty much the entire cast of Crossover Basketball, the basketball programme for which he works.

He has been living in the northeast since September, and he is not simply a Clare man trying to navigate his way through Belfast’s labyrinthine streetscape, he spends his days negotiating a path through the decades of distrust, of separation and of hatred that still govern this city and still affect the youngsters born in what is officially known as Peace Time.

The project is called Crossover. Like most of the coaches, Ben Honan is working for next to nothing and, like many organisations, it has felt the pinch in recent times.

Ben spends mornings in the office and afternoons coaching basketball to kids from both sides of the religious divide. He reckons he will have to pick up some night-work soon, just to keep going.

“If I have to pull pints, that’s fine.”

Has he worked bars before? “No,” he says brightly, “but I’ll say I have.”

You don’t have to spend long with Ben Honan to realise he has become suckered by this strange idea of cross-community reconciliation through the most urban game of them all.

The principle is simple: to get Protestant and Catholic kids from the disadvantaged pockets of the city interacting by playing basketball with one another. The education system is, by default, helping to perpetuate the figurative wall of silence and hostility that divided Belfast’s communities just as effectively as the concrete ribbon that once ran through the heart of Berlin.

In a way, the German division was more easily dealt with: once knocked, it was simply rubble to be cleared away. But this partition exceeds the peace wall that still divides the more confrontational sections of the city, it concerns imagination and memory . . . Belfast’s past cannot be so easily erased and it has been handed on to the latest generation.

“My big hope is they will not turn into the teenager I turned into,” explains Dave Cullen, a founder member of the project.

“And if I can get kids like Ben to come here and administer the basketball and I sit back and watch the kids coming together, then I am happy. You go up to Poleglass tonight and see them play. A year ago, they hated each other – their parents did at least. They never saw each other. They were segregated. And people tell you things are okay here?

“Only 6 per cent of the schools here are integrated. How can that be okay? The richer schools are the worst. They don’t want integration. They want to stay elite. So we are just giving a few of them a chance to come together and at least get them thinking about this segregation that is forced on them.

“They are on a team. They will learn a new sport. They will become friends with kids they would otherwise never have.”

We had met Cullen in his workplace in the library of Queen’s earlier. The afternoon was just turning to evening and the avenue up was bustling with students. Cullen is curly-haired and moves from melancholy to mischievous with lightning speed.

He grins slyly when he looks across the table at Ben.

“He comes alive at night,” is his summary of the Clare man. Cullen is Catholic and, he says, remains at some level the “little bigot” he was growing up in the 1970s.

“See, a lot of people like me have good reason to be. But I refuse to let my children grow up and become as ignorant as I was then. For me, it came down to a basic assumption that Protestants didn’t like me. And I wasn’t going to like them right back.”

Cullen’s father was a Republican activist who was killed when his son was a child. His early memories are of British army and RUC men searching the house, tossing it upside down – 40 times in 30 days during one period, he was told by a relative.

After his mother moved them to south Belfast, where the population was mixed, Cullen started getting in fights, causing trouble.

“Hating the other,” as he puts it. When he was 20, he was set upon on a street near his home by five men and badly assaulted. His mother was so affected by the state he was left in she became an alcoholic for the rest of her life.

“She was a victim, you know. This is a city of many victims. You don’t have to be attacked to be a victim.”

He knows his story is unremarkable in this city: he can instance 20 contemporaries who passed through prisons and a half dozen school-mates deceased.

“Robert McCartney was one. Went to school with Robert . . .” he says, his voice tailing off.

Even in the darker years of Belfast life, basketball was an escape for Cullen. He followed his older brother to the leisure centre in Andersonstown, in those days a sort of sporting sanctuary locked behind corrugated metal shutters.

Later, he played on an acclaimed Star of the Sea team, coached by Danny Fulton, a side that visited and hosted teams from the South during the worst excesses of violence. He smiles at the memory of the league then.

"You're familiar with Hanging from the Rafters?" he asks, referring to Kieran Shannon's lauded book on Irish basketball. "Well, like it says, that time was just phenomenal for the game."

Basketball never quite fully left Cullen and he knew instinctively it could be used in a positive way. He became involved with the Peace International Project, and then, in 2006, he met Michael Evans, an American who had come to Belfast to play ball with Queen’s’ national league club.

Together, they plotted to get a Protestant-Catholic school team together, and Evans began coaching at two schools, St Joseph’s and Orangefield, in order to gain their trust.

There was no big philosophy behind it: they just planned to place these kids in a gym together and have them play basketball. Trevor Ringland, the former rugby international, who immersed himself in the Peace International Project, became a crucial figure in facilitating the project, and Cullen was there when it came to actually marching the kids on to the floor of the Queen’s gym, staring at one another with mutual unease.

Some of them had never played before: a few never would again.

There was no Field of Dreamstransformation for Cullen either, just enough to convince him this thing was worth pursuing.

“It didn’t change my mindset or anything. But I knew it was the right thing to do. And there was a moment that day when things clicked for me. Shortly after the game started, they realised they were going to have to pass the ball to one another.

“And there was a moment when a guy scored and he gave the passer, who was from the other side, ‘five’ on his way back up the court. That was it. It was that simple. I felt then there was a chance that these kids could grow up differently to their parents.

“Like, kids were kept off school that day so they wouldn’t go to this thing. We had Fr (Aidan) Troy with us a few days beforehand and he listened to several parents ranting. And then he flipped out. He told them they were a disgrace and that this thing was going ahead and if they didn’t want their kids to be in it, then they should keep them home. And some of them did.”

But that first game brought about an unstoppable momentum. Cullen and Evans sourced funding and founded Full Court Peace, were sponsored by an office on Ormeau Avenue and young basketball coaches from America and Ireland began to volunteer their time.

In the summer of 2007, Cullen and Ringland were stunned to learn they were the recipients of the Arthur Ashe ESPY courage award, following in the footsteps of Muhammad Ali, Pat Tilman and George Weah. They stood on a stage in Hollywood, a pair of dazed Ulstermen, to receive their award from Samuel L Jackson, the actor. Together, they made a proud and nervous speech.

“Back home in Belfast,” Cullen quipped, I watch Le Bron (James) and Shaq (Shaquille O’Neal, both of whom were in the audience) on television. Tonight, they’re watching me. Brilliant.”

They kept pushing, organising a trip to New York where the Belfast kids were divided in pairs, one per denomination, would stay with host families and play games, see the city. TJ Reynolds, who grew up in Yonkers, came to Belfast for a year after learning about the project. Three years later, he is still here.

“Could have had a law degree by now,” he laughs. “But I couldn’t leave. Initially, what I experienced blew me away. I had no idea just how rigidly separate the two communities are and I had never really seen anything like the iconography – the murals and that – before. But the first season, I spent a lot of time coaching in the gym in Orangefield and it was falling apart, and when the season was done a lot of the kids were leaving the school.

“And it didn’t seem like enough. So we started a team with kids from Orangefield and St Joe’s, the Bulldogs. It just seemed to me that this was a fairly crucial time for these kids, 10 years after the Good Friday agreement and that, and I wanted to see this through. I kind of fell in love with the place, to be honest.”

Three years: it is a lot of time for a bright, athletic graduate to give to his cause. As Cullen puts it, the presence of the Americans in the project is important. The youngsters respond well to the American coaches.

“There is an element of coolness about the Americans,” Dave says with dry humour.

But he understands too the reservation – the hostility – on the part of some parents to the sight of young foreign graduates blithely presuming to know the actuality of life in the city.

Except the Crossover coaches (the title changed from Full Court Peace to Crossover this season) aren’t simply nomadic do-gooders visiting to pick up a few humanitarian brownie points on their way to a college degree.

When we get to the gym in Poleglass, the game is in full swing and you don’t have to spend long there to see the level of trust Reynolds and Dave Tierney, a local boy from St Malachy’s, have built through constant coaching and encouraging.

There are a couple of natural ball-players on the court, youngsters Honan is eager to recruit for the Queen’s national league team.

One of the kids abandons playing defence for a minute to wave at Ben after he comes in the door. It cracks Honan up and he says with mock despair: “What are we going to do with a lad who starts waving at people in the middle of a game?”

But Honan has become so comfortable with the boys that, by now, he can’t really remember which denomination is which. He recalls bringing a mixed team up to play a challenge game against Aquinas, one of the more privileged schools in the city.

“And as far as I could see, that was the big divide. I think our guys understood that as well: that they had more in common with each other than they knew and that the big divide, the real gulf, was between themselves and kids from either denomination who have more privileges than they have.

“Because the thing about here is, once you get through the suspicion and whatever sectarian prejudice the kids have handed down to them, the whole façade comes crumbling down. We had one kid, Mark, who was absolutely brilliant in developing this team.

“In the beginning, he made an effort to sit next to us and talk. Last year, when things were tense, he would sort of tip us off: this guy is nice, this guy is pretty sectarian, this guy is uneasy. He just got it!

“And others get it too and don’t want to be part of it. Like, we have this one kid who could be a fabulous player and he understands the programme but he just doesn’t want to buy into it. He just said, you know, I would rather stay out on the Short Strand.”

Ben removes Mark Wilkinson of St Joseph’s from the game so we can talk for a few minutes. He also calls over one of the kids from Wheatfield, Mark Woods. They stand beside one another, steam rising in the cold of the gym, talking about the idea of “us and a them”.

“I think it is always going to be there,” says Wilkinson. “It takes people a long time to know there is not much difference between us. If it wasn’t for this, yeah, it would still be the same. Like, we used to play football and any time we played against a Protestant team the feeling would be really intense and all that. Once you get over all that, there is no real problem.”

It took the fortnight they spent in the States to truly break the ice: away from Belfast and placed together in a different culture, they were surprised how reliant they became on one another. Woods grins when asked about New York.

“It was my first time there. It was amazing. I had to do a news interview for Fox. That was great. Just asking me about how life was here and if the division was still here. They wanted me. And a Catholic as well. But it was while we were there that I began to think, yeah, we are actually friends here.”

The boys laugh when asked if they been around to one another’s house. “We don’t really get to socialise like that, because of where we live. But I definitely think we will stay friends because of this.”

“We are always saying we are going to meet up, but he has GCSEs and I am mad busy too at the minute,” adds Wilkinson. “But we are definitely going to head out some time soon.”

That is all Dave Cullen wants from this. Basketball is secondary. If the youngsters get to see past the inherited limitations, that is enough. He grins wickedly at the idea that what may come of this is the Protestant and Catholic kids in the programme will realise what they have in common is the denial of opportunities afforded to their peers in the wealthier parts of the city.

“Yes. This is their chance: for the wee kid who has nothing to come up against this middle class kid with his nice haircut and beat him up on the basketball court.”

Cullen is being devilish here but he is halfway serious too. He tells of a time a few years ago when he took his children to an open farm on the outskirts of Belfast. While there, he looked across and saw one of his assailants from the street assault nearly 20 years earlier standing at another pen, showing his own kids the animals. Cullen felt weak at the knees.

“I nearly fainted. He saw me looking at him and I am sure he remembered me. I just took my kids and left.”

That is Belfast for Cullen and those of his generation: it is a vital and exciting city now, but it is also a place where ghosts show up on every corner. This weekend, he will probably be among the faces in the crowd in at the National Cup finals in Tallaght.

After the game in Poleglass, Reynolds and Honan were heading back to Queen’s for a pick-up game. They wanted to induct a new recruit to the programme, Noah Weissman, who had flown in from LA for the year. As we watched the kids go through the last few minutes of the game, I ask him what he knew about the North of Ireland.

"You ever see that movie The Boxer?" Weissman responds good-humouredly. "Well, that's about it."

When the game ends, Noah moves onto the court and takes a couple of jump shots. One of the kids comes over and says hello, and soon they are yapping.

This is the start of it.

Belfast, the troubled city, is about to get under the Californian’s skin.