Lonely passion of the certified basket case

Keith Duggan Sideline CutEvery so often, Irish basketball manages to conjure up an unlikely episode of heroism that makes a mockery of its invisibility in the catalogue of national sport.

Although the rest of the world cannot get enough of basketball, it was never likely to flourish on this damp and peculiar little island of ours. Given we are a nation of short-asses, in thrall to two of the most dynamic and exclusive field sports in the world and too commercially insignificant to attract the radar of America's frighteningly expansive NBA, hoop was always going to struggle here.

But it survives, quietly and without fuss, a hardy flower among the clamorous GAA championship, the elitism of rugby, the overindulged woes and ambitions of Irish soccer, the angst over the diminishing gene pool of Irish athletics and the brainwashing monotony of the English Premiership culture. For decades, basketball has toughed it out, operating on meagre resources and broad imagination to produce leagues and cup finals whose level of professionalism, sporting theatricality and pure enjoyment have always taken the uninitiated by surprise.

Those of us who got sucked into the vortex of Irish basketball at a young age regard it with a combination of sentimental reminiscence and a degree of frustration. At secondary-school level, particularly over the last 10 years, it is easy for young players to believe basketball is a major deal in this country. Irish basketball excels at organising schools competitions.

At the March finals, the best schools meet for three days of feverish noise and often heartbreakingly close games whose importance is intensified by the allegiance to school and place which the busloads of supporters declare as if their hearts depended on it.

The great thing is that - unlike schools rugby - basketball has few perpetual hothouses. It is clear to anyone who has attended those finals that Ireland produces a significant number of talented young players. But once they leave school, many simply disappear. It is hard to ascertain where they go.

After school, if you want to play basketball, you have to seek it out, be it in college, at national-league level or in the most fascinating and strange of all mediums, the all-county leagues.

Unlike the schools arenas, these games are without the howling encouragement of school colleagues or the glamour of a schools title at stake but instead are played in deathly quiet, poorly lit 1970s gyms through the frozen heart of winter.

If you could magic the ball out of the picture, the entire scene would resemble an austere, avant-garde modern dance performance that might well earn rosettes at festivals around the world. However, with the ball - or 'the rock', as Mayo hoop fans call it - in frame it merely looks like bad basketball.

That these local games are played at all is a kind of madness and, I think, bestows nobility on them. Because Gaelic games have, over the last century, commanded such a rich draw on the imagination and volunteerism of towns and parishes, the fates of local basketball teams rarely sets things aflame.

Sometimes - well, never until this precise second - I wonder if it might have been different if, in November 1884, Michael Cusack had looked out at the bleak skies and muttered: "To hell with this Thurles meeting. I'm turning in with a good book."

Would basketball have filled the spiritual and energetic void then, coming to represent in this country what it does today in rural Indiana? After all, the game is cheap, every town has a parish hall, and if you look away from the bingo book or the Christmas variety show, your eyes will inevitably meet a forlorn basket, its net hanging bleakly off the dull-orange ring, unloved and unused. And there are odd pockets - most vividly Ballina and Neptune in Cork - where a parallel universe for Irish basketball was briefly realised.

For years, a bunch of us used to play local league in the northwest of the country. We sometimes joked it had the distinction of being the worst-organised league in the world, and there were nights, during astonishingly grim and low-scoring encounters that seemed to last for three or four hours, when that seemed true. At other times, though, the league was exceptionally well run and had several truly good players.

It was great fun, and even when the games were awful, they mattered. In fact, when they were poor, they mattered even more because the odd time the two town teams got their A games in synchronicity, there was a vague pleasure to be taken from the (remote) possibility that we were somehow enhancing the aesthetics of the sport whatever the result.

It would be an exaggeration to label it the worst experience in the world - getting gored by the bulls in Pamplona would possibly be worse - but leaving the town of Kilcar on an icy night after a 56-55 overtime loss actually kills a small piece of your soul. It was - and undoubtedly remains - a situation from which no redemption is possible, even if you do swing by the Limelight in Glenties for the consolatory sounds as spun by DJ PJ.

That sting of the midwinter Kilcar loss is something Pat Burke, of Ireland and the Phoenix Suns, has never had to endure. But at the same time, he ultimately drinks from the same fountain, trying his damnedest to play the game in a land that hears no bounce.

Burke is the most extravagantly talented of the Irish senior men's team, who are on the threshold of achieving something remarkable. If Ireland beat Denmark this afternoon and in the away game in a fortnight, we will qualify for the European championships for the very first time.

Ireland playing at that level would have been unimaginable a few short years ago.

It would be a slightly unrealistic representation of our international standing as the IBA have used the Charlton imperative to scour the world for the best available players. Hence, players like Marty Conlon, whose grandfather hailed from near Kilcar and Jay Larranaga, whose bloodlines are Corkonian, now wear the shamrock. And they care.

And there is some home-grown talent. Point guard Michael Bree went from Sligo to captaining Davidson College in the USA and played in the most evocative and popular theatres in American sport: the Dean Dome in North Carolina against Michael Jordan's alma mater and at Duke, home of the famous Blue Devils. Conor Grace, son of rugby's Tom, has had a similarly brilliant - but largely unrecognised - career.

In short, it is the best hoop team Ireland has ever had and maybe the best it ever will have. They have a smart, driven coach in Gerry Fitzpatrick and at least a fighting chance of making it to the big dance - though tragically, Burke's absence today because of the prior demands of pre-season training with the Phoenix Suns makes the challenge appreciably more daunting.

Even if they do prevail, it will probably be like a flare in the darkness. That is fine, though. Irish basketball has grown and shrunken and expanded again through the years but even as the hoop game takes a grip across the world, it remains something of an underground passion in this country.

But the thing is, it does remain. There are enough diehards, lunatics and geniuses out there to ensure the game stays alive and the Danes get a hot reception in Dublin this afternoon.