BASKETBALL: The exodus is swift and unsentimental. On Sunday, quietly and without fanfare, the Irish basketball season ended, so all this week professional American players leave from Shannon and Dublin, chastened and less credulous after a season playing ball on the cold edge of Europe.
Corey Dickerson, the season's top scorer, averaging 28 points per game in the Superleague, flew out yesterday. He is a 22-year-old from Philadelphia and admits that basketball is his life right now.
He spent the last eight months living in Dublin's Glasnevin with the Donnellys, a famous Irish basketball clan and one of the core groups that keep the St Vincent's club together. Dickerson loves the family now and will stay in touch no matter what.
Although St Vincent's are among the aristocracy in Irish basketball, the club failed to find a sponsor, so it was a Spartan season. Dickerson got an anthropologist's insight to rural Ireland looking out backseat windows on midnight drives home from Killarney, Sligo, Cork, Belfast, Dungannon, Limerick, Waterford.
When you were born to the high school and sweltering playground basketball culture of the City of Brotherly Love, the Irish experience must seem otherworldly. Empty gyms, a perpetual struggle, little or no profile, like playing in an underground league, a prohibition sport.
Dickerson is part of an Irish tradition now. The stories of American ball players in Ireland are legion. During the Star Wars days of the Reagan administration, an American arrived in Dublin having agreed to play a season less than 48 hours earlier.
"Right, how far am I from the Russian border?" he demanded of his hosts in the arrivals halls.
"What do you mean," they inquired.
"Look, I know I'm in Poland. Just tell me how close we are to Russia," he said. Border confusions erased, he stayed the season.
Although scouting is a fairly thorough business now, when Americans first arrived in Ireland they were selected on word of mouth. It was like getting a mail-order bride. One year, a club coach and his friend went to the airport to pick up their new signing, whom they were assured was 6 ft 6 in and built like a tank. Forty minutes later, all arrivals had filed through when the gates opened to reveal a short-ass midget with a white suit, a big grin and one of those Stetson hats that Dallas popularised.
"Knowing our luck," hissed the coach, "that's our man." Fortunately it wasn't, but when the new player did make it through, after an arduous Q&A session with Immigration, he had to travel to the other end of Ireland and play a game that very evening. Not only was his first night not good, it was terrible.
At some point in the second half, watching their prize bum another shot, the coach turned to his friend and said: "Know what? We should have taken the f***er in the Stetson." But the new man survived, excelled for many seasons and ended up as chief executive of the Irish Basketball Association.
Many Americans come here for only one season. A few are sent home after just three or four games for not cutting the mustard. Some have stayed permanently, forming the elite "one-name-only" club, so well known are they in basketball circles. Lenny (McMillan). Jerome (Westbrooks). Jenks (Anthony Jenkins). Deora (Marsh). Kelvin (Troy).
Everyone has a different opinion as to who the best American to play here was. The most famous is probably Mario Elie, who five years after winning a cup title with Killester in 1987 showed up as a first-five member of the Houston Rockets and won a couple of NBA championship rings. Around that time, dozens of Irish farmers, bankers, teachers etc, with paunches and dodgy 10-feet jump shots were able to boast of how they once played an NBA star out of the game.
Other stories are darker; one player who spent some time playing here got caught up in a robbery and will spend a good stretch playing prison leagues for no pay.
The Amerian player with the coolest name hung around Belfast and was called Soup Campbell. The American with the best three-point shot was either Anthony Jenkins (still playing) or John Carson, a Canadian who was apparently incapable of missing. No one ever dunked a ball with more easy flamboyance than Ballina's Deora Marsh. Jerome Westbrooks was the first to win a cup medal playing with his son.
This is the legacy that Dickerson has enriched. After eight unforgettable but long months, he is aching to get back home. A summer season with Alabama or Harrisburg beckons. Then a few weeks in the Baker league in Phili, which attracts NBA-calibre players. Offers have come in from Icelandic and German clubs, so another long-haul winter is in store. It's a vagrant's life but Dickerson is reconciled to it and loves it.
His father played wide receiver in the NFL for the Philadelphia Eagles in the 1980s and although he inherited the speed genes, he always took grief for being the family slouch.
"I'm quick but not fast," he says with self deprecation. But he was lightning over here and laughably skilful with a ball. Since Dickerson was a young teenager, the NBA has always been the ultimate stage but when you are a 6 ft point guard, scouts tend to look the other way.
He hasn't fully given up on the NBA, having always revelled in proving scouting reports wrong. Sometimes you hear of people floating around European and semi-pro American leagues for half a decade and suddenly getting picked by an NBA franchise.
For now, though, he will globe trot, following his game. Never say never, but his Irish days are probably behind him. He says it was a worthwhile experience, one he will cherish. He got used to the rain, the absence of sun. He made some great friends and some even better moves.
But basketball, even the twilit Irish game, is as mercenary as any other sport. Dickerson will go to where the highest quality ball is, the best money. While he is there, he will put his soul in, but season after season, he will try to improve himself. "You have to keep going until the day comes that they tell you that you can't play any more," he says.
He is one of the hundreds of stories that have passed through the Irish game. Come September, his successors will arrive for their virgin season on the edge. The raw truth of the Irish game is probably far removed from the glory of their aspiration, but it's all about expression, about playing the game. Some, like Corey Dickerson, will thrive. Others will flee or be pushed. And so it goes.
