CAVANMAN'S DIARY

There’s a song by the American rapper Nas called Half-Time which starts, “Nasty Nas in your area, about to cause mass hysteria”.

I thought of it at the sports arena in the University of Limerick a couple of weeks back when I was watching the final of the World Wallball Championships between two New Yorkers, Nazir ‘Nasty Naz’ Marston and Timothy ‘Timbo’ Gonzalez.

Marston won it with a display of athleticism, which I could only compare to our own Paul Brady at his best. When Brady is on song, I always make a point of watching the reactions of the spectators. Generally, it is astonishment, complete awe. He will hit a mind-bending shot and people in the crowd just laugh; the retrieving and killing of the ball with both hands of such a high level as to be almost comical in the mind of the ordinary player or supporter.

Nasty Naz, a 22-year-old fashion model from Brooklyn, plays with that dash and is one of the most charismatic athletes I have watched in the flesh. His win in the final was an adornment on a tournament which has already propelled handball to a new level – over 250,000 viewers watched the event online and on TG4 according to a press release from the broadcaster last week – and has the potential to catapult it on to a plane few of us handball diehards thought possible.

Some of the leading GAA officials, such as Jarlath Burns, Tom Ryan and Shane Flanagan, were in attendance and were mightily impressed by the whole thing. The association now sees handball as a huge area for potential growth, particularly internationally and in urban areas, which was another contributing factor to the general vibe of positivity in the Irish handball community around that week in Limerick, which saw 900 players do battle on nine courts under one roof.

It’s an understatement to say that that hasn’t always been the case. For the longest time, handball tended to operate as something of a secret society, a GAA off-shoot which, while part of the Gaelic games family, wasn’t always invited over for Sunday lunch.

The game enjoyed a glorious mid-century boom, with open-air alleys dotting the landscape, but when it moved indoors, essential given the Irish climate, it became hidden away.

It was no-one’s fault but the price of progress was that a once-vibrant sport was pushed to the shadows and while the achievements of transcendent players like Brady, Joey Maher, Pat Kirby and Michael ‘Ducksy’ Walsh at times dragged it back into the light, those luminous days have been all too brief.

Now, though, there is a sense that things are changing. The pandemic brought a near-existential crisis but handball has bounced back strongly, as was in evidence in Limerick.

The major growth area in handball is the One Wall code, which has been rebranded as Wallball. The barriers to entry – cost, difficulty, even the initial pain of learning to strike the hard ball – are essentially eliminated. It’s a ball and a wall, a return to the ancient and most basic form of the game, and it is opening new doors for the sport.

The triennial World Championships, inaugurated in 1964, tended to focus primarily on the four-wall version of the game but such has been the rise of Wallball that a decision was taken to run a standalone Worlds in that code. Wallball is played against a rectangular playing surface, 16 feet high and 20 feet wide. There are no side walls or back wall and the ball, akin to a racquetball, is softer and easier to hit than the one used in other versions of the game. In Cavan, courts are springing up everywhere, with well over a dozen schools and GAA clubs now boasting wallball facilities and more in the pipeline.

Wallball’s Mecca is New York, where there are over 2,000 public courts and a circuit of big-money tournaments. The sport exploded over there in the Depression era and is very much a street game, where professional hustlers vie with cops on their lunchbreaks and side-betting is an integral part of the culture.

It was long felt that the top New York players were on a different level – and they were - but standards have risen elsewhere.

Over the past 15 to 20 years, various handball-playing nations have come to the realisation that Wallball offers the best pathway to the mainstream, incorporating as it does dozens of indigenous games – such as Basque pelota, the English public school game of Fives and the wildly-popular Frisian game of kaatsen – into an accessible crossover code.

A European Tour has sprung up and there are now strong handball communities across the continent, with the Belgians and Dutch particularly strong.

At the Worlds, there were also players from Canada, Japan, Wales and England, with the latter providing three players in the elite Open grade.

The cast of characters is most exciting for me and provides a real glimpse of the potential to sell the game to the masses. When I tell people about the leading players, they are generally surprised and impressed.

One of the English stars is Luke Thomson, a left-hander who works as head of recruitment strategy with Chelsea FC and is currently ranked number one in Europe. Also in the mix was Lur Ziarrusta (24), a fiercely proud Basque from the village of Dima in the mountains of the Urkiola National Park and his compatriot Mikel Beldarrain.

The Basques stayed with me in Virginia on the eve of the tournament. I brought them to Kingspan Breffni to watch Killygarry v Castlerahan and they were taken by the spectacle; the next morning, they trained on the wallball courts at Jim Smith Park in Killinkere.

There were strong performances from the Irish players in Limerick, with the number one male, Conor McElduff from Tyrone, losing to Naz in the semi-finals and local favourite Martina McMahon winning the Ladies Open, where unfortunately Cork great Catriona Casey suffered a serious knee injury in the quarter-final.

But the New Yorkers were the star attractions. The flamboyant Tywan ‘Golden Child’ Cook is known in every park in the city; videos of Timbo Gonzalez, a Red Bull athlete, have amassed millions of views online while Marston, son of a pro boxer who shared a ring with Puerto Rican icon ‘John John’ Molina, confirmed his place as the sport’s rising star.

I was there to watch and help publicise the event but I played, too, in the Over 40s (I was 40 in March so I am a young up and comer again!). In the doubles, with my partner from Belfast, we were fortunate enough to beat two Japanese players, Satoru Isogai and Naoki Tomokiyo, who made the long trip from Tokyo. In the singles, I was beaten by Willie Polanco from New Jersey, who won the event. It was a privilege to play him.

In the first round, I played Jason Gallegos from Florida, a gentleman and handball nut and, by day, professional sensei and mind guru. Like me, he has written a book before, he told me. (“You think this is a coincidence, two authors meeting? The universe did this, man!” he said. It takes all sorts, especially in the world of handball.)

Readers of this column will know that I am an unapologetic handball lover so you can only image how excited I was about the whole thing (“mass hysteria” is about right) – and the buzz is still lingering on. After so many years fighting against the tide, handball is back steering its own course and the horizon appears reachable after all.

In Cavan, where the roots are strong but growth has been limited outside of Kingscourt, it is starting to flourish again.

The 4-Wall World Championships take place in October, also in Ireland, with upwards of 1200 players expected to enter. A Cavanman has won this competition five times in the last 20-odd years. Could that happen again? I’ll say no more.

Watch this space.