Remember when I wrote about a session I was at in Belfast where I was sitting next to a fiddler who it turned out had written a book and then I ended up reading the book? Quite an unusual occurrence, right? Definitely not the kind of thing that’s likely to happen twice (you can see where this is going…)

During the Fleadh, I went to quite a few sessions at Cumann Cultúrtha Mhic Reachtain. I ended up chatting to a fiddler named Rus from New Mexico. He told me about a book he had written twenty years previously about his time in Kerry coaching a basketball team and learning Irish music.

I had heard of this book! I can’t remember where exactly, but there aren’t that many books with a connection to traditional Irish music, so it’s no surprise that it was on my radar.

Anyway, Rus very kindly sent me a copy to read. It’s called Paddy On The Hardwood.

While it’s ostensibly a mix of basketball and trad, it’s actually about 90% basketball and 10% trad. But that 10% is great. Rus was learning from the late great fiddler Paddy Jones.

While I wish that there was more of that, I understand that is not really a book aimed at me. It’s a book aimed at Americans who might not know anything about Ireland but already understand basketball. As someone who doesn’t know anything about basketball, I was left to flounder in jargon and acronyms.

But even as someone who doesn’t have much interest in sport, I felt kind of uncomfortable about the way different sports were presented. There’s exasperation that basketball isn’t more popular in Ireland. The popularity of Gaelic Football is only described as something that gets in the way of basketball. The interest in Irish culture extends as far as music, but not indigenous sports.

I was also really uncomfortable with the level of fat-shaming. This is from the very first page of the book:

A chunky girl with a navel that shoudn’t have been exposed leaned against the wall behind him.

I rolled my eyes and hoped that would be the end of it, but it only got worse. There’s a barrage of “humourous” remarks from this white coach about the weight of a Black player on his team. The power dynamics alone made that a poor decision.

Whenever there’s a fish-out-of-water story, the humour can come from two sources; the fish or the water. You can tell a self-deprecating story about yourself, or you can point and laugh at everyone different to you. There was a bit too much of the latter for my taste. The punching down grew tiresome.

The book was written two decades ago. Were it written today, I would hope it would be less mean-spirited and colonial in its outlook.

While this mostly isn’t a book for me (apart from the musical excursions), you might like it if you’re into basketball and you’re okay with some outdated attitudes.