'I love the tough games' - Mayo basketball legend looks back at 50 years

​He only started when he was 16 but became an essential part of the Ballina team alongside Deora Marsh and his brothers Liam and Seán McHale. But Anthony is still at it, training and playing with Mayo Meteors.

​Retirement has worked out well for Anthony McHale. He can go to the gym three times a week. And he still trains with the Mayo Meteors senior team, as well as filling in whenever needed. On top of that, there are plenty of Masters tournaments dotted across the year.

Ever since Anthony first picked up a basketball when he was 16, he hasn't stopped. When he started out in the mid 1970s the game was in its infancy in Mayo

“When I started out we played our games in Scoil Phádraig in Ballina, it was on one of those Granwood tile floors. They would break your knees and ankles. You wouldn't get 50 people at a game.”

However, McHale pointed out, that it all started to come together with the introduction of the Americans. That's when the game really took off.

“All of a sudden, you had extremely talented athletes playing basketball all around Ireland on a Saturday night. Dunking the ball. It was a spectacle. Irish people love sport. People took to it very quickly.”

McHale was part of the Ballina teams in the 1980s that got promoted to Ireland’s top league, demoted, and got back up again. The game changer was the arrival of future Irish Hall of Famer Deora Marsh. The bare fact that the tall man from Ohio ended up in North Mayo was a stroke of luck:

“We played against Deora at a pre-season tournament in Sligo. He had just moved to Ireland and played for a team in the second division, North Monastery Cork. In his first season, they got promoted to the Super League, to the top league, and they decided that Deora wasn't big enough for them.”

A decision that McHale and his teammates in Ballina could hardly believe.

“As soon as we heard that, we were all of the same mind: We'd love to have Deora on our team – and we got him. We would never have got him if Cork didn't cut him. Their mistake was a huge advantage for us, because Deora went on to be one of the best players ever to come to Ireland.”

Ballina were promoted to the top league and went on to win national titles in the 1990s. As McHale likes to put it: “You aways need a bit of luck to win a championship.” And securing Deora Marsh's services, was certainly the biggest scoop for Ballina at the time.

THE FIGHT

McHale's skills and experience grew alongside the Ballina team in general. When he and his brothers reached their prime, the Moysiders were making waves nationally. The biggest triumph came in 1991, when Ballina won the National Cup against Neptune from Cork.

The only trouble then was, Ballina had to go down to Cork again only three weeks later to play them in the league. The Mayo boys knew they would have to expect a fight. It was a huge achievement for them, an upset. Neptune Stadium was the top court in the country at the time, and all the cup finals were on there, and to go down and beat them in their own court was huge. Anthony McHale admitted they knew it was going to be a battle.

“I love these real competitive games. I love that. I used to really look forward to the real big games, the real tough games. I'd be up for it. You're really alive.”

The atmosphere in Neptune Stadium that day was certainly animated. It reached absolutely boiling point with only a few minutes to play, when it escalated, as Anthony remembers.

“It was a huge scrap. There was a lot of tension there from us beating them. It started with Liam McHale and one of their players, Paul Kelly, who got into a bit of a tangle and it exploded into a battle. Punches were thrown, even some of the crowd got involved. And Sam Graham, American, big bully guy, 6'8'', strong as a horse, hit me a thump and lifted me off the ground.”

Liam, Deora and Graham, the three of them got sent off, out of the court altogether, so they were in the dressing rooms, with a few minutes left in the game. And Anthony got up off the floor and just sat down. They somehow finished out the game.

Those were different times. On the way home, the Ballina team stopped along the way and a clip of the scrap was being shown on the RTÉ Six O'clock News.

“I was going around with a sore jaw afterwards, I didn't know where I was, but I survived it anyway,” McHale laughs. “I ended up having to get an x-ray on my jaw, I was sore for a good few weeks, but even then we were just laughing about it afterwards.”

FIRST MEETING

IT'S not that McHale would only receive blows. Different times, as his current teammate at Mayo Meteors, Paul Freeman, can testify.

Freeman vividly remembers his first encounter with McHale: “He does what he needs to. The first time I played against him, I was 17 or 18. He would have been an experienced player at that age.

I cut to the basket, he just gave me a big hard bump just to 'welcome' me to the game, to show that I was playing against men now. I never actually spoke to him at that age, just from playing against him. After the game, I was in Supermac’s on the way home. He was standing there and I was a bit worried.

This guy had just thrown an elbow in my chest when I cut to the basket in the middle of the game. Then, when I met him after the game he was nicely chatting to me, ‘how are you, good game.’ He's a competitor on the court, but a gentleman off it.”

A memorable occasion surely for the young Freeman, who is now a veteran player himself, former Irish international. And him and Anthony McHale are teammates. Granted, McHale doesn't play too many games, mostly the regional league ones.

But he still has it. “He's automatic”, Freeman explains, and still very competitive: “You wouldn't have thought when you're in primary school watching a guy like Anthony winning the National Cup on television, that you'd end up playing with him when he's in his 60s. It's kind of crazy.”

McHale is representing the Irish Masters teams, regularly travelling abroad to tournaments, even striking friendships with former adversaries from around Ireland, he played against when he was with Ballina.

“We would have been enemies then, but now after a training session or two and a tournament, you're all teammates. It all happens very naturally and very easily. Back in the day we would have been fierce competitors against each other.”

There's still the drive to win. And for Mayo Meteors, McHale still helps out in certain games. Always the competitor.