Every four years, the Summer Olympics brings forth a collective fever dream of strange, communal treasures. We discuss synchronised diving instead of the weather. Flava Flav is temporarily rebranded as a champion of women’s water polo. The phrase “pommel horse” re-enters our shared lexicon. Snoop Dogg feeds carrots to dressage horses.
And, for those who know where to look, the lyrical lilt of Timmy McCarthy returns to the Irish airwaves to commentate – at loud, joyous volume – on basketball. He growls. He sputters. He shrieks so loudly the microphone crackles.
SHAKE AND BAKE!
COAST TO COAST!
Taking a shot from … DOOWWNNTOWWNN!
In a crowded field of feel-good Olympic quirks, McCarthy, who turns 64 on Friday, may be one of the longest-running – a hidden gem that is both uniquely Olympian and uniquely Irish, broadcast only to those with access to Ireland’s state broadcast channel.
First tapped by Raidió Teilifís Éireann in 2004 to anchor basketball for the Athens Games, McCarthy’s commentary has since spawned memes, a Soundboard, Facebook fan pages, YouTube remixes and a modest but mighty fandom for whom his appearances are an Olympic touchstone – and the only Irish connection to the Games’ popular basketball series, in which Ireland has failed to qualify.
“Timmy is a national treasure that gets dusted off every four years,” said Brendan Boyle, an Irish writer and basketball fan who lives in Spain and has followed McCarthy’s broadcasts.
To follow McCarthy is to know his -isms. Among them: BOOM-SHAKA-LAKA, for an impressive dunk; SHAKE-AND-BAKE, for a deft move on the court. Perhaps best known is McCarthy’s call for a shot from DOWNTOWN, an exclamation with which he has become so synonymous that it caps his Basketball Ireland profile, and has been dubbed over a version of the classic song of the same name, by Petula Clark.
While some of McCarthy’s -isms are borrowed phrases stamped with his trademark delivery, other larger-than-life quips skirt mainstream colloquialisms just enough to be uniquely – and hilariously – his own.
Float a jumper? Not for McCarthy, who shouts his preferred phrases – DROP A FLOATER or A DEUCE! – with abandon, either gleefully unaware or unbothered by the implications such terms carry in more crude contexts. He peppers broadcasts with foreign linguistics, not always pronouncing his French correctly, but saying it with conviction anyway.
“I love this. I love doing what I’m doing. If I love it, then the audience can enjoy it,” said McCarthy, whose passion for basketball even seeps through a telephone. He bounds through analyses and memory, lurching from anecdotes about 2000s-era buzzer beaters to eloquent monologues on the accessibility of sport.
“What the Olympics do, particularly in Ireland, they bring people to watch sport, all different sport,” he said Thursday. “Most fans watching these games in the Olympics are not really interested in who wins. They just want to enjoy what they’re seeing, and I just want to make sure in my games that I’m commentating on, that they enjoy it.”
It was not always this way. McCarthy started with RTÉ as an analyst, more of a stats guy than an entertainer. Then, at the 2004 Athens Games, he was asked to step into a broadcast booth for a game as a precautionary fill-in – a tape, he was told, that would almost certainly not be aired. But the sound man immediately sent the recording up the network chain, with an instruction: Listen to this guy. He’s different.
That was 20 years and six Olympic Games ago.
It is the latest chapter for McCarthy’s athletic star, first forged in the 1980s as basketball surged into Ireland’s mainstream. It was a relatively brief but booming golden age, when throngs of American players who had narrowly missed the cut for the NBA draft instead turned their sights to Ireland, packing arenas, stacking the island’s newly minted national league – and paving a way for talented Irish players to find a spotlight, too.
Captain of the formidable Cork Blue Demons, McCarthy was one of them. A member of Basketball Ireland’s hall of fame, he guided his team to multiple national championships before his surprise retirement at 29 – in the same season that Irish teams voted to limit the number of American players on their rosters, which quickly sucked the air out of the league.
Still, basketball has remained popular on the island, and McCarthy has since built a career coaching in Ireland’s midlands and – of course – serving as one of the country’s most beloved commentators. Each time the Games roll around, a new legion of Timmy McCarthy stans, or obsessive followers, are christened.
Speaking in full paragraphs, McCarthy’s one-liners gallop so quickly that he occasionally seems, like the rest of us, to just be along for the ride. Unmistakable is the brogue of north Cork – famously indecipherable and beautifully rhythmic – which, among other things, gives the word “ball” an additional two to three syllables.
“It feels like you’re watching something almost biblical,” Gavan Casey, a writer for the Irish sports website The 42, said of McCarthy’s broadcasts. “He is his own event at the Olympics, to the Irish viewer.”
As Irish basketball’s international lustre has faded – its men’s national team has only competed once at the Olympics, in 1948 – McCarthy’s commentary opportunities have grown rarer. The Olympics remain his primary RTÉ gig, and he helps cover the European basketball leagues for FIBA, the International Basketball Federation.
The scarcity, though, is what makes the Olympics so special, to McCarthy and his fans.
“This is the most basketball Irish people would see in four years,” he said. “I just love it. I just love it.”
This article originally appeared in the New York Times
