AT SOME POINT OVER the weekend, there’s a good chance that three athletes could find themselves in conversation at the World Handball Championships, held at a purpose-built venue at the University of Limerick.
Imagine if the top seeds from Europe, Ireland and America bumped into each other.
You would have Ireland’s Conor McElduff, from the Breacach club in Tyrone, who works as a GAA Handball Regional Development Officer.
Reared on Gaelic football until he tore his cruciate playing for the school team in his early teens, he had already been mad into handball anyway and after his recovery, devoted himself to sport in sneakers, not studs.
Then, there’s European top seed Luke Thomson. He belongs to the English Public School system as a former pupil of Christ’s Hospital (‘A school like no other,’ it straplines in its’ website), outside Horsham in West Sussex where you can board for a term and it will come in at the entirely reasonable, I think we all can agree, £15,000.
Numerous versions of handball have been played in English public schools since the 1700s. Most of them have been derived from the three-wall game of ‘Eton Fives.’ Thomson’s own version was the one adopted from Rugby school. His day job is head of academy recruitment for Chelsea FC.
It was another man going to the Worlds this weekend, Dan Grant, who spotted him playing Fives in a competition and put him onto Wall Ball. That’s how it all started.
Among his peers, it’s not a stretch to say his hobby is somewhat unusual.
“I think the immediate reaction is to not know anything about it,” he said.
“People see I take it very seriously. I train every day. Around nine times every week. My whole working career is based around sport so people give me credit for that.
“It is cool to compete and I am the European number one. That interests people!
“Being a semi professional athlete is challenging as I work a full time job. The majority of my time I spend on court. I don’t have the time to invest in my recovery as a professional athlete would, it’s very physical for me to spend long periods of time in the gym. When I try to do that, my experience is I get more injuries.”
So he trains like a demon on court. Two of the sessions would be in London with members of the Team GB handball team and the wider community on a Tuesday night in west London. On a Sunday, he’s over to the east End for a session.
“Other than that, it’s about training on my own. My Dad comes along and I would do a lot of repetition, shots I need to improve.”
Then, there’s Timbo.
His real name is Timothy Gonzalez, but that wouldn’t fly in his neighbourhood of Brooklyn, where there is a one-wall court every two blocks.
In New York, the scene is as gritty as you might imagine and far more widespread than you can comprehend. There’s a touch of ‘White Men Can’t Jump’ as Gonzalez and others compete on leaf-strewn concrete courts that play fast, seeking to get the kill shots early as the side bets get bigger and bigger.
It’s hustling, but it’s respectable. Gonzalez is a Red Bull-endorsed athlete that has made YouTube clips of himself running the NBA superstar Blake Griffin ragged around a court.
Since his stepfather took him to see his first doubles’ game at 8, he’s been hooked.
Each morning, he approaches a massive set of steps in a local park and goes up and down 20 times. Then he’ll trot out a five mile jog with ankle weights attached. Other days he will bike to the beach, strap on his resistance bands and travel the length of the sand, sidestepping. Then he’ll do his calisthenics.
“The handball community is super raw,” he said in a previous interview.
“It’s like boxing. We have a lot of people who bet on the games and they’ll trash talk, trying to get you off your mental game to make you lose. It’s definitely not easy.
“I was training another player and we went to tournaments together. When they trash talked him, he got emotional and had a breakdown.”
If there was ever a movie made of this scene, you could pick the lead roles as Paul Mescal, Tom Hardy and Chris Rock.
There are others coming, such as Tywan Cook and Nazir ‘Nasty Naz’ Marston who will all add some flavour to the mix alongside entrants from Canada, Japan and the Basque Country.
In the showdowns between McElduff and Gonzalez, the American is ‘two and oh’ ahead.
“He beat me in the Worlds semi final back in 2015 and that was the first taster we had off each other and back then, the Irish wouldn’t have been expected to get more than a couple of points off a New York player,” says McElduff.
“But he and I went to the wire and I think it came as a shock that a wee white Irish boy would live with a big dog from New York. And we played in a Belgian Open final as well in 2017 that went down to the wire.
“So he has pipped me twice. He is in the bottom side of the draw so I am hoping to even up the score a little.”
Anyone thinking that the Tyrone man might be cowed by the brashness of a New Yorker would be wrong. On his handball gloves, McElduff has ‘TGO’ printed; ‘The Great One.’
One Wall is in the middle of a growth spurt in popularity, able to attract an international dimension because of the universality of the contest.
Since 1964 there’s been a World Handball Championships, running every three years and rotated between Ireland, America and Canada (Australia once, in 1988). Usually, it’s been based around the Four Wall version in which Cavan’s Paul Brady dominated and ruled with an iron open palm.
The proposed event in 2021 was cancelled due to the Covid pandemic and this is the first since then. It was decided to create two separate events to include One Wall.
It will serve off this Sunday at ten purpose-built courts in UL and 900 entrants will compete in a range of different levels and formats.
You could say McElduff has some skin in the game. It’s a complete immersion he has with his job growing the game and his playing commitments. He covers eleven counties, mainly Leinster but also some of Ulster too.
“It’s the best kept secret in the GAA. It’s just amazing to see how big it is getting in Europe and how bigger it has become in the last year here,” he says.
“We are seeing a steady increase in popularity and the idea is to get more facilities up around the country, new clubs, introduce it to as many new faces as we can.
“I know it might not become part of the mainstream popular culture in the next few years, but in ten years, we would like to see it in a much bigger space and perhaps in the Olympics.”
There’s an Olympics space opening up for Los Angeles 2028 with breakdancing spinning off the menu. Wouldn’t that be a fine thing to see a podium for Handball?
