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January
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Kerry teenager with one hand makes Ireland basketball squad
Jordan Lee has perfected his favourite shot by practising it thousands of times.
Despite having only one hand, 14-year-old Jordan Lee from Killarney, Co Kerry has worked hard to make the Irish under-15 basketball development squad.
The teardrop is his shot. He uses it when he takes the ball to the basket, where the taller boys wait to use their height and then leap to swat the ball away. Instead of taking a conventional lay-up off the glass, he releases a high, floating shot with an impossibly high arc that falls into the net.
It is one of the most precise shots in basketball and was Allen Iverson’s calling card. Jordan Lee has perfected it by practising it thousands of times here in the frigid glory of the basketball gym in St Brendan’s College in Killarney, Co Kerry.
The place is like a preserved shrine to everybody’s PE class memories: poor light, a scuffed wooden floor, constant echoes and that extraordinarily bleak, damp cold exclusive to Irish gymnasiums. Jordan Lee loves the place. They all do. It is their home. Although he is 14, he trains with the senior team as well. They give him no free passes.
“My cousin threw the ball straight in my face there the other day,” he says ruefully. “On purpose. I passed to him and then cut through for the return and he just smacked it off my face. You have to step up.”
Andrew Fitzgerald, his coach, has this particular memory of Jordan which always makes him laugh. Fitzgerald was playing a local league game with St Paul’s and Jordan was sitting at the official’s table. He was in charge of the arrow, pointing it to whichever team was to be given possession on alternate jump-balls.
“It was a tense game, really close . . . we were sweating buckets and there was a tussle for the ball and when the whistle went everyone looked at the table to see whose ball it was. And there was Jordan holding the prosthetic and using it as an arrow and grinning at us.”
Fitzgerald has watched this tough, sunny youngster grow up and, as his coach since first year in Brendan’s, has watched him work ferociously on his game. And he stood back and watched the unexpected rush of publicity which followed Jordan in the late autumn.
“You know, the big thing about Jordan is his personality . . . he has great energy and all the other kids love him. He is only 14 years old but he is such a help to the new kids in the school and is just so positive. I do hope that doesn’t get lost in all of this hullabaloo about his basketball.”
Fitzgerald is a big, rangy man with a shock of blond hair and the loose walk of someone who has spent his life shooting hoop. He was in Colm Cooper’s class in Brendan’s and likes Gaelic football but is one of those peculiar Kerrymen whose sporting passion lies elsewhere. He is a basketball addict, plain and simple, just like Jarlath Lee, Jordan’s father.
He gets frustrated sometimes when he brings youngsters through, finessing big ungainly athletes only for the football team to suddenly see their potential and snatch them. But he understands the allure and aspirations of playing football in Kerry.
Distant heroes
To give yourself completely to basketball requires a broad mind and more distant heroes. Jordan Lee has his obvious heroes like Dwayne Wade of the Miami Heat but the ball player he quietly models himself on is a young man named Zach Hodskins, who is on the roster with the Florida Gators, a Division One college team in the US. He made it as a walk-on, which means he wasn’t recruited and certainly won’t be earning big minutes.
But just to live on a basketball court with D-1 players, where the future NBA stars play, means that he is better at basketball than most people in the country. Jordan Lee has never met Hodskins and hasn’t even seen him playing a full game. “I’m always looking for Gators games on television but they are never on.”
Still, knowing he is out there is enough. For now.
If you go online, you will quickly find the trail of attention which followed Hodskins’s first appearance with the Gators. It had parallels with the sudden deluge of media interest which suddenly sprung up around Jordan. For Jordan and those close to him, it is a catch-22. They know that the interest is generated by his story; by the curiosity of a kid with one hand even trying to play basketball, let alone trying to excel at it.
Making it as part of the Irish under-15 development squad was a great, inspirational story. But deep down there is a worry that the real point will be missed. That, as Jarlath says, people will think that he is “great for what his ability is”. You can see it when you raise the issue with Fitzgerald, in the look of defiance and dismissal. They are all too polite to say it but it is like this: if you think that Jordan Lee made that squad because of his hand rather than his basketball, then f**k you.
“That’s . . . complete rubbish,” Fitzgerald says forcefully, bringing politeness to bear. “Look, he is there on merit, not on sympathy. That is the one thing that is getting lost and it really annoyed me at the time when all the stories came out. I felt: this can’t be about this guy because he doesn’t have a disability. I know he does – but he doesn’t. Just the way he lives: he is not limited in any way. He doesn’t perceive life in that way. And I know that he made that squad on merit.”
Ticket contributed this story in lieu of yet another inaccurate score count.
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