For my National League team we play our first 18 games in the northern conference and the last 8 in the southern conference. Now that we are in the southern part of the season, we’re regularly making car trips as long as 6-7 hours if you include food breaks and even nap breaks. In college I took for the granted the fact that we would stay in a hotel the night before games after long commutes. I underestimated the advantages of riding on a bus that was spacious enough for us to be able to enjoy our personal space or get up to stretch our legs. Here, the process is slightly different. We squeeze 5 grown men of all different shapes in and sizes into a car with our bags and some basketballs in our laps. It’s a cozy journey, and you quickly learn how loud your teammates snore and just how bad they smell after games (The car below is the infamous vehicle). Also, instead of staying over the night before, we make the drive the morning of the game and stay over that night. Although that makes it a little more challenging to warm up before the game, the plus side is that no matter the outcome, were able to experience the night – life of places like Galway, Belfast Dublin and Cork. As a result, the trips have helped me gain a fuller scope of Ireland and even though the car rides can be tight, I’ve actually started to enjoy them.
The car ride conversations consist of anything and everything. When you’re hip to hip for that long with a bunch of Irish players it helps you get a full grasp of Irish culture. My teammates are absolute clowns and they spend a lot of the time trash talking each other so I spent most of time cracking up. What’s said in the car stays in the car or as my coach would say in his absurd Derry accent, “What happens in the cuhyaar stays in the cuhyaar.” Therefore I can’t discuss everything that is said but we usually talk basketball, recount whatever goofy thing happened the night prior and I’ve also heard a lot about their backgrounds and their occupations.
The choice of music for during the journey is…interesting. No matter what the situation their first choice on the aux is going to be fist-pumping club music. It’s rapid beats with no lyrics and it builds up until the base drops. It makes some people want to jump around and dance but to me it just sounded like straight -up repetitive garbage! At first, I would try to blast my headphones to drown it out while others in the car would go crazy as they pumped their fists’ and convulsed their bodies to songs that felt like they were never-ending. As the year has gone on however, I am surprised to say that I found a select few that I can nod my head too. We also were able to find some common ground with some Motown classics and 90’s hip-hop along the way.
Aside from the dubstep music, they also have showed me a few Irish anthems that are about struggle and finding peace. One of the songs that they all sing along too is called “Grace” which is about a man who was killed during the clash known as the “Troubles” that occurred in Northern Ireland in the late 1960’s. It led us to a conversation comparing civil rights African Americans and Irish Catholics and how the two were subject to similar structural disadvantages. Long story short, Ireland was split in two after people living there went to war against their British rulers. The south became a separate state now called the Republic of Ireland the north was left divided into two sides. One side was majority catholic and sought to have a united independent Ireland while the other side was majority protestant and felt Ireland should remain a part of the UK. The photos of the street art were taken in Northern Ireland and they reflect the extent of the conflict and the level of animosity during those times.
The majority of my teammates are Catholics from Derry Ireland which is the heart of where the troubles took place. According to them, the protestants held most of the wealth and power and continuously discriminated against Catholics. This included inequalities in terms of political power and representation, denial of access to good jobs and land, and limited resources in terms healthcare and education. They also stressed how during the “troubles” police brutality was rampant and often occurred without any type of accountability from the government. This was fascinating me because their movement to fight for civil rights occurred in the same time period as ours did and they were also fighting for extremely similar reasons. Issues of poverty, forced segregation, inferior resources in healthcare and education, voter suppression and a bias criminal justice system are all issues that African- Americans face then and now. The conversation was eye- opening and I never would have thought that black people over the past 50 years would have shared a common struggle with northern Irish residents. Everything down to the acts of civil disobedience, riots, and protest songs that began during the troubles resembled the same type of steps that African-Americans took during the Jim Crow era.
Our conversations in the car aren’t always that insightful but that one in particular helped me gain some perspective. You never know what you might learn about the world around you unless you associate with a variety of people and have dialogue that isn’t always the easiest to have. The car rides symbolize the idea that it is the journey, not the destination that matters. They may be physically uncomfortable at times but ultimately, we spent a huge chunk of our time here traveling from one place to another. From my experience so far, the car has been the place where I’ve spent the most time enjoying countless views, laughing with teammates and even learning a thing or two. Ironically, the jam-packed road trips are an opportunity to optimize every moment and embrace the challenge of living within a new culture. Even as I write this blog now, I am sitting in car with barely any leg room while my coach is blasting a song called “Eat, Sleep, Rave, Repeat”, but it in the grand scheme of the things, there’s no place I’d rather be.
