The ‘Boomshakalaka’ man lighting up the world of basketball with his unique commentary
Cork native and long-time resident of Kiltoom, Tim McCarthy, at the Hodson Bay Hotel. Picture: Gerard O'Loughlin
The ‘Boomshakalaka’ man lighting up the world of basketball with his unique commentary If you polled 100 people on a main street in an Irish town and asked them about their highlights from the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris, it’s reasonable to assume that the majority would cite any one of our four gold medal winners, or perhaps even the incredible performances of the 4x400m women’s relay team, or their star, Rhasidat Adeleke.
Then there were the stories of a global, rather than an Irish interest. Steph Curry and Lebron James teaming up for the USA’s basketball team, Novak Djokovic winning the men’s tennis gold medal, or even any one of the incredible scenic and spectacular venues that were part of the Paris landscape.
Of course, in the midst of all those big stories, there were the colourful moments that caught fire and captured the imagination of the world. There was Yusuf Dikec, who won a silver medal for Turkey in the air pistol event while dressed like he was about to paint his kitchen, Cameroon-born, United Kingdom-based boxer Cindy Ngamba winning the first ever medal for the Refugee International Team, and of course French Pole Vaulter Anthony Ammirati, who was offered new and different career opportunities when he missed out on the Olympic final due to knocking over the bar in a different way to most. If you’re unsure what we’re talking about here, google is your friend, but not on your work computer.
And in that same bracket goes Irish basketball commentator and Kiltoom resident Tim McCarthy, whose style can best be described as letting his deeply felt love of the sport permeate every single play he calls.
Put his catchphrases down in print, whether it’s "SHAKE AND BAKE," "Taking a shot from....DOOWWNNTOWWNN”, or even his trademark “BOOMSHAKALAKA”, and it’s easy to imagine that all of that in a Cork accent would sound un-natural, when it’s the complete opposite.
In fact, he developed a cult following, with social media channels dedicated to clipping and sharing, not the highlights of the games, but the highlights of McCarthy’s commentary. At least, it was a cult following, until this Summer when he went really viral, even featuring the New York Times. More on that later.
McCarthy, who in 2023 was inducted into the Basketball Ireland Hall of Fame, had a glittering basketball career as a player, coming to his peak during a golden era for the sport that people born after 1990 couldn’t even imagine.
Ask a 30-year-old about the Blue Demons, and you’ll probably get a perplexed expression. For McCarthy, they were the club in Cork that he helped to win an array of national titles, and the platform from which he played 103 times for the Irish national team, captaining the side for 58 of those games.
“People would be queuing for three hours to get into the game. There'd be four and five or six thousand people at games” he recalls.
“It was still a big deal on TV with highlights packages, RTÉ news carrying the results alongside the GAA results, it was a major sport at a time when if Munster played Leinster in rugby, there might be just 200 people at it.
The attraction, in many cases, was that every Irish club was allowed to have two American players, and in many cases these were players who had aspirations to play in the NBA, but that they didn’t quite make it. Some, most notably three-time NBA champion Mario Elie, used the Superleague as their path to the big time.
Then, in an act of self-sabotage on par with choosing to invade Russia in winter, the league chose to remove the American players, and within a few seasons, the interest had disappeared almost entirely.
McCarthy, who had earlier in his career come back from a cruciate ligament injury that was the end of serious sport for most who suffered it at the time, retired at age 29. Just two years later, he was set onto his current path.
“Two years later (after retirement), RTÉ asked me to become their analyst, for pre-game, half-time, post-game etc.. Then the second year, they wanted me to continue to be the analyst, but I also became a co-commentator alongside Ger Canning. And that went on basically from 1991 until 2004”.
Throughout all this, McCarthy’s career in the financial services sector blossomed, which brought him to Athlone as the first and founding chief executive of An Post Insurance. He continued coaching too, earning success with several Irish national teams, but the real turning point was at the Athens Games in 2004.
“I arrived for my usual analyst and co-commentator role, but then the producer asked ‘Can you go in and commentate on a game first?’ We probably won't use it, he says, but at least we have it if somebody finished early. I said I've never commentated, and he said, don't worry, you'll be fine, and we won’t use it in all probability.
“So I went in, it was Spain against the Czech Republic, and Spain hit a three-pointer on the buzzer to bring it to extra time. It was a very exciting game and I just started commentating, as I do today. One of the sound engineers rang the director and said, you should listen to this person, he's very different.
“Some parts of the game actually needed to be shown because there was a gap in the scheduling, so it was actually seen, and the director called me the next day, saying you're going to be the basketball commentator from now on, Ger will go off and do volleyball. That’s 20 years and seven Olympics ago, if you count the Paralympics”.
As someone who played the game to an international level, it would be easy to fall into the trap of getting too technical, but a huge part of McCarthy’s success stems from how he marries his own abundant enthusiasm with an understanding of who he’s speaking to, every time he picks up a microphone.
“The majority of people watching sport are watching it for one of three reasons: loyalty to their team or their athlete, interest in the sport, or interest in the overall event. The Olympics is an event, so when I'm commentating on the game, I'm thinking of the farmer down in Roscommon, the student in Dublin, the wife in Cork, the professional in Limerick” he explains.
“A whole range of people are watching this event with no knowledge or extremely limited knowledge of the event they're watching.
As a player and coach, McCarthy’s love for sport extended far beyond the basketball court. While he dabbled with a lot of sports growing in Gurranabraher on the north side of Cork city, he played League of Ireland with the Cork City club, and has also been involved on the coaching ticket with St. Finbarr’s hurlers in the city, with the Wexford intercounty footballers, and here in Roscommon when he was part of Benny O’Brien’s management group that guided St. Brigid’s to the 2020 county title.
That was part of the reason why RTÉ have been happy to deploy him to other events, including the Munster Hurling Championship, the Ulster Football Championship, and even the 2006 Ryder Cup.
Through it all however, his reputation as a basketball commentator with a unique ability to inject life and joy into games was growing, both in Ireland and abroad.
“Athens was exceptionally well-received, so much so that RTÉ showed a lot of basketball in the Athens games, which they wouldn't have done in previous Olympics. It built up in Beijing but London, no doubt like Paris because of the time zone, got a huge reaction”.
But nothing like this summer. He shakes his head in amazement at it all.
“You say to yourself, I'm a working-class kid of two wonderful parents who sadly have passed on. I'm in the middle child of five, very humble beginnings, so I'm very clear where I'm from and very proud where I'm from.
“And I find myself, you know, at one stage, trending in the USA on Twitter, second to Steph Curry, like, for, as Andy Warhol said, 15 minutes of fame. But it was just an unusual explosion of pure enjoyment. People genuinely seemed to love it”.
An explosion of pure enjoyment, seems incredibly apt. Next time you tune in to one of Tim McCarthy’s commentaries, you’ll see exactly why, if you don’t know already.
