Aidan Igiehon’s college basketball career concluded three days before St Patrick’s Day in the Orleans Arena, Las Vegas. Caesar’s Palace, the Bellagio and the rest of Sin City’s flashiest wares, sat in full view just five minutes away the other side of Frank Sinatra Drive. The game went out live on ESPN.
Abilene Christian Wildcats fell three points short of Stephen F. Austin in the opening round of the Western Athletic Conference Tournament and that was that: over a decade of Igiehon’s life in America was all but done having first arrived in Brooklyn as a 13-year old kid with just nine months of basketball under his belt. On Saturday the 6’ 10” forward will pick up where he left off in March, but in very different surrounds.
St Mary’s Hall in Portlaoise can’t hold near a tenth of the 7,000 people catered for at the Orleans Arena. Home to the Portlaoise Panthers, it is a storied but dilapidated piece of brick and mortar in dire need of updating, or bulldozing. Igiehon will take to the floor with the Dublin Lions in the opening round of the Men’s Division One.
That’s second-tier domestic Irish basketball. About as far removed, literally and metaphorically, as you could imagine from his days playing NCAA Division One and eying a ticket to the NBA. “It’s going to be fun,” he smiles.
“All the cheering and the booing. I can’t wait.” *** Still only 24, it would be trite to say that the kid Mick White spotted playing football in a Dublin park and aske.