Maryland All Stars in Cork, Ireland in 1981. From left to right: Front row-Bill Ruback, Mike Brey, Jim Hoops, Hank Schultz, Steve Karr. Back row-Wayne Talbott, Brian Magid, Malcolm Wellelink and Paul Devito.

For the increasingly sober print platform of Washington City Paper, I wrote a column this week about a short-lived hoops squad called the Maryland All-Stars.

The All-Stars were really just a gang of D.C.-area basketball buddies, including future Notre Dame coach and SI Coach of the Year Mike Brey, who landed in Ireland on St. Patrick's Day in 1981 as part of a junket that was supposed to have the Yanks' schooling the Irish on America's court supremacy.

The trip didn't work out as intended from a sporting or schooling standpoint, but, boy, did the lads have a time!

The athletic ambassadors' stories of, um, drinking in the local color and getting jobbed by the hometown refs — tales which turn 30 years old this week — will have me giggling forever.

And to have Brey, the All-Stars' guard who was hailed during his time in Ireland as the Americans' "coach on the floor," end up coaching a team called the Fighting Irish to such heights all these years later, well, the perfectness of it all gets me goosebumpy!

So go read the story! And tell me there ain't a movie in there!

And, of course, Happy St. Patrick's Day!

The Washington Kastles lost to the Philadelphia Freedoms, the team named after an Elton John song or vice versa, in their home opener last night. The big stories were the sellout crowd that filled Empty Parking Lot Arena, or whatever the temp downtown stadium is called, and the appearance of tireless Venus Williams, who gave a clinic to local kids by day and starred on the court at night.

The loss puts the Kastles at 0-3. Amazing how quickly they've blended into the DC sports scene.

***

Speaking of: The Nats lost again in Colorado. Just another day at the office for the boys: Three errors for Washington (none for the Rockies), one-run loss.

Austin Kearns, he of the $8 million 2009 salary, had a huge pinch hit single in the 8th inning. Huge not for the Nats, but for Kearns, since it put his batting average above .200 for the first time in a while. Alas, the team's mandatory all-star slot has already been filled by Ryan Zimmerman.

The Nats have a death grip on the 1st Pick in next year's draft, and are now 14.5 games out of second-to-last place in the NL East. The team can boast a record -196-run run differential differential (R2D2™) with the league-leading Los Angeles Dodgers.

Manny Acta et al will try to fight off the broom with a getaway-day game this afternoon in Denver.

AFTER THE JUMP: Inevitable Chris Cooley backlash starting already? The guy who taught us "Macaca" still thinks he's righteous? Alberto Gonzales banished to an American archipelago? The Irish play basketball?

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Whereas being a wild ass came naturally to past Redskins wild-asses (John Riggins, Curtis Jordan, etc...), Chris Cooley's wild-assishness by now seems incredibly forced. Cooley has gotten desperate to throw his wacky side in everybody's face. Every week there's a new stunt, promoted on his blog. If it ain't a shot of his naughty bits, it's a flaming cow. And on and on.

So when somebody at Extremeskins, Dan Snyder's message board, let everybody know that Cooley will be featured on a segment of ESPN's magazine show "E60", with him playing around on a ranch, the reaction wasn't all pro-#47.

The poster SkinsTerps26, whose board signature is a photo of Cooley, singed the star like a cow carcass, and probably spoke for a lot of fans as he did so:

"Cooley being all over TV and Internet bug me," wrote SkinsTerps26. "You are a funny guy... kinda... but after the cow burning and those stupid mustard peanut butter and ham sandwiches, its time to take a time out from video appearances. Go learn how to block."

Ouch!

***

From characters to character: The Examiner reports ex-Senator George Allen is putting out a sports book. "The Triumph of Character: What Washington Can Learn from the World of Sports."

The publisher's tease says Allen is qualified for such a book because he "spent the better part of his life with one foot in both the world of sports and the world of politics." He spent the worst part of his life with one foot in his mouth. Isn't his license to ride the high horse still suspended?

But, damn, his dad was my favorite football coach of all time.

***

Another guy who left town in shame: Alberto Gonzales, the short and disgraced former attorney general, not the shortstop for the disgraceful Washington Nationals, has been hired to teach by my alma mater, Texas Tech. Gonzales probably figured Lubbock is a fine place to go when the rest of the world hates you, seeing how it worked out for Bobby Knight. If Coach Knight were still leading the Red Raiders, you know he'd be asking Gonzales to draw up a memo on how far he could legally push his players during "enhanced workouts." Those who want Gonzales tried for war crimes can take comfort knowing that while it ain't jail, a stay in Lubbock is a close second.

The town gave us Buddy Holly, bless him, but has been making up for that ever since. (Before hiring Gonzales, Tech chancellor and Democrat-turned-Republican ex-Congressman Kent Hance sacrificed whatever pride the school had trying to land the George W. Bush Library.)

***

Speaking of my roots and coaches in exile: Great story in the Washington Times about Jay Larranaga, son of George Mason coach Jim Larranaga.

The littler Larranaga is the player-coach of the national basketball team of Ireland. The squad's never been good. Writer Bob Cohn wraps up Irish international hoops history thusly: "In Ireland's only Olympic appearance in men's basketball in 1948, it lost all four games by an average of 51 points, including a 71-9 defeat by Mexico."

Ok, but in fairness to my people, folks are still talking about that '48 Mexican squad, nicknamed El Fuego Cinco*.

*Nobody's really talking about the '48 Mexican national basketball team, and they weren't really called "El Fuego Cinco." Continued apologies for my Los Lobos spanish. But the W. Times' story is really fun.

On the morning of Friday, April 3rd, the highly decorated Irish author Colm Tóibín found himself in a rather unusual position: seated in front of a class of twelfth graders at Benjamin Banneker Academic High School on Euclid Street. The school visit was part of Tóibín’s participation in the PEN/Faulkner Foundation’s Writers in Schools program, which brings writers who participate in the non-profit’s Reading Series into D.C. public high school classes to discuss their work.

Tóibín’s work as a novelist, journalist, non-fiction writer, and playwright has garnered much acclaim. His novel The Blackwater Lightship (1999) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, as was The Master (2004), which also won the Los Angeles Times Book of the Year.

At Banneker, Tóibín fielded questions about his latest novel, Brooklyn, which will be released in America on May 5th. I sat down with him after the class to discuss various topics, including his writing style, his coming-of-age as a gay writer in Ireland and the persistence of overly phallic writing at a certain American M.F.A. program.

So how did you enjoy the visit to Banneker High School this morning?

I dread schools. I don’t do them much, because I find the gap between what you do and the kids’ perception of that is too great. Though you might often get one kid who is absolutely interested, it’s a cross between a freak show and time off. So I really wasn’t looking forward to it. . . It’s actually the best time I’ve ever had with students. It wasn’t just that they were intelligent, but there was an openness in the way they would look at you. It was very inspiring; they were much better than reviewers.

You began your career as a writer by writing journalism and continued to do so after your first novel, The South, came out in 1990. If you’re in the practice of writing journalism, how does an idea for a novel form in your head?

Often you start with a single image, and you don’t know what it is, so quite often it’s hard to remember exactly where it began. But it’s often very small. I don’t take notes; I don’t have a diary. If it is important enough, it will stay in your mind. Then what happens is stranger. Suddenly, . . . that image . . . becomes an idea, and this can happen in a second. You just glance at the sky, or you can be walking down the street, or you’re just looking down into your coffee, and suddenly you realize, “Oh my god, that is where that is going.” It can be quite overwhelming, in that something so small can suddenly become a plan for a book.

There are autobiographical elements to Brooklyn: Eilis is from Enniscorthy, your home town, and she, like you, emigrated from Ireland in her early twenties. Given the similarities between your own life and your protagonist’s, why did you decide to cast a woman rather than a man in that role?

I think if I had made her one of her brothers, for example, she wouldn’t have been as open. In other words, her weekends would have been much more about going out with guys, drinking, having confidence. . . Whereas guys could swagger around in groups, girls were never given a sense of entitlement to do anything and didn’t even seek entitlement. . . There can be much more going on beneath all the time, an inwardness going on all the time in her. . . I wanted to get the experience of someone who was totally sensitive to [her environment], even damaged by it, affected by it, and would always keep things to herself. It never occurred to me to make her a man.

As a novelist, you tend to craft your stories within a fairly conventional form rather than experimenting with different forms. Do you ever consider trying to write a more experimental novel?

I’ve been trying to write about them; I’ve been writing a lot recently about Donald Barthelme in the New York Times, and I’ve written a piece on Flan O’Brien, on Pesoa, Borges, and all that. In my own work, what I do is just get a tone and stick with it. The tone, as you say, is ostensibly quite traditional, but what I’m trying to work with are levels of secrecy and silence that go beneath words. So a sentence which might seem quite simple actually is concealing a lot. It’s really quite difficult to do because you really have to concentrate on not getting it wrong. But you’re absolutely right that the novels are formally conventional, and that’s done because I really couldn’t do the other type. I’d love to write a big, strange, sprawling book.

You are an openly gay writer living in Ireland, a country whose culture is known for having been less than progressive when it comes to gay rights. I’d like to ask you a question about the following passage from your nonfiction work Love in a Dark Time, and Other Explorations of Gay Lives and Literature:

Some of the greatest writers of the age [between the Victorian era and 1993, when laws against homosexuality in Ireland were rescinded] were fully alert to their own homosexuality. In their work, they sought to write in code...

You published The Story of the Night, a novel that deals openly with homosexual sex and relationships, in 1996, just three years after homosexuality was legalized. Before that book, did you ever feel like you were “writing in code”?

I suppose I did worry before The Story of the Night, and certainly because I was dealing with London editors. . . In other words, [to Londoners,] the idea that someone was still in Ireland—Ireland seemed so strange. We could talk about everything, except that, almost. . . But I have to say that although the law was changed in ’93, the attitudes changed much earlier. The law was delayed by ten or fifteen years, so that I probably should have written the book earlier. It is possible in the first novel The South, that [homosexuality] is there somewhere in that book, if you read that book a certain way.

It’s something I’ve had to be careful with. I suppose I learned to say, “I’m Irish and I’m gay, and male,” and at times those things don’t interest me. At times a character doing something else would interest me more, and I’ll want just to escape from it slightly in a book. There’s a slight lesbian scene in [Brooklyn], but since I’ve written the novel I’ve written a few very explicitly gay stories. It moves back and forth; it’s almost like playing different instruments. And I think gay people have a right to be many other things besides gay. And I think it’s a funny right, that you have to assert sometimes, such as, “I’m gay but I also really love baseball,” you know what I mean? So in other words, it comes and goes in the fiction.

When you were writing The Blackwater Lightship, which is not only about a gay character but about a gay character with AIDS, were you ever aware of the possibility that your novel might be interpreted as an attempt to push a social agenda or effect social change?

I never wanted to write that book. I was desperate not to write the book, but it kept coming to me. But it was also a book about the three women. Once the story came to me, as how it could be done, it wasn’t pushing a social agenda as much as dramatizing the social agenda. So at the end of the book, you’re as sorry for the mother as you are for anybody. I was dramatizing a social situation rather than preaching.

I read your interview in The Manchester Review, and my favorite part of that interview was when you said, “I’m against a whole grain in American writing which is male, macho, so I don’t encourage any guys to write about penises.” Can you tell me to whom you were referring?

Yeah, in Texas I found, at Austin, in the first class that everybody was doing it, and all the girls were sitting there while the guys were describing it. And I said, “If you want to write about your prostate operation, go ahead.” But one guy was going, “He was rock-hard all night”—give me a break here. Give me, you know, erectile dysfunction—that would be interesting, but this is not. Why don’t we forget about it all semester? Next semester, all you guys can get back to it, but I’m not having any more of it. I’m retiring it.

Which contemporary American writers interest you?

Jeffrey Eugenides has only written two books, but they’re both amazing. I read Toby Wolff, Richard Ford—that sort of school—Raymond Carver. But there’s also another school who, I suppose, are much more difficult: a line going from someone like Donald Barthelme to David Foster Wallace.

Every so often, there is one writer that, like a lot of writers and readers, I go back to, and that is Alice Munro. You just go across the room, and you get Alice Munro, and you just go, “Oh, oh.” Twisting the story, and the plainness of some of the writing.

I have to ask what you think of this line, from a story by Alice Munro called “Material.” In the story, the narrator describes the process by which a writer learns to transform a person from real life into a fictional character. The narrator calls this “an act of unsparing, unsentimental love.”

It’s also an act of unsparing, unsentimental treachery. I know no one who’s ever not done it. Once it occurs to you to do it, you go there. Sometimes it’s very wrong, and you know it’s wrong. In other words, you’re taking something that isn’t yours. . . Elizabeth Bishop describes it, and the term she uses for it is “infinite mischief.”

But it’s also, perhaps, an act of love in the sense that for some reason something that you know matters so much to you, even though it belongs to somebody else, that you want to write it down. It’s a very complicated business. . . My friend Fintan O’Toole said, “The biggest nightmare for a parent would be to have a novelist child.”

Download a full transcript of the interview here.