Name the Offaly man who has played for Ireland, Real Madrid and Panathinaikos?
TWO hours before the New York Knicks and the Phoenix Suns tip off, Pat Burke exits the visitors' locker-room and strides down the corridor leading towards the cavernous main arena at Madison Square Garden. A couple of inches shy of seven feet, his stubbled chin carries more hair than his cleanshaven head as he walks the gauntlet of fans in search of autographs. Every step is soundtracked by a bastardised version of John Denver's 'Take Me Home, Country Roads' blaring over the PA. The lyrics have been mangled to promote the hometown team but the song is still kind of appropriate. Few journeys to the most famous venue in the NBA encompass stops in Tullamore, Athens and Madrid.
There are 83 different nationalities in basketball's most prestigious league and the lone Irish-born representative took a scenic route to the biggest stage.
Burke didn't start playing the sport competitively until a high school coach spotted his latent potential at the age of 16. He made his NBA debut shortly before turning 29 and in between, spent a thrilling decade shuttling around Europe becoming one of the great pub quiz questions of all time. Name the Offaly man who played for Ireland, Real Madrid and Panathinaikos, winning a European Cup and La Liga?
"It's something I'm definitely proud of.
From where I came from to where I am now, I think I've accomplished a lot. Not only just being in the NBA now but also with what I did playing in Europe all those years. Every time I'm around Irish people, they seem to make this instant connection to me. Just last night when we landed in New York I met a gentleman from Ireland, got talking to him and when he found out that I was an Irishman in the NBA he was shocked and delighted."
The youngest of Michael and Christina Burke's six kids was born in The Coombe on 14 December 1973. The family were living in Tullamore at the time and when Pat turned four, they upped sticks and moved to Cleveland, Ohio in search of a new life. What they found were winters long and harsh enough to eventually prompt them to seek out warmer climes. Having spent most of his childhood playing ice hockey, the teenager suddenly found himself attending high school in Cape Coral, Florida.
Standing in the corridor one day, the new arrival's height attracted the attention of Marty Warner, a basketball coach who soon figured he'd stumbled upon a diamond in the rough.
"I guess he had the experience to look at me and say this guy is not where he's gonna be so we gotta take small steps.
We just can't assume he's going to be able to do everything at one time. So he really embraced the fact that I wanted to play and he saw I had a hunger to improve. Like any Irishman, when I start something I put what I have into it, 100 per cent. It helped too that the coach told all the other guys on the team that it wasn't just his job to get me ready.
"So in the summer, I'd wake up, sit there and watch TV and one of the guys would call me - I really didn't know any of them that well being the new kid - and say 'come on we're going to play here'.
I'd get in the car and go play, come back and eat lunch or something. Then in the evenings, somebody else would call and I'd go play again. A year after meeting Marty Warner, I'd improved a lot."
The neophyte ended up setting school scoring records, catching the eye of college scouts, and eventually heading off to Auburn University. While juggling four years of Division One basketball with a degree in communications, Burke's sporting passion morphed into a professional career. A summer playing with the New York Knicks developmental squad led to a contract offer.
The stuff of American boyhood dreams;
the problem was the Knicks deal was significantly less than the sum being tabled by Spanish club Tau Ceramica Baskonia.
Not to mention that the Basque outfit were also dangling guaranteed minutes on the court. He chose the road less travelled and inevitably, it made all the difference.
"I wouldn't trade the experience in Europe for the world. If I could go back and live those years again, and the two contracts were there again and somebody said: 'Here's your two roads to the NBA', I would definitely go to Europe again. It was a great experience on so many levels. I saw everything from fireworks being hurled at us on the court to boat flares being fired across the arena over our heads. I've seen a million brawls with riot police trying to hold back crowds. I've seen everything you could possibly see in a sporting arena."
A couple of seasons in Spain segued into a hugely productive spell in Greece.
With Panathinaikos, he won three consecutive Greek titles and a European Cup. After a stint with another Athenian club, Maroussi, yielded a lucrative return to Tau Ceramica, Burke ended up buying himself out of his contract after a month in order to take his chances on the NBA.
His wife Peyton had just given birth to twins so when the Orlando Magic expressed an interest, he figured the time had come to go home and see if he could cut it at the highest level of all.
Sixty-two games later, the rookie had proven that much to himself and earned his footnote in history as the first Irishborn player to grace the league.
In an accent that betrays no sign of him taking his first steps in the midlands, Burke can hold forth on Kieran Donaghy's impact on the Kerry footballers last year before moving seamlessly into discussing his encounters with David Beckham and Zinedine Zidane. Real Madrid's basketball team may have been playing in a bull-fighting arena rather than the Bernabeu during Burke's stint in the Spanish capital two seasons back but he dined with the Galacticos - "Nice guys but very quiet" - a few times.
These days, he's a bench player on a Suns team containing one of the NBA's own star turns in point guard and reigning MVP Steve Nash.
The best player ever to come from Ireland averages just six minutes a game on a thrilling team likely to contend for the title come June. Beyond the monetary rewards of an estimated $800,000 salary, Burke has also earned cult status via YouTube. In collaboration with the Suns media office, he starred in a couple of fake infomercials for a hair restoration product, and a run for US Congress.
After nearly 50,000 combined viewings of those, he now hears opposing fans around the country shout out to him when he enters matches. At 33, that's a modicum of fame for a man already thinking about how best to use his unique position to promote the game in the land of his birth.
"Basketball in Ireland is not where we all want it to be and if I could be part of something that would make it more popular, that would be great. I have talked to the people here in the NBA Without Borders division about maybe doing some camps over there in the summers. Finding another six-foot-10 guy is going to be hard, but if the sport is handled correctly from a young age, there's no question Ireland does have the athletes to become perimeter-based players and great ball handlers. With the support of the NBA, we could move around the country helping to popularise the sport, perhaps attracting new kids to it."
Maybe even kids in places like Tullamore.