By Tony Morris

Maybe you should watch this to get some ideas…?

Today we join the MTV generation and have a You-Tube video instead of a player write up. Even so I’ll take most of the old-timers out there back to your early years in some gym somewhere playing horse against your mates…

With me it was Ton and Gelli Boys Club in the late 1970s early 1980s. A place build by miners in the 1900s for the boys of the village to give them some structured activity and keep them out of trouble. It had a room for boxing, weights, two full sized snooker tables and a place to get cheap sweets and pop.

It was built at the bottom of two coal tips (see the picture) so I used to go in there clean and come home covered from head to foot in coal dust… Shower there?? The water run green with rust and the boilers never worked… The heating never worked either, in winter we froze, in the summer we baked under the tin roof. We played in a little hall with a court about quarter the size of the nice shiny regulation sized courts we have to play on for insurance purposes today with the painted brick walls marking the out of bounds, what’s that about a 1.5m run off area? When you shot the ball from distance you had to avoid the low roof supports and under the far basket you had to be careful where you bounced the ball as the trap door to the shooting range built in the cellar meant that ball didn’t bounce back unless you gave it an especially hard push! Despite all this it was home and we loved it there.

We had intense rivalries with the clubs from other mining villages such as Llywnypia, Pontypridd YMCA, Beddau and especially Treherbert Boys Club who always seemed so luxurious with their roaring coal fire in the changing room!

Looking back it was a magical time and I feel something has been lost with the rules and regulations that make our kids today have to play on full size, pristine courts and in central venue leagues. The passion, competitiveness and pride simply don’t exist around here anymore.