The Brits and Basketball

Keith here. Back home, I’m not especially a fan of the National Basketball Association. I haven’t seen a Charlotte Bobcats game since they moved into their downtown, excuse me, uptown arena.
But an interview with New Jersey Nets and former UNC basketball star Vince Carter in The Daily Telegraph caught my eye the other day. His team was here over the weekend to play an NBA pre-season game with the Miami Heat at the 02 Arena. I think it’s the second straight fall that a couple of NBA teams have made the trip over and there’s talk of a regular season game possibly being played here in the future. I didn’t see this weekend’s game – like I said, I don’t do the NBA back in Charlotte – but I did read the story about Carter with interest.
And it reminded me, as I’ve written before, that many of the sports that take up most of the time and space in U.S. sports coverage barely rate a mention over here. While the NBA is attracting increasing international attention, Carter remarked on how he could walk the streets of London with relative anonymity. I laughed out loud at this anecdote: a local walked up to him as he sat in a restaurant wearing a Tampa Bay Buccaneers cap. “Does that (TB) stand for tuberculosis?” the old gentleman asked. (The Bucs are probably about that popular with Carolina Panthers fans right now. )
The story also reminded me of an interview I read with Paul Gascoigne about five or six years ago. If you don’t know who that is, that’s exactly the point of this entry. He was a star of the English national team and the English Premier League in the fading years of his career who at the time was thinking about playing for D.C. United of Major League Soccer, the top U.S. pro league. One of the best things about coming to America, he said, was that he could walk around, go to a nightclub or out to eat without being mobbed.
David Beckham, of course, did make that leap last year. But he’s transitioning from being a part-time soccer player to being a full-time celebrity, so it’s not exactly the same thing.
At any rate, basketball commands only a small amount of space each week in the sports section here, but I’ve found it interesting that the Atlantic Coast Conference has a rather big footprint in English hoops. Luol Deng, who played for one year at Duke before going pro with the Chicago Bulls, is the star of the English national team. The London team in the English professional league is coached by former Tar Heel player Steve Bucknall and one of his players is London-born Olu Babalola, who played at Clemson.
A true ACC fan doesn’t leave the love of the game behind even when he’s across the ocean, so I may have to take in a game before we’re done this semester. We’ll see how it goes.