Monroe in ARG for FIBA Americas

Do you need your basketball fix and feel afraid you'll only have the collegiate action to watch this fall?  Get your Tivo/DVR ready. It's Olympic basketball qualifying time and there are great games to be seen. (However, in the USA, you'll have to watch online on ESPN3).

The FIBA Americas and the European Championships have tipped off in Argentina and Lithuania, respectively, and berths to the 2012 Olympic basketball tournament are on the line.

Mike Monroe of the San Antonio Express-News is in Argentina for the Americas tournament, and its quite a bit further than the trip to Las Vegas back in 2007 to cover the beginning of the Olympic gold medal sojourn for Team USA 2008. He is the only reporter from the States that made the trip which shows the dedication of the San Antonio faithful for the sports of hoops.

Here is his opening report from Argentina where not an team representing the USA can be found since the Americans have already qualified for the Olympics by virtue of their 2010 World Championship victory:

SOMEWHERE BETWEEN BUENOS AIRES AND MAR DEL PLATA, Argentina — The bus taking 42 basketball fanatics to the FIBA Americas pre-Olympic basketball tournament bounces along Argentina’s Route 2 past open spaces that look a lot like South Texas, minus the scorching heat. It is late winter in the Southern hemisphere, after all, and the temperature today is a delightful 53 degrees.This is a non-scheduled bus, but the first of only two Aerolineas flights from Buenos Aires’ Jorge Newbery Airport was canceled. A plume of volcanic ash from the Puyehue volcano in Chile apparently made it too dangerous for the small aircraft that makes the short hop to Mar del Plata.
Aerolineas’ second flight isn’t until 6:50 p.m. and there are basketball games to be seen, so Ivan Rivera, wearing a J.J. Barea Dallas Mavericks jersey, springs into action. Rivera is an officer of the Asociación de Turistas Olímpicos de Puerto Rico, which he announces loudly as he descends on the kiosk of a bus company serving the airport.
After 20 minutes of negotiations, Rivera has secured the names of the passengers willing to pay a premium to have a bus to Mar del Plata added to the day’s schedule. These include one American sports reporter grateful for the chance to tag along, at what seems a very reasonable $60 — a price that seems to outrage the others.
“They want $500 extra for the driver, but when you are a fan, you are a fan,” says Rivera, who has been to international tournaments from Beijing to Athens in support of Puerto Rican athletes. “When they said there was no airplane, I knew we were going to find a bus. Nothing holds us back.”
After fares are collected, the hoops dreamers cluster around their luggage and debate the tournament that will begin its first day without them, but not end before they have taken their seats at Malvinas Argentinas Stadium. These include plenty of Argentines — from Cordoba, in the Northwest, to Patagonia, in the South.
Danilo Ventura, a 44-year-old worker at an electrical company in Cordoba, speaks perfect English, having benefited from a year as a high school exchange student in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
“I began playing when I was young, 8 or 9,” he says, “but the game I knew was different from what I discovered when I went to America. It was 1985, and Magic Johnson and Larry Bird were the best in the NBA, although there was a young player named Michael Jordan.”
Ventura never dreamed Argentines would someday be stars in the NBA, but everything changed for Argentine basketball fans once Manu Ginobili joined the Spurs. Now Ventura is but one of the basketball-loving Argentines happy to assist in chartering the bus to see the team that is a national treasure.
“I bought my tickets the day they opened the sales on the Internet in July,” he says.
He chats at length with Cristian Kuhot, a Patagonian who calls Puyehue “el traitor volcano.” They agree making the tipoff justifies extreme hardship.
Five thousand miles from Route 2, David Stern and his NBA lieutenants will sit today across a table from Billy Hunter, Derek Fisher and other representatives of the NBA players’ union and scowl as the NBA lockout approaches its third month.
Ventura doesn’t understand how owners who offered big contracts they now contend have ruined their business can expect the players to save them from themselves.
But nobody at the FIBA Americas pre-Olympic tournament cares much about the gloomy doings in New York.
This tournament is about the love of the game, and it is about national pride, as is the Eurobasket tournament in Lithuania, where Tony Parker will begin play in a few days.
There are business issues that must be resolved in New York. But when you see the passion with which Ginobili and his teammates represent the host country, you wonder how anyone can be as committed to taking meaningful basketball away from the basketball-loving world as some of the league’s owners now seem.

American Way Tells the Story of the NBA Going Glo-BALL...

The NBA - Global Game Story is told by American Way. Check out the in-depth coverage and a tremendous feature on David Stern by Mike Monroe:

Growing up outside Paris, Tony Parker didn’t have to look far to find a basketball hero. His father, Tony Parker Sr., who had been a Loyola University Chicago standout before playing professionally in France, imparted his knowledge of the game to him as soon as he was able to walk.

“I was two,” says Parker Jr., the star guard of four-time National Basketball Association champions the San Antonio Spurs. “My dad played basketball, so I was following him everywhere, trying to do the same moves and everything.”

While his playmates were dribbling soccer balls with their feet, Parker dribbled a basketball with his hands. Also vital to young Parker’s development as a basketball phenomenon were summers spent in Chicago at the home of his father’s parents. There, Parker learned that to be cool on the playground, you had to wear a red-and-black number-23 Michael Jordan jersey.

In his grandparents’ living room, the nine-year-old watched Jordan lead the Chicago Bulls to the 1991 championship and declared: “I’m going to play in the NBA someday.”

Dad may have been his mentor, but the French youngster wanted to be like Mike.

So, too, did young boys in cities like Würzburg, Germany; Sant’Angelo, Italy; Bahía Blanca, Argentina; São Paulo, Brazil; Barcelona, Spain; Belgrade, the former Yugoslavia; and Istanbul, Turkey.

Now, Parker, a two-time NBA All-Star and the most valuable player of the 2007 NBA Finals, is but one of 75 active NBA players born outside the United States. He is a member of the most successful professional sports franchise of the past decade, a Spurs team that has built success largely by looking beyond America’s borders.

When the Spurs swept the Cleveland Cavaliers in the 2007 Finals, four of their five starters were foreigners: Parker (France), two-time NBA MVP Tim Duncan (St. Croix), guard Manu Ginobili (Argentina), and center Fabricio Oberto (Argentina).

Last summer, when the gold, silver, and bronze medals were handed out after the Olympic basketball tournament in Beijing, China, to the members of the teams representing the United States, Spain, and Argentina, 24 of the 36 medals went to NBA players, past and present.

Standing with hand over heart as the U.S. national anthem played and the flags of the three medal-winning nations were raised in the Olympic basketball arena, NBA commissioner David Stern felt his heart swell with pride -- equal parts patriotism and self-realization.

The globalization of the NBA, long a goal Stern had envisioned, seemed an unquestioned fact.

FOR DECADES, Stern has understood the global appeal of basketball in general and of the NBA in particular. He recalls listening to stories the legendary Boston Celtics coach Red Auerbach told in the 1970s about taking his teams to the former Czechoslovakia, the former Yugoslavia, and Israel for summertime exhibitions in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

During a trip Stern made to Japan to supervise some quasi-official basketball exhibitions by NBA players in the early 1980s, when he was deputy commissioner, he began to envision a day when there would be a significant NBA presence in countries outside North America.

“I just was always surprised at how knowledgeable people were and how well received our sport was,” he says. “And each time I had occasion to interface with something international, it was confirming of the fact that this sport, long before I became involved with it, had an enormous international following, warmth, and potential.”

The potential just needed nurturing, and Stern became its godfather.

Terry Lyons, a 26-year NBA employee who served as the league’s vice president for international media relations, recalls a time in the early 1980s when a young TV executive in Italy made weekly trips to NBA headquarters in New York to gather videotape of NBA games. He’d then show them to Italian basketball fans who were anxious to see Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, and other NBA stars in action.

“Andrea Bassani happened to be the son of a TWA pilot,” Lyons says. “His very early role in the NBA’s TV agreement with Italian TV was to use his flight privileges to fly back and forth to get videotapes of NBA games. At that time, these were CBS tapes, because they had the international rights. But David, in one of his smartest moves, resecured those rights back to the league office. Thus was born a very important piece of the globalization of the game, which was TV exposure internationally.”

When Bassani would return to Italy, Dan Peterson, the U.S.-born coach of the successful Tracer Milan team in the Italian League, would then provide Italian language voiceovers for airing on Italian TV.

“Without question,” Lyons says, “international TV was the first important bridge to building the viable businesses and everything the NBA does around the world. A lot of people think it was about selling T-shirts and hats, but the proof is in the player development, which grew from those European players being able to see the game played at the highest level.”

Today, NBA television programming reaches 215 countries and territories, and games are broadcast in 45 languages.

And Stern has watched the rosters of his league’s teams swell with players born outside the United States. In the 1983- 1984 season, there were eight international players on the NBA’s 23 rosters; by the 2006-2007 season, there were 83, from 37 different countries and territories.

The greatest increase, season to season, occurred after Parker joined the Spurs in 2001 and became a starter for them, one of the league’s best teams, as a precocious 19-year-old rookie. The very next season, the number of international players increased from 52 to 68.

Parker is one of nine French players now active in the NBA. That France, a country so crazed about soccer, could suddenly produce more NBA players than any other nation but the United States is no accident.

“What happened is easy to explain,” says Olivier Pheulpin, U.S. correspondent for L’Equipe, France’s leading sports periodical. “After the Dream Team in 1992, many of our best athletes began playing basketball instead of soccer. Simple as that.”

Indeed, the phenomenon that was the 1992 U.S. Olympic basketball team, the first to include American NBA players, had a dramatic effect on the worldwide popularity of both basketball and the NBA.

Led by Jordan, Johnson, Bird, Karl Malone, Charles Barkley, David Robinson, and John Stockton, the American team stormed through the Olympic tournament in Barcelona, Spain, enjoying international celebrity status.

Most believe that USA Basketball, the U.S. representative to the international basketball governing body, Fédération Internationale de Basketball (FIBA), had petitioned to allow NBA players on the U.S. Olympic roster after the Soviet Union defeated an all-amateur U.S. team in the gold-medal game at the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, South Korea.

The truth is that Boris Stankovic, secretary-general of FIBA, had lobbied for many years for the inclusion of NBA players on the rosters of all teams in international competitions.

“I see the ’92 Olympics as the bookend to the 2008 Olympics,” Stern says. “On the one hand, it was like Team USA was a circus. We had the Tournament of the Americas (in Portland, Oregon), and play stops so the Brazilian players [can] get their pictures taken with the Americans. It was very funny.

“I remember everyone saying, ‘It’s ridiculous. … Why would the United States do this? … They’re going to humiliate the world.’ But I said two things at the time. One: ‘We’re actually honoring the world.’ Boris had said to us, ‘The only way we’re going to get better is to play against the best.’ And I said that we understood that.

“Number two: ‘You know what? The world is going to get better faster than you think, because this is an easy sport to learn, and we’re being followed very carefully.’ “

Stern was right. The Dream Team won its eight games in Barcelona by an average of 43.8 points, but even teams that were blown out appeared to regard it as an honor to have been humiliated.

In relatively short order, great athletes who had never considered any sport but soccer began playing Dr. Naismith’s game. The world began to catch up to Team USA.

“We were derided for some period of time,” Stern says, “until, for consecutive times, we lost badly in the [2002] World Championships and badly in the [2004] Olympics.

“So, we were right, and all of a sudden, there was a beatification of that Dream Team. They deserve to be lifted on our shoulders, because they did a great job. They competed. They represented. They were very good. That was important, because that helped us get to the point where we could begin distributing our games internationally. We’re now in 215 countries and 45 languages.

“That was a key liftoff point for that, and in some ways, probably more profoundly, a key liftoff point for millions of potentially elite basketball players around the world deciding to bounce the ball rather than kick it -- which is something I often say, and which I think is true.”

IN 1994, AT ROUGHLY six o’clock on a steamy June evening in Shanghai, China, the world began to change for a skinny Shanghai youngster who, at age 13, already had sprouted to seven feet in height.

Surrounded by friends with whom he shared a passion for basketball, a teenage Yao Ming watched his first live telecast of an NBA game.

There, before his eyes, on a TV set in a small apartment, New York Knicks center Patrick Ewing and Houston Rockets center Hakeem Olajuwon matched up in a memorable battle of big men in the 1994 NBA Finals.

“We were excited,” Yao recalls. “We hear about the NBA, but at that time, NBA hadn’t come to China yet. We would only get to see games that were played three months ago, something like that.

“Then, with the game played live, we watched a lot more of the mascots and just the show.”