Expatriate Games by Dave Fromm

I finished reading Dave Fromm’s Expatriate Games: My Season of Misadventures in Czech Semi-Pro Basketball within hours after I got it in mail. The events of author’s adventure are intertwined with his thoughts about future, reminiscences of past NBA and college games, his struggles to find a basketball team in a country whose language he can’t speak and can barely understand. All this moves quickly, sentences flow smoothly like they should in a well-written book.

So, let me be upfront – I liked this book! Granted, I could relate to it for many reasons. During the year of Dave’s adventures, I was myself in transition in Croatia, one of the pieces of Yugoslavia, true European basketball empire, only two years after Croatia took one and only Dream Team in the finals of the Barcelona Olympics, lost to them big without being utterly embarrassed. I know too what it means to  work religiously on your ball handle and turnaround shot for hours on end, chasing a dream of once making it in front of thousands of roaring fans, despite the low odds of it ever happening, despite knowing deep inside that your talent can take you only “that far”.

You could read Expatriate Games as a saga about an undersized point guard destined to become a lawyer, or as a story about a future lawyer who never outgrew his dream to be a professional basketball player. This book may be more about pains of consolidating one’s self in an alien environment than about basketball, and in that regard it is a book about so many of us. But in all its aspects it is a splendid read, not boring whether or not you have interest in the sport, and at times a funny read indeed. It may be more valuable than Maravich, Bradley, Jordan, Walton books… because these books are about super humans. Even when they struggle, you know they will come back strong and win it all in the end by hitting the final shot. With David, you never know if his TJ Sokol Kralovske Vinohrady team will even play their next game because opening of the gym may depend on the mood of the housekeeper, or the gym could have been double-booked and there’s a handball game going on. There are more variables at play than in real pro games: the bottles of rum the players shared on the bus, exams they have to prepare for school of dubious legitimacy, painful breakups with their girlfriends, or a sudden rain on the outdoors court in France during their first and only international tournament.

An inspiring book for all the high school point guards who will score most of their points while serving in the military, teaching, or practicing law. A great book for travelers who feel so helpless after changing their money in Prague to discover minutes later that the place next door offers 20% better exchange rate. An interesting book for all those who like books which can be swallowed within hours, but will linger in their mind for weeks after.

From My Notes

The whole experience starts with misunderstanding and underlines the author’s good sense of humor:

And he (Jan Wiener, a formidable septuagenarian and Holocaust survivor) said, “Don’t back out.” That kind of challenge, from that kind of man, wasn’t going to come along too often. “I won’t,” I said, and meant it. We shook hands; Jan’s grip was firm and controlled, the grip of a man at ease with himself [...] I checked the rearview mirror, hit the gas, and immediately skidded the tail end of the car up over the low snowbank at the edge of Jan’s garage and onto his small, pristine lawn. When I got out to push on the fender, I saw Jan watching from his kitchen window. He looked concerned. I gave him the thumbs-up. Mission accepted. It was months before I figured out that when Jan had said, “Don’t back out,” he had not meant “of this formative life challenge.” He had meant “of my driveway”.

In any adventure like this, you’d expect some intriguing characters, people appearing as if coming out of dreams:

…and Skee Graf, who seemed to embody the reinventive expat aesthetic better than anyone. In the brief time I’d known Skee, he’d moved in and out of sight, dating young and beautiful Czech girls, passing out old Russian passports and outdated currency, asking indecipherable questions like, “You know Ponyboy?” and, “Why do my hands always smell like chicken?” before vanishing again with such effortlessness that I sometimes wondered if he existed at all.

Dave hasn’t made the team yet, but he’s a bit philosophical about the game of basketball and differences between the game as played in the U.S. and in Europe. I have to make a point here, sorry, Dave! Czech Republic is just a tiny dot on the map of European basketball. Real European basketball countries are: Spain, Greece, Turkey, Italy, all countries coming out of former Yugoslavia (Serbia and Croatia in particular), Russia. The equivalent experience taking place in Vitoria, Spain, might have yielded completely opposite conclusions. The point being made, there is much to be agreed about in the statement below.

The scrimmage seemed to reflect fundamental differences between the skill sets – and mind-sets – of U.S. and European players in the mid-1990s. The Czechs, at least the ones on this court, seemed relatively new to basketball, entranced by the geometry of it, the arcs and angles, the form and percentages. They focused on, and thereby excelled at, certain things – the three-point shot, the rolling hook, the multiple, inside-outside passes. They tended to be weak dribblers, their upper bodies churning like train pistons when they pushed the ball downcourt. They favored the pull-up pump-fake and the slide-step and eschewed going all the way to the hole. By contrast, the U.S. game I’d left behind seemed to have gotten bored of jump-shooting and was enamored with the idea of the dunk – not the dunk itself, which remained out of reach for many players, but the idea of it, which promoted patterns and spacing, encouraged individualism and explosions of energy. U.S. players, especially those in unstructured environments, overexposed to highlight shows and All-Star games, seemed to play with the idea of the dunk in the back of their minds. From the smallest point guard to the heaviest power forward, guys seemed to play to be part of the dunk, to dunk themselves, to facilitate the dunk. To drive the paint as if they were going to dunk, even if it just turned into a layup, going to the hole and planting, both feet square and the ball cocked back. Because maybe, just that once, they might then tomahawk the ball through the hoop, and hang for a second on the bent rim, and wouldn’t that be just about the end of it?

Here’s a crash course in Czech basketball trash talk…

Ti vole, Tomas said, was the default locker-room disparagement I was likely to hear most often. It meant, roughly, “You castrated ox.” A missed shot, a bad joke, a spilled beer; you could say Ti vole for any of them. You could say it angrily or affectionately. It seemed to be an important phrase to know. Bohuzel meant “unfortunately.” Kureci prsa was “chicken breast.”

… and some more…

My Czech language teacher told me that Tobe do oci meant, roughly, “Right in front of your eyes!” It was as close as she could get to “In your face!” “Tobe do oci!” I said when I drove on Kratcha. “Tobe do oci, ti vole,” I said when I drilled a three on Tomas. “Do prdele (Go to my ass), ti vole,” I said to Poli, when I snuck up behind him and blocked his shot.

Helplessness of being all alone in a foreign country even while doing the most familiar thing.

At the next dead ball, I went with Michal. I felt tight, wound up, surprised at how foreign the foreign court felt. All around me, people were speaking words I couldn’t understand, warning of blind picks, setting defenses. For all the one-on-one stuff, basketball was indisputably about teams, not about individuals. Teams chewed individuals up. Teams funneled individuals into the lane and collapsed on them.

I’ve enjoyed European basketball for many years, basketball of chess-like strategy, with planned out offenses and complicated defensive schemes. I’ve enjoyed baskets coming out of multiple passes; the ball swirls around for a long time, but you see it coming, one guy pops out in the open and takes the shot which inevitably goes in. I would lie, though, if I wouldn’t admit that I find dunking the most mesmerizing form of artistry in the game. I agree with first two points Dave makes and I am intrigued by the third one while struggling to fully understand it.

Growing up, we would try to dunk all kinds of things, figuring out what we could hold onto and measuring our steps from the rim. We’d dunk tennis balls, crushed soda cans, softballs, cantaloupes. I dunked a slightly deflated volleyball once, but the basketball never went down for me. I thought a lot about dunking. Once, my dad and I tried to develop criteria for ranking the dunks we had seen (he never dunked either), with the ultimate goal of identifying the greatest dunk ever. It was a pointless thing to do since all other dunks would pale in comparison to three we’d never see – our own, and Earl Manigault’s circa 1965 jam over three forwards at the Rucker – but we did it anyway. There were three criteria for the greatest dunk ever; like a lot of criteria, they could have just as easily been applied to the wider world. First, the greatest dunk ever had to be in a real live meaningful game, the more meaningful the better. The dunk had to matter to be great – jams that came out of Slam-Dunk contests and All-Star games seemed erstaz and accommodating by comparison. Of course, there were exceptions: Ced Ceballos got creativity props for the blindfold dunk, and Julius’s first foul-line jam had all sorts of sociocultural implications. Second, and for similar reasons, there had to be a defender. Breakaways didn’t count. A monster dunker had a victim, a Hektor to his Achilles. The bigger or better the defender, the more likely it was that the dunk would be special. As the NBA evolved into big-money entertainment, only a few players still seemed willing to try to block dunks (Mutombo, Mourning); most everyone else seemed reluctant to wind up on a poster. As a result, it was rare that Jordan or Barkley even had a chance to really exceed expectations. Although Barkley still did on occacion. Finally, it was good if the dunk at least appeared to be an extension of the player’s personal integrity. Speculating about the personal integrity of professional athletes is ridiculously dumb, but we tried to extrapolate from what we knew of the person’s game, his home life, his childhood, so that the dunk might become a spiritual act, a representative of the player’s soul, his moral fabric. This was sometimes easier to figure out with guards.

Here comes Dejda, the semi-Czech, the ultimate supplement of the Czech semi-pro basketball league. Without her, this whole basketball adventure would be less interesting even if she rarely comes to see the games. She lives in a different tunnel of Dave’s consciousness, and she’s bound to be out of it before the end of the book…

She smiled in a way that made her seem sort of like a wild animal, the sort of animal for whom showing teeth is both a sign of aggression and of vulnerability. Her name was Dejda Chandlerova, a name that sounded like e meteorological event. Di-E-da Supernova. She said she was half-Czech, working in a bio-chemistry lab at Charles University for some unspecified length of time, living in an apartment owned by her aunt, and eating dinners with her babicka. She jad hips like the run of a luge course.

… because you just felt she wasn’t the “uncomplicated woman” from the author’s fantasy.

During that first summer after college, as I’d watched my friends move on toward futures that seemed infinitely more promising than my own, I developed this very specific fantasy of what it would look like when my life got going. In the fantasy, it was late at night, and I was up, sitting at a desk, holding my glasses in my hand like I’d just taken them off to make a point. The desk was covered with meaningful work – some virtually unsolvable problem that I could unravel only if I applied myself fully. A beautiful, uncomplicated woman slept in a nerby bed. The bedside alarm was set for 7:00 A.M. It was a detailed fantasy, and I was impressed that I’d managed to fit it in between shifts as a parking lot attendant at Tanglewood.

This reminded me of my brother, once a professional volleyball player, who said that Rade Malević, a great Croatian player from mid-eighties, had 110cm vertical leap, which was obviously great. Since then, I measured my own vertical leap on several occasions and was always disappointed with the result. I could understand Bob’s disappointment all too well.

Radek told me that he had a 65-centimeter vertical leap. I had no idea what that meant. Even if I’d been sober, the conversation would have bee tricky. Radek said Charles Barkley had a 120-centimeter vertical leap, something he seemed to expect me to know. Bob said that, because of his ankle problems, his vertical leap was only 60 centimeters. That still sounded quite high, I told him, but he frowned into his beer. Sometimes, he said, he wondered why he kept playing at all when Barkley could do such wondrous things.

Troubles begin with the half-Czech girl… but then this great injection of humor, the author himself on the receiving end of the sting.

An hour later, I was still waiting for her at the bar, and she hadn’t shown up again. I began to think about what Vitas Gerulaisis said after he finally beat John McEnroe after sixteen consecutive losses: “Nobody beats Vitas Gerulaitis seventeen times in a row.”

Most everybody knows the difference between shooters and scorers, but here’s introduction of another category with negative connotation: gunners. Yes, we’ve all played with them, people who think that every shot they miss is way more exciting than a shot somebody else makes.

Gunners had a negative connotation, in that it implied an excessive spraying of shots. Someone who shot frequently, and rashly, and with little success, was a gunner. Gunners ignored their teammates, and thus rarely lasted long in any organized context. My high school coach had a formula he’d apply to determine if someone was gunning: If your point total was equal to or greater than the number of shots you attempted, you were okay. It was a formula weighted heavily in favor of the scorer, since if you took enough threes and got fouled on enough jump shots, you didn’t have to shoot a very high percentage to remain in the black. Shooters were not necessarily gunners because they could shoot well. Often, shooters occupied the role of specialists on organized teams; other players got the rebounds, delivered the passes, set things up. Shooters, everyone knew, saved their energy, floated around, and picked their spots like snipers. Scorers – who were not necessarily as gifted at shooting as shooters – occasionally had to resort to gunning. But scorers usually had their own advantages: They were able to create their own shots, something that shooters were neither inclined nor encouraged to do. Jordan, the classic scorer, had worked hard to become a shooter, and it showed in his 1992 Finals first-half barrage against a hapless Clyde the Glide Drexler and the Blazers.

More or less, we’ll agree. This paragraph will reveal nothing new about the role and value of point guards, but for some reason I always underline these pieces of worn out wisdom. I often argue with friends whether it is more important to have a great center or a great point guard on basketball team in order to win a championship. Of course, my friends win the argument by agreeing quickly that point guard is way more important. To this day I remain unconvinced.

Point guard is the hardest position to play in basketball. Point guards start all the plays, push the ball upcourt, and settle the team down. Their roles are nuanced; they might try to score, but not too much, but also not pass too much. They need to identify how their individual teammates are playing, see who has a hot hand, who is off. They need to channel their coach, call the defenses, set everything up. And they do all this all game long. By their passes and play-calling, they can authorize a player to shoot, and when a player feels authorized to shoot, he’s more likely to shoot well. The point guard was almost always in the middle on the break, making decisions about who should get the ball, and where and when. They needed to be unselfish, but still retain their own scoring threat, lest defenders sag off.

What it takes to be en effective power forward if a bit undersized?

You had to be a freak of nature to excel as an undersized forward in the pros; Barkley was a freak of nature – they said he could stand under the basket on one foot and jump up and dunk. Karl Malone was sort of a freak of nature, but more of a self-made one, built in the weight room, not in the celestial interstices.

The greatest basketball game every played, in author’s view. Many will disagree, and we’ll never know which game was the best ever played. Google search pops up NC State versus Maryland ACC Tournament Final game in 1974, in John Feinstein’s view.

The 1992 Duke-Kentucky game was probably the best game that had been played in my life-time, the game that Laettner won on a turnaround foul-line jumper at the buzzer, taking Grant Hill’s full-court pass with two seconds left. Just moments before, down one, a Kentucky guard name Sean Woods had taken the worst last-second shot you could imagine, an off-balance, one-handed floating bank shot from straight on, over the outstretched arms of the six-foot-eleven Laettner. The commentators were clearly aghast. One of them said, “Where did he find the … courage … to take that shot?” Duke and Kentucky had been trading punches all game, the clock was winding down, Mashburn had fouled out with 28, and Kentucky had to get a shot up. Woods didn’t know quite what to do. he got into the lane, Laettner was in position (Laettner, who shouldn’t have even been in the game, having stomped on Kentucky forward Aminu Timberlake’s chest earlier in the game), and Woods left his feet, leaning in, and made it. And for the length of a time-out, that was all that mattered in the world.

This paragraph I find funny and in contradiction with everything I’ve heard about foreign players in Europe (Czech league should be no exception being one of the least demanding in Europe). All you hear is how foreign, by this meaning U.S., players can ONLY jump and do nothing else. They supposedly bring their athleticism with them and none of the game’s fundamentals valued so much in European basketball.

In The Prague Post, they ran a story about the eight non-Czech players in the Superliga under the headline FOREIGN MEN CAN’T JUMP. The article detailed the struggles that the foreigners were having adapting to the Czech teams, and quoted Tracey talking about his frustration over only being loved for the occasional dunk.

Czech basketball boring – point proven. Have to say though, and this is where I give the author a lot of credit. If he made his way to any Superliga team, he’d probably find it much easier to play and maybe even to excel. It is here in the dungeons of the “semi-pro” leagues that you have to play against the uninventive echalons of the game, having your own game subjected to their standard, your own creativity curtailed.

The Czech ballers had grown up studying diagrams and play sheets, not watching World B. Free “create his own shot” or Jordan dunk on Kelly Tripucka. They played an ordered game. I was starting to figure that out, and not surprisingly, we were playing better and more together on the court.

The breeze smelled like wet earth. Young couples made out on the steps of the John Hus statue. The day seemed made for daydreaming, as maybe most days do when you can’t speak the language well, only go to class eight hours a week and don’t have a full-time job.

Who is this gifted point guard? The only Czech player known beyond its borders is Jiří Welsch, who might have overlapped with the author when he still played for Pardubice or later for Sparta, Prague, but he played Superliga, so it is not very likely.

Horni Pocernice tore into us behind their star guard. He was gifted, his game economical. He dangled the ball out in front of him, but by the time you reached for it, he’d gone by you for a skying finger-roll or a pull-up jumper. He was the kind of guard who got offensive rebounds off foul shots by being in the right place faster than anyone else. In the first half, we were keying on him so much that he was able to thread passes through our focused defense to cutters back-dooring their men.

Yes, all the work we’ve put into our game. Without all the hours could you endure being in a foreign country chasing your dream and fulfilling it?

Just from the sound you could tell the ball was rubber and overinflated. I could hear the pauses and the footsteps when the ball hit a crack and had to be chased down in the street. Two kids appeared, between the green curtains of leaves, young, bouncing the ball irregularly between them every couple of steps, exclusively right-handed. I thought about all the ball-handling drills I’d ever tried, the figure eights, the spider dribbles, dribbling while wearing mittens, with my eyes closed, with plastic handcuffs over the mittens. About hours spent whirling the ball around – first hips, then ankles, then next, then hips again, like a satellite. About a couple of exceptionally restless nights in junior high school where I slept with my basketball, because I’d heard that Pete Maravich used to do that. About watching and watching again, in super slow-mo, Isiah’s double back-and-forth against Alvin Robertson – Alvin Robertson!-in the 1989 All-Star Game that put Alvin so far back on his heels he couldn’t even get his balance to wave at the ensuing jump shot. Or Jordan’s unusual left-right-left crossover on Bird in the 63-point game. Or Timmy Hardaway’s UTEP Two-Step on Mark Price and his hanging and-one follow. Every drill I’d tried to become a ball-handler, to learn each new crossover, each new spin. To hold onto what other people wanted.

I find the adventure of the international tournament surreal and sad… sad because it’s clear with every sentence that the adventure is coming to a close, Dejda is already gone, the dream will vanish soon, the point guard will become a lawyer.

Also, I wanted to remember the moment when I could start to think of myself as an international basketball player. So far, I’d been limited to Prague or its suburbs, but once we crossed into Germany, we became something more: national athletic representatives, mercenaries, barnstormers.

In the sarcastic rhyme of this sentence, “Daveed is the best; he is from the West” you can feel ambivalence of European’s view of Americans. Certain envy is intertwined with attitude that American ways are too simplistic, dumb in a way, for “sophisticated” Europeans, who don’t see their complex heritage as chains around their legs.

Slava, sweaty and grinning, turned around in the seat in front of me, holding another bottle of rum. He wrapped his meaty hands around my neck and whispered, “Daveed is the best; he is from the West.” The bus started to roll again. It wasn’t stopping. We were in Germany. I took the rum from Slava, swigged deeply, and closed my eyes.

Unless you are a French, of course, thus wondering how it’s possible that there are non-French humans.

Afterward, the St. Pierre players were congratulatory and hospitable, encouraging us like we were refugees. They did not seem to mind the loss much, and appeared more than consoled by the fact that they remained French, and we did not.

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• By Matt McHale, Editor of Basketbawful.com