To Magee, Traveling Made Dollars, Sense : Snubbed by the NBA, Two-Time All-American From UC Irvine Now Plays Basketball in Israel

They needed a power forward in Varese, Italy, and Kevin Magee, who hadn’t planned on being available, suddenly was.

The National Basketball Assn. had rather rudely informed him that he was no better than the 39th-best player in the 1982 draft and would offer him no guarantees--contractual or otherwise. Two-time All-American or not, his future in the NBA was uncertain at best.

The Italians, meanwhile, were talking big bucks.

So it was that Magee, once the biggest thing to hit UC Irvine since the alligator shirt, packed his bags and left home to see how professional basketball was played on the other side of the Atlantic.

As it turned out, Italy was only the first of many overseas stops in a professional career that could be whistled for traveling. Magee played half of a season in Zaragosa, Spain, after being cut by the Phoenix Suns in 1983, then ventured into the Middle East when he signed a one-year contract to play for a team called Maccabi in Tel Aviv.

Magee has chosen to return to Tel Aviv in 1985, and it’s not because he just can’t get enough of that Mediterranean climate. Magee has become educated to the realities of professional sport. Money talks, and Magee listens.

“I think I could go to Russia if the money’s right,” he said with a smile.

Maccabi’s offer was more to Magee’s liking than one made by an Italian team. It’s another one-year contract, but it offers Magee the security he was seeking.

Said Dennis Harwood, Magee’s agent: “It’s in six figures. With the tax breaks and the situation with them picking up his living expenses, I’d say Kevin would be in the top half of the NBA as far as dollars go. I seriously doubt that, at this stage in Kevin’s career, somebody in the NBA would offer him the same dollars and guarantees he’s getting now.”

Magee, who will report to training camp in Tel Aviv Aug. 9, finds Israel a nice place to earn money, but he has no intention of living there any longer than necessary. He made that quite clear in a newspaper interview last year.

“They asked me about what I thought of things over there . . . my likes and dislikes,” Magee said. “I just told the truth and said what I didn’t like. The people got a little hostile about it. I just said it was different.

“You get up at night and want to get a carton of milk and you can’t get it because everything’s closed down. The food is bad. There’s nothing to do, other than go to the beach. It’s nothing like where I lived in California.

“I said when you get up in the morning to eat breakfast, you don’t want to eat onions and bell peppers. That’s what they eat for breakfast!

“I figure I do my job, I do it to the best of my ability and that’s it. I’m not coming over here to love you all. I come over here to do my job, then get the hell out of here. I told them just like that, and they didn’t like it. But as the season went on, they started loving me. They forget.”

Points and rebounds will do that to basketball fans, and Magee collected more than his share of both. He averaged 27.9 points a game, second among Israeli players, and 12.5 rebounds. He helped Maccabi reach the final four of the European Cup tournament.

“It’s (European Cup) the NBA championship over there,” Magee said.

That may be where the similarities end. NBA trips can be demanding, but at least they don’t require a passport and regular stops through customs. Magee will tell you there are better ways to see the world than by joining an overseas basketball team.

“The first two or three months, I’m playing league games,” he said. “After November, I’m moving every two weeks or so, going to different places. It really gets to be kind of a job. It gets kind of monotonous, leaving your family every two weeks. You’re going to Spain, you’re going to France, you’re going to London, Yugoslavia, Russia. Hey, it gets tiring.”

Irvine to Varese to Zaragosa to Tel Aviv. Kevin Magee hadn’t planned on becoming such an international man when he finished his career at UC Irvine. He had planned on being a first-round NBA draft choice and being paid accordingly. He had planned on staying a little closer to home--such as on the same continent.

The plans seemed to have a solid foundation. As a junior, Magee had followed Coach Bill Mulligan from Saddleback College to UC Irvine, where they combined to rescue Anteater basketball from the quiet recesses of Crawford Hall.

Magee was the country’s only player to finish among the top five in scoring, with 27.5 points a game; rebounding, with 12.5, and field-goal percentage, .671. He led Irvine, which had finished 7-20 the year before, to a 17-10 record, and was named the Pacific Coast Athletic Assn.’s player of the year.

His senior season was the best in Irvine’s history. The Anteaters were 23-7 and reached the second round of the National Invitation Tournament. Playing against teams whose defenses were designed to smother him, Magee was fourth in the nation in scoring with a 25.2-point average, fifth in field-goal percentage with .642, and seventh in rebounding with a 12.2 average.

The national media took notice. Magee was a first-team selection on the Associated Press All-American team in 1982. Ralph Sampson, Quintin Dailey, Terry Cummings and Eric (Sleepy) Floyd were the others. In 1981, Magee joined Sampson, Mark Aguirre, Danny Ainge and Isiah Thomas on the All-American team.

Those are familiar names to basketball fans. All of them, except Magee, can find their name in NBA box scores.

Magee had expected to be drafted fairly high in 1982, perhaps among the first 15 players, so it came as a surprise when the Phoenix Suns made him their second-round choice, the 39th player taken overall. Said Lou Carnesecca, St. John’s coach who was covering the draft as a television commentator for ESPN: “It’s amazing this kid goes 39th. Unbelievable. He could easily be the rookie of the year.”

His poor showing in the draft was blamed in part on his poor showing in an NBA pre-draft trial camp at Chicago in June, 1982. Magee said he had still been suffering from a hand injury that he got in the NIT, and that he had been pressing to impress the scouts.

“I didn’t really play up to my expectations, and my stock went down from there,” he said.

As a result, the Suns didn’t offer Magee a guaranteed contract, and Magee, saying he had grown tired of proving himself, opted to go to Italy, where Varese was offering a package that Harwood said “would equate to what a top 5 or 10 (NBA) draft choice would get.”

Magee had an instant impact in Italy. He led the 16-team Italian league in rebounding with 14.9 a game, and was second in scoring with a 25.9 average. But when Varese offered him a one-year contract, reportedly for $150,000 with incentive clauses, Magee turned it down in favor of another shot at the NBA.

He returned to the Suns, who still owned his rights, but was cut a week before the start of the 1983-84 season. He left for northern Spain--where he played half the season for Zaragosa--thinking the NBA held no place for him.

“I wanted to try one more time so I wouldn’t think about it 10 years from now and say, ‘I should have tried it again,’ ” he said. “I didn’t make it, but life goes on. There are a lot of players who would give their right arm to play overseas and make the kind of money I’m making.”

Magee, 26, is a full-fledged family man, which gives him all the more reason to be concerned with financial security. His wife, Melanie, gave birth to a daughter, Brandy, five months ago in Tel Aviv. The couple’s son, Jeremey, will be 3 in October.

Magee has decided that it will be best for him and his family to finish his playing career overseas, and forgo any further gambles on a NBA career.

“If I was single, I could take that chance,” he said. “But you have to sacrifice when you have a family. You have to have money coming in all the time. You can’t take that risk. I just want to concentrate on European basketball for the next four or five years, finish my career out over there, then forget about basketball.”

On NBA draft day, 1982, it almost seemed as if basketball had forgotten about Magee. To this day, that irks the man who became something of a surrogate father to Magee while he was at Saddleback and Irvine.

“I still can’t fathom that he can’t play in the NBA,” Mulligan said. “I had (Golden State Warriors’ center) Jerome Whitehead at Riverside JC. Jerome didn’t even dominate junior college basketball, and he’s in his eighth year of the NBA.

“The bad camp in Chicago really hurt Kevin. I think people thought he had a bad attitude. Of course, I think he can do no wrong. And for the last seven years, I’ve been as close to him as anyone in the world. If he had a bad attitude, I think I would have seen it.”

Magee tries not to dwell on the past. It’s enough just keeping up with the travel itinerary of the present, and trying to adapt in places worlds apart from where he grew up in Magnolia, Miss. That hasn’t always been easy.

“They wanted me to convert (to Judaism) when I first went over to Israel,” he said. “But I told them, ‘No, I’m a Baptist, and I’m gonna die a Baptist.’ ”

In the meantime, he’ll continue globe-trotting, collecting newspaper clippings written in languages he can’t begin to comprehend and earning the money he needs to provide for his family. This wasn’t the way he planned it--an All-American playing virtually everywhere but America--but there are certainly worse ways to make a living.

“I wanted to play in the NBA, but it really doesn’t matter now,” he said. “I’m happy. I’m making money, I’m doing something I like to do, my family is happy. This is the way I figure it: The money spends the same everywhere. If you make money in Israel, it spends the same in the United States. American dollars are American dollars.”