Their World Is Turned Upside Down : Unable to Make It in NBA, a Few Dozen U.S. Collegians Are Leading a Basketball Renaissance in Australia

In 1979, basketball player Cal Bruton got the bad news--he was cut from the Kansas City Kings’ tryout camp. It was the second time he had failed to make a National Basketball Assn. team.

So much for being a pro basketball player, he figured.

“It was pretty depressing,” he said recently. “It meant I had to go back to my real job--riding a Wichita city garbage truck.”

Two days later, however, chance No. 3 came fluttering out of the sky.

“I got a call from an agent who’d seen me at the Kings’ camp, and he wanted to know if I was interested in playing in a new pro league in Australia,” Bruton said. “I told him yes, and I’ve been here ever since.”

Today, Bruton is not only an all-star guard in Australia’s National Basketball League, but he is also the head coach of the Perth Wildcats.

Bruton, 32, and a couple of dozen other former U.S. collegiate players, are leading a basketball renaissance in Australia, a country in which the sport was barely recognized a decade ago.

Today, basketball hoops are plentiful. And cement trucks are pouring courts in city parks everywhere.

A recent sight in Cairns, on north Queensland’s coast: A boys’ soccer team, practice over, playing a skins-and-shirts basketball game on a new court at a city sports field.

Pro basketball’s impact on Australia has been nationwide, from the Indian to the Pacific oceans. Fittingly, the league’s best-of-three final playoff series last October brought together both sides of the country, Perth and Brisbane.

NBL attendance in 1987 increased 17% over a record year in 1986. When Perth’s Wildcats returned home after a victory at Brisbane in the final series, 4,000 fans met them at the airport. An estimated 26,000 fans tried to buy tickets for the next game at Perth, in a 5,000-seat arena.

League MVP Leroy Loggins remembers it this way: “When I came to Australia in 1980, we were playing in gyms with 600 seats, and rugby or Australia Rules Football teams would be having barbecues behind one of the baskets. We were choking on smoke.

“Now, we’re on TV, playing before 12,000 people and finally starting to make some decent money.”

“Decent money” means about $40,000 per year, a top salary in the NBL today. Some players in the league make no salary at all. Nearly all but the top players hold steady jobs on the side.

Australia’s 14-team NBL is a league for U.S. collegiate players whose skills are well below the NBA level, but it isn’t a wide-open market. Rules permit only two U.S. citizens per team, and there aren’t many vacancies.

Says Bruton, a 5-foot 9-inch guard who was not drafted out of Wichita State a decade ago: “The way I feel right now, I’ll spend the rest of my life here ( in Perth). I love Australia; it’s a great place to raise kids, and I get a real kick out of playing a role in the growth of basketball here.”

Says Loggins, 30, a 6-5 forward for the Brisbane Bullets, who played at West Virginia’s Fairmont State: “I love it here. My hometown is Baltimore. If I went there now, no one would know me. Here, I can’t walk down any street in Brisbane without signing autographs. I haven’t decided if I’m going to stay here forever, but it’s a tough decision for me, I’ll tell you that.”

Players, coaches, sportswriters agree--the NBL’s explosive growth has kindled a basketball revolution in Australia.

The league’s commissioner is a 6-7 American, former Stanford center Bill Palmer.

“In the last several years, the interest in our league has really exploded,” he said. “The deciding game of our recent championship playoff series was on TV and up against a big Melbourne tennis match, Pat Cash (the Wimbledon champion from Australia) vs. Boris Becker.

“Our game got a 23 (TV rating), and the tennis match got a 30. Ten years ago, we’d have been right around zero.”

Palmer presides over his young league from a modest office in a new, two-story green building in South Yarra, a trendy neighborhood of boutiques and small restaurants. It’s 20 minutes from downtown Melbourne.

Palmer, as a collegian, wasn’t close to having NBA skills.

“In college, Kareem (Abdul-Jabbar) kicked my butt for three long years,” he said, laughing. “I came to Australia in 1971, right after I left Stanford, to teach high school history. I wound up playing ball for a club team, and we started traveling to other cities. The league evolved from that.

“When I came here, people didn’t know what basketball was. You could drive all over Melbourne and not see one basketball hoop. Now, city parks all over the country have courts.”

Brian Kerle, an Australian who is the coach of the NBL’s champions, the Brisbane Bullets, called the sport’s recent growth historic.

“It’s been phenomenal--it’s the fastest growth of any sport in the history of Australia. When we travel around in the off-season and put on clinics for young players and coaches, it’s standing room only.”

Said Bruton: “I scheduled a clinic for kids last off-season and had to cut off enrollment at 200.”

Now, growing pains.

“Our two big needs right now are bigger arenas and a centralized TV setup,” Palmer said.

“Brisbane plays in a new building, the Brisbane Entertainment Centre, with 12,000 seats, and it’s by far the biggest facility in the league,” Palmer said. “One of the Melbourne teams plays in a 1,200-seat facility.”

Melbourne’s three teams may have a new venue next year. The city is building the world’s largest tennis facility, with 32,000 seats, and the NBL hopes to use it.

Kerle, the Brisbane coach, said four small gyms (1,500 seats each) are being built for basketball club teams in the Brisbane area now.

Said Bruton: “Perth used to play in an 800-seat gym. Last April, we moved into a brand-new 5,000-seat arena (the Superdrome) and filled it for 14 of our 16 home games. Now our owner, Bob Williams, is talking about building a 15,000-seat arena.”

Another growing pain comes from a chaotic TV policy.

Palmer: “We need a centralized TV contract, desperately. Teams are cutting their own TV deals, which means some do very well and some don’t do well at all. For the league to grow significantly beyond where we are now, we’ll have to have centralized control of TV.”

There is one major difference in the structure of Australian and U.S. basketball, Palmer says.

“In the States, basketball is entirely school-oriented,” he said. “Here, like in England, sports are all connected to the club system. Here, when a kid goes to school, he goes to the classroom, period. After school, he participates in club sports.”

A simmering NBL problem is one you might expect: resentment of foreigners. Franchises are allowed two U.S. citizens apiece, but U.S. players can establish residency--or even citizenship--and skirt the rule. At one time last season, one team sent out a starting lineup composed entirely of former U.S. collegiate players.

“I’d say about 30% of the players in the NBL have U.S. college backgrounds,” Palmer said. “It’s starting to be a problem with old-line Australia basketball people but certainly not with the ticket-buying public. My gosh, we’ve gone from 170,000 attendance (in 1979) to 980,000.”

Players from the United States, according to Kerle, are the players who are filling the arenas.

“The black players from the States are really the players who’ve made the league take off, the ones who turned us around,” Kerle said. “They’re very exciting players, they play with flair, and they’re immensely popular with the fans.

“And best of all, the good U.S. black players have made the Australian kids much better players. . . . They’ve forced them to be better.”

Kerle revealed another growing pain: The lack of a restriction on coaches with U.S. backgrounds.

“It doesn’t make sense to me that we can have a two-(U.S.) player limit per team, but no similar rule for coaches,” he said. “Of our 14 head coaches, only 5 are Australians. The rest are from the States.

“I don’t have anything against those guys, but I think it would be better for the future of basketball in Australia if we developed our own coaches by providing more opportunity for them.”

The NBL’s rules are an Olympic-NBA mix. Games are split into four 12-minute quarters, there is a three-point shot and a 30-second shot clock. And the regular season is only 26 games.

Loggins is the NBL’s ultimate success story--an American, cut adrift by the NBA, who became a star on the other side of the world. Drafted on the eighth round out of Fairmont State in 1980 by the Detroit Pistons, Loggins was a fast cut.

“I was contacted by an Australian guy, and since I’d toured Australia the previous year with an all-NAIA team, I was interested because I’d enjoyed Australia,” he said.

“I’m really happy here. I go home (Baltimore) to visit my family once a year, but every time I come back to Australia, it seems more like home. For one thing, the weather in Queensland is wonderful--it’s like Southern California all year round, with gorgeous beaches. I even like driving around in the countryside. Australia is a very clean country.

“A lot of young U.S. players come here and enjoy themselves. Then they get the NBA itch, to go back and try again. Emory Atkinson is on our team, he’s from UNC Charlotte. He wasn’t drafted by the NBA, but at 24 he feels like he should keep going to NBA camps, trying to make a team.

“Me, I’m 30. This is my NBA, right here.”

It’s not out of the question, Loggins said, that the NBL might one day produce an Australian player who could graduate to the NBA.

“The best Australian player in the league is Andrew Gaze,” he said. “He’s a strong forward, maybe 6-6, and really tough. Very good offensive player, a great rebounder. He’s been recruited by major U.S. universities, but I think he’s happy playing right here.”

Already, a team of mostly Australian all-stars has beaten a good U.S. college team. In 1986, an NBL all-star team toured the United States and beat, among others, Georgetown, 77-76. Villanova beat the Aussies, 94-91.

Bruton said he lasted through all of the 1976 exhibition season with the San Antonio Spurs, getting cut on the final day of the exhibition season.

“I was working on the Wichita garbage truck and trying to get my degree at night, when Australia sort of fell out of the sky on me,” he said.

“I decided to try it for one season, and got on a plane and left my wife and two little sons in Wichita. I loved it . . . especially when I averaged 33 points per game and led the league in scoring. I wound up playing for the Geelong Cats the next year, and they paid my family’s travel expenses.

“Perth is one of the greatest places in the world to live . . . the weather’s great and so are the beaches.

“I became an Australian citizen in 1982, but my wife, Patricia, kept her U.S. citizenship. We did it that way, in case anything happened to me here, she could take our three kids back to the U.S. with no hassle.

“It’s weird when we go to the States to visit--I have to go through the ‘visitors’ line, and she goes through the ‘U.S. citizens’ line.”

The NBL is no place to get rich. Here, seven-digit contracts aren’t even a rumor.

“I see the top player salaries getting to maybe $60,000 over the next couple of years,” Bruton said. “There are some fringe benefits playing down here--you get help with housing, cars, gasoline, and you can pick up extra money with public speaking and endorsements.

“Also, our season is only 26 weeks, and the games are only on weekends, so you can have a real job during the season or in the off-season.”