Boyer Finds a Game South of the Border : Basketball: Former UC Irvine center is a star of Mexican league team in Tijuana. He hopes it might lead to steady work in CBA, NBA or Europe.
The run-down 3,000-seat Municipal Auditorium on the south side of town normally is used for boxing or volleyball. But on this night, for the second time in 17 years, professional basketball is being played here.
The Tijuana Dragones-Pioneros of Delicias contest was scheduled to start at 7:45, but the youth game that preceded it ran long, so the referee didn’t toss up the ball until nearly 8:15.
The late-arriving, laid-back crowd is distracted by a Dragones’ mascot, who dances to Madonna songs during timeouts and plays with children during the game. Adults are occupied by dozens of Tecate beer salesmen, who seemingly are never more than 10 feet from their prospective customers.
On the court, the undermanned visitors from Delicias, dressed in tan cotton shorts with pockets and red nylon practice jerseys, are being blown out by the Dragones, who are wearing fashionable mesh uniforms with a Dragon emblem on their chests.
The Dragones are being led by 6-foot-3 sharp-shooting guard Steve Wise, who played his college basketball for the Colorado Buffaloes. They are anchored by 6-10 center DeForrest (Dee) Boyer, the tallest and easily the heaviest player on the court.
Boyer, who played high school ball some 60 miles up the road in Oceanside, isn’t much of a factor on offense. Occasionally, he doesn’t bother making the trip across half court. When he does, Boyer often acts as a screener or a passer for Wise, who scored 54 points in the Dragones’ 146-113 victory. But on the defensive end, Boyer is a factor--plugging the lane, blocking shots and grabbing most of his team’s rebounds.
Two months removed from his final college basketball game at UC Irvine and not yet removed from his studies, Boyer is making the transition to professional basketball. It’s not the NBA or even the CBA. It’s the CBP or Conference of Basketball Professionals.
But Boyer is not complaining. He’s being paid a guaranteed salary of $30,000 for the 68-game, five-month season, which includes 12 exhibitions. He also gets free rent at an apartment in Tijuana and he can make bonus money, depending on the team’s regular-season and playoff finish. The team also travels to all of its games by plane.
“You have to pay your dues, and I see this as paying my dues,” Boyer said. “I was out of shape. I needed something to keep me in the sport. This popped up so easily, I had to go with it.
“If something else comes up, I’ll probably take it if the pay is better. But I don’t know if the CBA is paying as well. From what I heard, it’s $500 a week there, compared to $1,000 here.”
Boyer learned about the CBP a month ago through Dragones’ forward Darin Aguilar, who played at Southern California College and has known Boyer since high high school.
“Darin asked me what I was doing as far as basketball. I said, ‘Well, nothin,’ ” Boyer said. “He said, ‘This team I’m playing on down here needs a center. They want you to come down.’ ”
After a three-day tryout, Boyer was offered a contract by Dragones’ General Manager Marco Ortiz. Before he signed, Ray Johnson, Boyer’s agent and former high school coach at El Camino, did some checking on the CBP.
“The pay surprised me a lot,” Johnson said. “It made me question the validity of it. But the contract was standard and it seemed OK.”
Boyer said his mother had many more reservations than Johnson about her son playing basketball in Mexico.
“At first, my mom was (upset) at me for coming down here,” he said. “She was like, ‘Is that what you want? You have high goals.’ I told her that this is going to start me off. I have talent, but I don’t think I can go into the NBA right now. I still want to work on my game a little more.”
Each of the CBP’s 16 franchises can have four U.S. players, two of whom must be Mexican-American. The Dragones’ U.S. players are Boyer, Wise, Aguilar and Ray Rodriguez. Tijuana had a team in the other Mexican professional league, CIEMBA, but it folded 17 years ago.
Now, Boyer and Wise are being counted on as saviors for the new franchise.
“Americans are 100% responsible for the success and failure of the league,” Ortiz said.
So far, the Dragones appear to be successful. They have averaged about 2,000 fans for their first three games and, thanks mostly to the play of Boyer and Wise, they are 2-1.
Boyer was averaging 20 points, 16 rebounds and 6 1/2 blocks after three games, but then he is not exactly going against Patrick Ewing. On this night, Boyer was matched up against Timo Brise, a 6-7 muscular player from Virginia Union with limited skills.
“The best player on every other team is American, so you’re going one-on-one every night against basically Americans,” Boyer said.
Rodriquez, who is playing for his third CBP team in five years, says the level of play is comparable to Division I college basketball.
“We have a lot of players who come here from Europe,” said Rodriguez, who played college ball at New Mexico Highlands, an NAIA school. “They played Division I and some of the Mexican-Americans played Division I. The style of play is pretty rough.”
But this night, Boyer was one of the few players who contested jump shots and the play underneath the basket was anything but rough.
Still, UCI Irvine Coach Rod Baker believes Boyer can gain from his experience in Mexico.
“I’m thinking if he goes down there and has a good season and gets himself in shape, and someone from Europe sees him, he could be playing year round,” Baker said. “Everybody in Europe needs size, and this just dropped out of the sky for him. For an unproven commodity like Dee . . . a lot of guys don’t even get this far.”
Johnson, who says he has secured Boyer a tryout with the New Jersey Nets in the fall, also thinks the CBP could be beneficial to Boyer’s career.
“It’s an outstanding opportunity,” Johnson said. “But if he doesn’t get himself in shape, he could get himself hurt. It could be the beginning of a career, and also the end of a career if he doesn’t take advantage of it.”
Although he’s nearly 300 pounds, Boyer said he is slowly working himself into shape.
“When I came in, I was real bad,” he said. “My wind’s good, I had twisted my ankle (in the fourth quarter of first game) so I just didn’t want to go real hard.”
Boyer played about 43 of 48 minutes last Thursday before leaving to scattered applause with two minutes remaining in the game and his team ahead, 137-109.
“If I thought I was going to get hurt out there, I’d have taken myself out,” he said. “I know if I was paying someone this much money, I’d want them to play the whole game and contribute a whole lot.”
In addition to learning about professional basketball, Boyer is also attempting to learn another language and culture.
“It’s a shock at first,” he said. “The language barrier is great. You can understand some words, but other times, I’m looking to Ray (Rodriguez), asking him to translate. My roommate (Aguilar) and I are going to make flash cards for each other so we can learn Spanish. As a kid, I always wanted to learn Spanish. I was too lazy to take a Spanish class.”
Boyer is still taking a class at UCI. Between games, he commutes from Tijuana to Irvine. After this quarter, Boyer will be 20 units short of earning a degree in criminal law.
“That’s as big of an accomplishment as Dee being a professional basketball player,” Baker said. “Dee and I had a deal that he got his degree. Coming in here from a junior college, it looked like that would be hard for him to do. But I’m as proud of him as I could be.”
Johnson said Boyer already has surpassed most people’s expectations for him.
“People doubted where his heart was, academically and on the court,” Johnson said. “He’s proved a lot of people wrong already. He wants to take that up another level.”
Said Baker: “I think he wants to better himself, prove something to his mother, and I think he has the need to be something other than just big.”
Judging by the group of young fans who greeted him after the game with applause and swarmed him asking for autographs, Boyer already is something to the children of Tijuana.
While walking out of the arena to catch his ride, someone told Boyer that he could become a star in Tijuana.
“It wouldn’t bother me any,” Boyer smiled.
Said Baker: “Who knows? Dee could make a career for himself down there. Worse things could happen to a guy.”