New World Order

No one calls them “foreigners” anymore. These days, they call them Mr. Foreigner, as in “Buenos dias, Senor Gasol” and “Guten tag, Herr Nowitzki.”

Or in their new language, NBA-speak, “Yo, Dirk, ‘sup?” (Hello, Dirk, how are you?)

Not that it takes the new guys long to catch up in this day of the Euro-dude, when hoopers keep disembarking at the international terminal and unseating the locals in such burgs as Memphis, home of the precocious Spanish 7-footer, Pau Gasol ... or San Antonio, home of the phenomenal 19-year-old French point guard, Tony Parker ... or Dallas, where the Mavericks have their own UN with a German (Dirk Nowitzki), a Canadian (Steve Nash), a Chinese (Wang Zhi Zhi), a Mexican (Eduardo Najera) and a Frenchman (Tariq Abdul-Wahad).

Now, they’re streaming in from Asia too. China has sent two big centers, Dallas’ Wang, a 7-footer, and Denver’s 6-11, 290-pound Menk Bateer, with the biggest, 7-5, 296-pound Yao Ming, slated to go at the top of this spring’s draft.

The impact has been felt everywhere, as in this new hotbed of Balkan and Eastern Mediterranean culture, Sacramento, where the Kings have two Serbs and a Turk in the rotation.

Once Americans considered foreign players geeks, sat them on benches, targeted them (“Whenever one got in, it became a one-on-one fest,” says Dallas assistant coach Donnie Nelson) and, when the players went home, said they were soft and didn’t have it.

Now, the foreign players arrive playing, and doing everything else, like Americans.

Take the Kings’ Predrag “Peja” Stojakovic, 25 and already an All-Star, a well-known man about Sacramento who goes out to warm up before games wearing his diamond earring.

Then there’s their hip-hop Turk, 23-year-old Hidayet “Hedo” Turkoglu, who likes rap, has blond highlights in his hair and, while undergoing surgery on his majestic nose last summer, had them trim it down, Western style.

This has been an education for the Kings’ elder Serb, 34-year-old Vlade Divac, one of the movement’s godfathers, who arrived in a different era, knowing no English, much less rap lyrics.

“People in the NBA, as far as Europeans or international players, they respect them now,” Divac says. “I didn’t have any respect from anybody. I had to earn my way.”

Divac had to learn the game all over. Now, NBA executives, beating the back roads of countries they hadn’t heard of three years earlier, consider the European leagues higher level than the NCAA, which is why the Euro-dudes adjust so quickly.

“The biggest reason is, they’ve been playing pro ball,” says Indiana President Donnie Walsh. “Peja Stojakovic was playing pro since he was 14. I worked out Stojakovic and he was a great player when he was 18.

“You have to understand, these kids are playing at the level that’s next to the NBA. It’s a lot better than college. I don’t mean just a little, it’s a lot better than college.”

Divac’s generation, which included the high-strung Drazen Petrovic, the gifted and massive Arvydas Sabonis, and the hard-nosed Sarunas Marciulionis, is now fondly remembered as the first wave.

Nelson, one of the first overseas scouts, who got Marciulionis out of the crumbling Soviet empire in 1989, and, 10 years later, convinced his father, Don, to bet the Mavericks’ house on Nowitzki, calls the ‘80s and early ‘90s “the Jackie Robinson years.”

Foreign players were less like stars then, more like greenhorns, getting their names changed by immigration officers on Ellis Island, bull’s-eye-wearing strangers in a strange land, calling one another long distance daily out of frustration and loneliness.

Now, there’s not enough skepticism left to fill a thimble.

Gasol was recently named rookie of the year, joined by Parker and Utah’s Russian forward, Andrei Kirilenko, on the all-rookie first team. Yao may be joined in the lottery by Nickoloz Tskitishvili, a 19-year-old 7-foot Georgian who’s supposed to be the next Gasol, and Nene Hilario, a 6-10 Brazilian.

In basketball, the world is round now. If you’re tall enough and good enough, it doesn’t matter if you’re in Paris, Lagos or Beijing, the NBA is watching you.

Give Us Your Tired,Poor and Especially Tall

In 1983, a Soviet Union team, gearing up for the ’84 Olympics, toured the U.S., going 7-1 against colleges, losing only to Ralph Sampson’s Virginia team, opening eyes with a front line of three 7-footers, one the 18-year-old Sabonis.

Because the Soviets wound up boycotting the ’84 Games, that was the last we saw of Sabonis, until he re-emerged in Seoul in 1988, having torn his Achilles’ tendon twice, without his old mobility but with enough left to lead the Soviets to their upset of the last college team the Americans sent.

Sabonis was called a foreign Bill Walton, and Marciulionis, an All-American-caliber player.

Four years later at Barcelona, the original Dream Team represented the U.S., with its walking pantheon of Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, hyping the already burgeoning growth of the game in Europe.

And the hunt was on.

In 1985, Phoenix drafted Georgu Glouchkov, a Bulgarian power forward, in the seventh round. He impressed the Suns with his appetite for fast food and was soon back home.

In ‘86, Portland drafted Sabonis in the first round, although it would be nine more years before the Trail Blazers would get him.

Having noticed the treasure trove of European big men, 17 NBA teams sent scouts to the 1988 European pre-Olympic tournament in Rotterdam, compared to the zero who’d gone to the event in Paris in 1984.

The supposed big noise was Stojko Vrankovic, a 7-2 Yugoslav, who’d signed with the Boston Celtics and gone nowhere. But the new kid on the block was the Yugos’ young center, Divac, who would be a No. 1 pick the following spring.

In 1989, as part of perestroika, the Soviets dropped the bar on letting their athletes play in the U.S. Donnie Nelson, working for his father with the Golden State Warriors, flew to Moscow to sign Marciulionis. No one was sure if it was real or propaganda, but at a news conference arranged by the sympathetic chess master, Garry Kasparov, Marciulionis and hockey star Viacheslav Fetisov announced they’d go.

“The audience was the new free press,” Nelson says. “Kasparov made this little speech, ‘We’re taking Gorbachev at his word.’ Then for three minutes, there was dead silence. It seemed like three days.

“There were three guys sitting in the front row in military garb. The first guy stands up, I hear the translation through my earpiece. He says, ‘What are you guys doing? You’ll be locked up!’

“The second guy stands up, says the same thing, ‘You’re selfish athletes, you’re not true Communists.’

“I’m starting to sweat. I was wondering if we were going to be carted away.... Now the thing is over and we’re walking out. But the athletes are lagging behind. They’re afraid to go out on the street. They’re afraid they might be made an example of.

“Before we started, [Kasparov] said, ‘By the end of the day, you’ll either be the wealthiest people in Russia or you’ll be on your way to Siberia.’”

Compared to that, what terrors did the NBA hold in store?

Marciulionis played seven seasons and was once runner-up for sixth man of the year. Sabonis was one of the better centers, even old, hulking and immobile as he was. Divac became an All-Star in his 12th season and is now in his 13th.

Then there was Petrovic, the most emotional and driven of the first wave.

“I think Drazen carried the biggest cross of anybody, of all the guys who came over in the first wave,” Nelson says. “Talk about hunger; talk about wanting to prove their worth.

“He started in Portland and there wasn’t a fit. They had Clyde [Drexler], Terry [Porter], Danny [Ainge]. Then he got traded to New Jersey and whenever you’re traded, you’ve got to start from scratch.

“Those were very emotional years for all the guys. You’ve got the responsibility for an entire continent on your back....

“There was some hazing. Everybody has his own story. They do the same thing to rookies, but now you’ve got a guy who talks funny, dresses funny.... The thing we tried to do in Golden State was create an environment where the guys would be accepted, but it wasn’t like that everywhere. There were certain guys who were left in the gym with no ride. There was a lot of that.”

Divac, who was close to Petrovic, says they talked by phone “all the time, trying to give each other support. He was in this situation--I had people trying to help me. He had people on his team, it was not that they didn’t help him, but they didn’t care.”

Traded to the Nets in his second season, Petrovic became a starter in his third, averaging 20 points, then 22 the following season when he was named to the All-NBA third team.

He died that summer in an auto crash in Germany at 28. His jersey hangs in the Nets’ arena now, alongside those of Julius Erving and Buck Williams.

In Real Life, Vlade Has Problam-uhs

In the spring of 1989, Divac, then 21, sat in the stands at the NBA draft, having just arrived in this country, next to a woman who translated for him, because his English vocabulary, he says, consisted of “two words, hi and bye.”

He had been told he might go as high as No. 11 to Golden State and probably before No. 20, but they were down to small forwards and big guards and still no one wanted him.

No. 19, Philadelphia, took Louisville forward Kenny Payne.

No. 20, Chicago, which had already selected Stacey King and B.J. Armstrong, took Georgia Southern forward Jeff Sanders.

No. 21, Utah, took Blue Edwards of East Carolina.

No. 22, Portland, took Byron Irvin of Missouri.

No. 23, Atlanta, took Roy Marble of Iowa.

No. 24, Phoenix, took Anthony Cook of Arizona.

No. 25, Cleveland, took Seton Hall guard Johnny Morton.

The tallest of them, Cook, was 6-8. Edwards, the longest-surviving, would be out of the game by 1999.

Meanwhile, Divac was wondering, in Serbo-Croatian, what he was doing here.

“They told me I was going between 10 and 20,” he says. “Then when I didn’t, I said, ‘I’m going back home.’

“Then they say Los Angeles Lakers [who took him at No. 26] and it all flashed back to me, ‘I’m going to be in the same dressing room with Magic [Johnson] A.C. [Green], James [Worthy]. Wow!’”

He was a local darling, with his tremendous gift for passing and ballhandling. He got parts in TV serials and commercials (remember Green asking him, “Problam-uh Vlade?”).

But this was the last of the hard-driving Pat Riley years and, despite their reputation as a finesse team, the Lakers were hard-driving and hard-nosed, new concepts for the easygoing Divac, reared in the gentle zone-defense world of Europe.

So, they all took their shots at bringing up Vlade.

As maximum leader, Johnson took direct charge of the new project, as one night in Divac’s second season, when he made a mistake, and Magic, on the floor, called him over, snarling, “C’mere!”

Then there was the time Byron Scott, asked about Vlade, replied, “Sometimes he comes to play and sometimes he doesn’t.”

Well, at least they cared.

“Of course,” Divac says. “Was everybody, from Pat, from Magic, from Jerry West. But I said, it’s to help me. I looked at them as people trying to help me....

“It was Magic’s way when somebody made mistake. It could have been anyone named Vlade or Byron or James or A.C. I never took it personal.”

He reached his Laker peak--16 points and 10.4 rebounds--in his sixth season but after his seventh was traded to Charlotte as the Lakers unloaded salary for Shaquille O’Neal. In return the Lakers got the Hornets’ No. 13 pick, Kobe Bryant.

In 1998, Divac returned to the West Coast, signing a $62-million deal with the Kings, who simply were looking for a 7-footer, as opposed to working on any Serbian strategy.

Stojakovic, drafted in 1996, had arrived the season before, but Divac naturally became his mentor. Two years later, the Kings drafted Turkoglu, another prodigy, and now they were like their own little ethnic neighborhood.

Not that it’s always easy being a rich emigre. A lot has happened in the old Yugoslavia in recent years, most of it tragic.

During the breakup of the country, Croatian friends--notably Petrovic and Vrankovic--stopped talking to Divac, a Serb. Petrovic died before they ever had a chance to make up.

While the Kings played the Utah Jazz in a first-round series in 1999, NATO planes were bombing Serbia. The birth parents of Divac’s adopted child were killed by snipers.

“I love basketball,” he told Sports Illustrated’s Rick Reilly that spring, “but it’s just entertainment, just business.”

Compared to that, what problems does the NBA pose?

There’s peace back home now, as Divac knows, going back and forth frequently, as he did over the All-Star break when the Kings were in Washington and he hitched a ride on the Yugoslav version of Air Force One, with President Vojislav Kostunica.

Said Stojakovic, when Divac missed the first practice back in Sacramento, “Yeah, he couldn’t find another president to bring him back so he had to ride commercial.”

You could ask Vlade Divac, it has been quite a ride, indeed.

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*--* Foreign Legion A selection of some of the 50 foreign-born NBA players from 20 countries: CANADA Steve Nash, Dallas; Rick Fox, Lakers CHINA Wang Zhi Zhi, Dallas CONGO Dikembe Mutombo, Philadelphia FRANCE Tony Parker, San Antonio GERMANY Dirk Nowitzki, Dallas NIGERIA Hakeem Olajuwon, Toronto; Michael Olowokandi, Clippers SPAIN Pau Gasol, Memphis VIRGIN ISLANDS Tim Duncan, San Antonio YUGOSLAVIA Vlade Divac, Sacramento; Peja Stojakovic, Sacramento

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