I originally posted this article a few months ago in NBA Dish, but it might be of more interest now he's on our roster: Sorry, no URL, it's subscription-only now. --- John Amaechi: Amaechi sticks to his guns in fight with coach American basketball's only British player should be working out in Utah, but he is working with children in Manchester The Brian Viner interview 07 June 2003 Here's a funny thing. There is a sportsman in Manchester who was offered £18m over six years to play for one of the world's most famous teams, but the man wasn't David Beckham or even Paul Scholes and the team wasn't Real Madrid or even Internazionale. The team was the LA Lakers and the man was John Amaechi, a giant of six foot nine who grew up in Heaton Moor, went to Stockport Grammar School, and is the only Englishman playing in America's National Basketball Association. Or to be precise, not playing. Amaechi has fallen out, big-time, with the coach of his team, Utah Jazz. There has been a clash of personalities, and as one personality is an immovable object and the other an irresistible force, the situation is not likely to be resolved. The coach, Jerry Sloan, even suspended Amaechi for a game after he called him the worst thing one man can call another. Therefore, Amaechi needs to find another team in the NBA. The Lakers, however, probably won't come calling again. When they did want him, they called every day. Amaechi, a forward-centre, was then playing for Orlando Magic, and fielded phone calls from the Lakers' star players Shaquille O'Neal and Kobe Bryant. It was as if Manchester United wanted to buy Patrick Vieira and got Beckham and Scholes to telephone him, begging him to join. But Amaechi said no, and stayed with Orlando on a relatively meagre £480,000 a year. "The year Orlando took me on, nobody else was interested in me," he explains. "Orlando gave me a shot when nobody else would, and I've always believed that you repay good faith with loyalty. It's not that I don't like money, but you can't be a part-time man of principle. I can't say that I believe in these semi-ethereal higher principles and then fold when the first test comes along." We are sitting in a suite in Manchester's über-trendy Rosetti Hotel. Fortunately, it is not Amaechi's suite, as the bed would not contain him even if he lay in it diagonally. His, he says, is much bigger. You will have realised by now that as well as being a sportsman with unusually long legs and unusually strong principles, Amaechi is also a sportsman of unusual eloquence. This is partly what led to the breakdown of his relationship with Sloan, who said to him: "You know what your problem is? You hate white people, you hate Americans and you think you're smarter than everyone else." Amaechi sighs as he prepares to rebut the accusation one more time. "My mother was white, my two adopted kids are white and American, and you know what, I've never before had to use that line, 'I'm not a bigot, some of my best friends are . . . insert demographic here'. I am smart - how many basketball players at any level are doing a doctorate? - but if that's offensive to you it's hardly my problem. Unfortunately, it becomes a little intimidating to men like Jerry if you can speak in complete sentences." Since Amaechi can find the hoop with a basketball like he can find the words to convey such withering condescension, it is no wonder that he has made a name for himself. Needless to say, he tells with great verve the story of his rise to fame and fortune. He was born in November 1970 and grew up with two sisters. His mother was divorced from his Nigerian father, who played no part in his upbringing. Where his extraordinary height comes from, he is not sure. His sisters are not especially tall. But he was always huge for his age. "I had a rugby teacher at Stockport Grammar, a little, short man, who said, 'One day everyone will catch up with you'. But they never did." He laughs. His accent is much more Stockport than Salt Lake City, although there are mid-Atlantic inflections, which is not surprising; he has lived in the US since he was 18. He went because it was his dream to play in the NBA, and his mother, a doctor, volunteered all her savings to help him send him on his way to realise that dream. So he enrolled at Toledo High School in Ohio, and won a basketball scholarship from there to Vanderbilt University. A year later he transferred to Penn State, where the coach told him what he wanted to hear: "I'm not promising you'll be the best but we think you've got great potential." If anything, he has exceeded that potential, which is due, he says, to good coaching. "In terms of athletic ability, I'm in the bottom five per cent of the NBA on my good days. But I get by on technique, and knowing what I do well on the floor - positioning, how to use my body. I have to get by with what people have called slithering-type moves, squeezing the ball past the fingertips of my opponent, my execution defeating their athleticism by millimetres. I'm also a better shooter than most big men are. And I'm willing to run all the time." As a college basketball player he made the All-American team, which is the highest accolade the college game can bestow. But he was overlooked in the NBA draft, the system whereby the big teams take their pick of the finest collegiate stars. The dream was within his sights but beyond his grasp. Then, just before the 1995-96 season, Cleveland Cavaliers signed him. In football terms he had joined Charlton Athletic rather than Arsenal, but what the heck, he was in the Premier League. His first game for Cleveland was against Chicago, in a pre-season friendly. "I had my first ever shot blocked by Michael Jordan," he recalls. "It was weird. You walk on, look up, and above you there's this huge jumbo screen and your face on it, with a caption saying, 'Rookie out of Penn State'.'' Unable to settle at Cleveland, Amaechi went to Panathanaikos in Greece. You might not think of Panathanaikos as a steaming hotbed of basketball, but evidently you would be wrong. When the team failed to win the European championship that year, Amaechi and his colleagues received death threats. "In the last game of the season they were throwing bottles and coins." He got out and played in Italy, before returning to the NBA, and Orlando Magic, in 1999. "It is the aspiration of every basketball player to play in the NBA," he says. "Otherwise I would never have left my mother. I was too much of a mother's boy." Just because America is the home of the NBA, however, does not make it home. "Most people don't realise how different America is, and how much more different it's getting, especially in the current wave of neo-conservatism. It's a very foreign country. We're really not on the same page." And he and Jerry Sloan are especially not on the same page. Or even in the same book. Sloan likes his players to talk of their all-consuming passion for the game, which Amaechi declines to do. "I love basketball, I think it's an excellent job, but I question people who say they love their job as much as they love their family. And of course nobody does, they just say they do. The truth is that I'm far more professional than most basketball players. I don't go out and get hammered the night before a game, I don't philander on the road, but also I don't go in and say, 'I love this game so much I would play it for nothing'. "Anyone who thinks you should work hard because you love something is living in the kindergarten. If you do a nine-to-five job and get it done, you get home, kick your shoes off, and say. 'Thank God that's over'. It doesn't mean you haven't enjoyed it, or haven't done it well." These comments are clearly directed at Sloan. To employ the football analogy one more time, Sloan, as Amaechi describes him, sounds like a combination of Sir Alex Ferguson and Arsène Wenger, but a combination of their worst rather than best traits. Presumably, when Amaechi signed for Utah, the coach knew what he was getting? "Well, when I signed I said that I would show up on time for every practice, but that when practice was over I'd be out the door. They knew that, yet they've given me grief about it since the day I joined. I have always polarised people. They either love me or can't stand me, but at least that way you know where you stand. And despite what Jerry and Larry (Miller, the owner of Utah Jazz) say, I'm popular with my team. My team-mates understand that I've got homework to do (he is working on a doctorate in child psychology), and business stuff to do." The "business stuff" is in part a reference to the Amaechi Basketball Centre in Manchester. To this he contributed a seven-figure sum out of his own pocket but dismisses his financial involvement. "You have to understand that a lot of athletes do things with money that are convenient for them as opposed to convenient for others. There are a lot of tax write-offs out there. It's not difficult for someone who makes £10m a year to give £1m away. What's important is that while I'm in Manchester I'm there every day, and that the kids know I care." The two-year-old centre is his pride and joy. "It's 95 per cent full, we have eight full-time staff, and 2,000 kids a week coming through the door. We're training some to be referees, and even some to be administrators so they can help run the club. "I arrived on a Thursday and the next day I showed up about 11 and the place was packed. There was a full-on local competition, and on every court there was another team waiting. We run eight boys' teams and six girls' teams, and we've won four out of six national championships." Could the day ever arrive, I wonder, when basketball is as big here as it is in the States? "No, but it could be as big as it is in Europe. Unfortunately, it won't be under the current regime. The people running basketball in this country for the last 20 years have made no progress. They are a governing body, but if they were a government they would have been overthrown by now. "They're abysmal, terrible, awful. It's not enough to be well-meaning - and I'm giving them way too much credit there, because I actually think they're very self-serving - but it's not enough to be well-meaning, you have to have expertise." While in England, Amaechi's basketball expertise is being used by Sky TV, for whom he is commentating on the NBA finals. He is a good commentator, too, not least because in relation to basketball he is the embodiment of what the writer CLR James said about another sport: "What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?" "I get paid to put a ball in a hole," he tells me. "Let's keep that in perspective. I left my home to do it, left my mother when she was dying of cancer, yet I fail to find any intrinsic nobility in it. But the other day, here in Manchester, a boy came up to me and asked if I would talk to his school, which I did. If you try influencing young people from a butcher's perspective, say, then even if you have something of value to say, you probably won't wind up addressing a school assembly. That's the best thing basketball has given me."
