"I was two," says Parker Jr., the star guard of four-time National Basketball Association champions the San Antonio Spurs. "My dad played basketball, so I was following him everywhere, trying to do the same moves and everything."
While his playmates were dribbling soccer balls with their feet, Parker dribbled a basketball with his hands. Also vital to young Parker’s development as a basketball phenomenon were summers spent in Chicago at the home of his father’s parents. There, Parker learned that to be cool on the playground, you had to wear a red-and-black number-23 Michael Jordan jersey.
In his grandparents’ living room, the nine-year-old watched Jordan lead the Chicago Bulls to the 1991 championship and declared: "I’m going to play in the NBA someday."
Dad may have been his mentor, but the French youngster wanted to be like Mike.
So, too, did young boys in cities like Würzburg, Germany; Sant’Angelo, Italy; BahÃa Blanca, Argentina; São Paulo, Brazil; Barcelona, Spain; Belgrade, the former Yugoslavia; and Istanbul, Turkey.
Now, Parker, a two-time NBA All-Star and the most valuable player of the 2007 NBA Finals, is but one of 75 active NBA players born outside the United States. He is a member of the most successful professional sports franchise of the past decade, a Spurs team that has built success largely by looking beyond America’s borders.
When the Spurs swept the Cleveland Cavaliers in the 2007 Finals, four of their five starters were foreigners: Parker (France), two-time NBA MVP Tim Duncan (St. Croix), guard Manu Ginobili (Argentina), and center Fabricio Oberto (Argentina).
Last summer, when the gold, silver, and bronze medals were handed out after the Olympic basketball tournament in Beijing, China, to the members of the teams representing the United States, Spain, and Argentina, 24 of the 36 medals went to NBA players, past and present.
Standing with hand over heart as the U.S. national anthem played and the flags of the three medal-winning nations were raised in the Olympic basketball arena, NBA commissioner David Stern felt his heart swell with pride -- equal parts patriotism and self-realization.
The globalization of the NBA, long a goal Stern had envisioned, seemed an unquestioned fact.
FOR DECADES, Stern has understood the global appeal of basketball in general and of the NBA in particular. He recalls listening to stories the legendary Boston Celtics coach Red Auerbach told in the 1970s about taking his teams to the former Czechoslovakia, the former Yugoslavia, and Israel for summertime exhibitions in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
During a trip Stern made to Japan to supervise some quasi-official basketball exhibitions by NBA players in the early 1980s, when he was deputy commissioner, he began to envision a day when there would be a significant NBA presence in countries outside North America.
"I just was always surprised at how knowledgeable people were and how well received our sport was," he says. "And each time I had occasion to interface with something international, it was confirming of the fact that this sport, long before I became involved with it, had an enormous international following, warmth, and potential."
The potential just needed nurturing, and Stern became its godfather.
Terry Lyons, a 26-year NBA employee who served as the league’s vice president for international media relations, recalls a time in the early 1980s when a young TV executive in Italy made weekly trips to NBA headquarters in New York to gather videotape of NBA games. He’d then show them to Italian basketball fans who were anxious to see Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, and other NBA stars in action.
"Andrea Bassani happened to be the son of a TWA pilot," Lyons says. "His very early role in the NBA’s TV agreement with Italian TV was to use his flight privileges to fly back and forth to get videotapes of NBA games. At that time, these were CBS tapes, because they had the international rights. But David, in one of his smartest moves, resecured those rights back to the league office. Thus was born a very important piece of the globalization of the game, which was TV exposure internationally."
When Bassani would return to Italy, Dan Peterson, the U.S.-born coach of the successful Tracer Milan team in the Italian League, would then provide Italian language voiceovers for airing on Italian TV.
"Without question," Lyons says, "international TV was the first important bridge to building the viable businesses and everything the NBA does around the world. A lot of people think it was about selling T-shirts and hats, but the proof is in the player development, which grew from those European players being able to see the game played at the highest level."
Today, NBA television programming reaches 215 countries and territories, and games are broadcast in 45 languages.
And Stern has watched the rosters of his league’s teams swell with players born outside the United States. In the 1983- 1984 season, there were eight international players on the NBA’s 23 rosters; by the 2006-2007 season, there were 83, from 37 different countries and territories.
The greatest increase, season to season, occurred after Parker joined the Spurs in 2001 and became a starter for them, one of the league’s best teams, as a precocious 19-year-old rookie. The very next season, the number of international players increased from 52 to 68.
Parker is one of nine French players now active in the NBA. That France, a country so crazed about soccer, could suddenly produce more NBA players than any other nation but the United States is no accident.
"What happened is easy to explain," says Olivier Pheulpin, U.S. correspondent for L’Equipe, France’s leading sports periodical. "After the Dream Team in 1992, many of our best athletes began playing basketball instead of soccer. Simple as that."
Indeed, the phenomenon that was the 1992 U.S. Olympic basketball team, the first to include American NBA players, had a dramatic effect on the worldwide popularity of both basketball and the NBA.
Led by Jordan, Johnson, Bird, Karl Malone, Charles Barkley, David Robinson, and John Stockton, the American team stormed through the Olympic tournament in Barcelona, Spain, enjoying international celebrity status.
Most believe that USA Basketball, the U.S. representative to the international basketball governing body, Fédération Internationale de Basketball (FIBA), had petitioned to allow NBA players on the U.S. Olympic roster after the Soviet Union defeated an all-amateur U.S. team in the gold-medal game at the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, South Korea.
The truth is that Boris Stankovic, secretary-general of FIBA, had lobbied for many years for the inclusion of NBA players on the rosters of all teams in international competitions.
"I see the ’92 Olympics as the bookend to the 2008 Olympics," Stern says. "On the one hand, it was like Team USA was a circus. We had the Tournament of the Americas (in Portland, Oregon), and play stops so the Brazilian players [can] get their pictures taken with the Americans. It was very funny.
"I remember everyone saying, ‘It’s ridiculous. … Why would the United States do this? … They’re going to humiliate the world.’ But I said two things at the time. One: ‘We’re actually honoring the world.’ Boris had said to us, ‘The only way we’re going to get better is to play against the best.’ And I said that we understood that.
"Number two: ‘You know what? The world is going to get better faster than you think, because this is an easy sport to learn, and we’re being followed very carefully.’ "
Stern was right. The Dream Team won its eight games in Barcelona by an average of 43.8 points, but even teams that were blown out appeared to regard it as an honor to have been humiliated.
In relatively short order, great athletes who had never considered any sport but soccer began playing Dr. Naismith’s game. The world began to catch up to Team USA.
"We were derided for some period of time," Stern says, "until, for consecutive times, we lost badly in the [2002] World Championships and badly in the [2004] Olympics.
"So, we were right, and all of a sudden, there was a beatification of that Dream Team. They deserve to be lifted on our shoulders, because they did a great job. They competed. They represented. They were very good. That was important, because that helped us get to the point where we could begin distributing our games internationally. We’re now in 215 countries and 45 languages.
"That was a key liftoff point for that, and in some ways, probably more profoundly, a key liftoff point for millions of potentially elite basketball players around the world deciding to bounce the ball rather than kick it -- which is something I often say, and which I think is true."
IN 1994, AT ROUGHLY six o’clock on a steamy June evening in Shanghai, China, the world began to change for a skinny Shanghai youngster who, at age 13, already had sprouted to seven feet in height.
Surrounded by friends with whom he shared a passion for basketball, a teenage Yao Ming watched his first live telecast of an NBA game.
There, before his eyes, on a TV set in a small apartment, New York Knicks center Patrick Ewing and Houston Rockets center Hakeem Olajuwon matched up in a memorable battle of big men in the 1994 NBA Finals.
"We were excited," Yao recalls. "We hear about the NBA, but at that time, NBA hadn’t come to China yet. We would only get to see games that were played three months ago, something like that.
"Then, with the game played live, we watched a lot more of the mascots and just the show."
Still, Yao was drawn to the battle of the centers, never once believing that just eight years later he would wind up in Houston, daring to carry on Olajuwon’s legacy. Back in 1994, an Asian playing in the NBA was too preposterous even to dream about.
"We know NBA basketball is the best in the world," Yao says. "You never imagine you can play there. Ask any American kid if they dream to play there, and they say yes. But for me? No. I never even thought it was possible. It is really too far."
Today, mere months removed from the Beijing Olympics but 15 years since Yao watched his first live telecast of an NBA game, the Chinese hoop dreamers who have followed Yao into the NBA include New Jersey Nets forward Yi Jianlian and Los Angeles Lakers guard Sun Yue.
"Maybe the kids right now in China are starting to think about it," Yao says.
It is not hard to imagine many more Chinese players in the NBA, especially now that the league has partnered with Anschutz Entertainment Group -- which owns and operates the Staples Center, the downtown Los Angeles home court of both the NBA’s Lakers and Clippers -- to build 10 to 12 new arenas in China over the next several years.
The sheer number of youngsters now playing basketball in China, estimated in the millions, indicates that there will be many more who have the skills needed to follow Yao, Yi, and Sun to the NBA.
The advent of the Internet has also played a huge role in popularizing the NBA all over the world. Stern, always an early adapter, saw the potential of a digital league before most. Just as importantly, he understood that the Internet has no borders.
"It’s no accident that [our website] gets more visits, in some months, from China than from the U.S.," Stern says. "You want photography? You want statistics? If you live in China, you can get a game ‘streamed’ every day.
"So the Internet is huge. When someone asks me what the future developments we’re looking at are, I say there is international and there is digital, and they’re actually related, because the digital makes the international so much more cohesive."
Could the future of the NBA include a division outside North America?
Stern has avoided such speculation in the past, but he sees the 2012 Olympics, scheduled for London, as another event that will spike interest in basketball and the NBA.
"I have no idea what’s going to happen," Stern says when asked to predict what NBA basketball might encompass in 10 more years.
He does, though, have a distinctly global vision.
"Ideally, there would be an NBA-assisted league in India," he says. "There would be an NBA-related league, in some shape or form, in Latin America, possibly [development-] league related. There would be an NBA-partnered league, maybe bearing our name, in conjunction with the [Chinese Basketball Association] in China. There would be a much bigger NBA presence in Eastern Europe. I’m not sure if Russia would be the hub or somewhere else. … And a bigger NBA presence in Europe, coming out of the 2012 Olympics."
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