An American Abroad
Mr. V wants to see you. Hurry, hurry!
After winning a championship with the Manchester Giants in 2000.
(Copyright © Ahmed Photos; photographs by Mansoor Ahmed / Ahmed Photos)
The championship I won in Birmingham—and whatever acclaim came out of quickly elevating a longtime losing franchise to the top—got me the opportunity to coach in Belgium with a club called Telindus Oostende. I wish I could tell you what I learned there. Maybe that sometimes shit just doesn’t work out and you’ve got to put it behind you and move on.
The job was a significant career upgrade, and it was a big deal for me to land it. Dave Adkins, who I’ve been close with now for thirty-some years, helped get me the job. He had coached all over the world, including in Australia and Mozambique, before he became an agent.
Oostende had a history of being good, dominated the domestic league in Belgium just about every year, and was sometimes a force in the Euro League. I was coaching better players and making about $90,000 for the season, a 300 percent raise. Bonuses for wins pushed the potential salary to more than $100,000.
At a dinner for sponsors after I got hired, I gave a speech and said that I had been the youngest coach in the NCAA at Grand View, the youngest in England, and now the youngest in Belgium. (I was thirty.) Then I joked, I wonder how long I can keep this up?
In England, teams just picked up players where they could—whoever they could find locally, older guys coming over from Europe who were on the downside of their careers, whatever second- or third-tier prospects from the US that agents pitched them.
Like the other top basketball clubs in Europe, Oostende had an infrastructure and it operated on the same model as international soccer. They signed some seasoned players, not NBA quality but some who were not that far off. They brought in young prospects and coached them from their mid-teens on up. They had a first team that played in the league games, a second team made up of younger players who competed on another circuit, and a youth academy for even younger kids who showed promise.
The job was almost like a 9-to-5. We practiced in the mornings and then they fed the players right there at the practice site. If we didn’t have a game that night, we practiced again in the afternoon.
The team was not ideally constructed. Its social fabric, to use that term, was a bit frayed—or to be more specific, it was ripped in three pieces. We had four guys who spoke French because they were from the southern part of Belgium. We had another four from the northern part of Belgium and they spoke Flemish. And we had four English speakers—a couple of Americans and two other guys who I think just spoke it because they couldn’t communicate in French or Flemish. The three different groups kept to themselves and basically hated one another, and there wasn’t anything I could do about it.
I did make some miscalculations. The biggest one was not really understanding that when I crossed over from England into continental Europe, it was a different style of basketball. Like I’ve said, basketball is basketball and 95 percent of it does translate across cultures and national boundaries. But you have to be aware of the 5 percent that doesn’t.
In Belgium, the players did not enjoy the triangle offense and were resistant to it. They were used to structure—call the play, set the screen, go here, pass it there—and I was giving them more freedom than they wanted. The basketball in Belgium was higher quality but the game over in England was more Americanized.
I loved the triangle so much that I probably figured everybody would. I continued to run it, but I put in some other stuff—more of the orchestrated style they were used to.
Despite it all, the results were good. We were right there in the race for the regular season title, even though we had a zillion injuries and I ended up having to start guys on the second unit. They were eighteen, nineteen years old and they played their guts out. Some of them made their careers that season and went on to make a lot of money in Europe.
The team was owned by a big businessman in town, Rudolf Vanmoerkerke, whom everyone just called Mr. V. He had a travel company, owned an airline, and built the nice little arena that we played in—which was called Mister V-arena. It was a packed house every game. There wasn’t much else in the way of sports other than a third- or fourth-division soccer club, so the fans and local press created a ton of pressure around us.
They wanted you to win every night and they wanted you to kill everybody—and they were critical of every single thing that happened. If you were up twenty points at the half and won the game by twenty-five, you’d actually get asked by one of the writers why you didn’t win by forty. You know, like, Did the team experience a letdown in the second half? Are you disappointed in that? We assume you’ll address that at practice tomorrow morning, right?
Basketball teams in Europe play in a number of in-season tournaments. We did well in the Euro Cup, making it to the final eight before getting beat by Rome, which was the best a Belgian team had done in about twenty years.
Normally, on Mondays, I’d get a call from one of the ladies in the team office, and she’d say, “Mr. V would like to meet you for lunch,” and we’d go to his favorite restaurant and have sole and frites and talk about the weekend’s game.
About two-thirds of the way through the season I got a call from a different woman I’d never heard from and she said, “You need to come to Mister V-arena.” And she sounded nervous. She was like, “Come immediately. Hurry, hurry, hurry!”
It didn’t seem like good news. I got there and was led into Mr. V’s office.
Oostende was like the Israeli club Maccabi Tel Aviv—it was supposed to dominate its domestic rivals every season. Second place was an abject failure. We were doing well in the Belgian Cup, the in-season tournament, and were just one victory from being crowned champions. But I was not going to be around for that.
When I stepped into Mr. V’s office, all he said was, “We have made a decision to change coaches,” and he handed me a check for the rest of the season and that was that.
It didn’t come as a complete shock. I’d had enough people putting mics in my face and saying, “Rumor has it if you don’t win this weekend, you’re out. Have you heard the same rumors? How do you feel about them?”
They’d come around the next Monday and say, “Well?” And I’d say, “I guess I’ve got to unpack again because it looks like I’m staying.”
The timing of the firing did surprise me. We had won our game over the weekend—one of the young kids hit a shot at the buzzer for a one-point win—and had victories in something like eleven of our last thirteen games.
The timing was a little unfortunate in another way: my parents had flown in to visit with me. They had been at that last game and then I drove them to Paris, which was about three hours away. They were going to spend a couple of days there and then return and spend time in Oostende.
When they arrived back, I picked them up at the train station, told them what had happened, and said, “I don’t really feel like hanging around here. Where should we go?” We decided on London and I loaded up my car, put it on the ferry, and we went over and saw a couple of shows and visited with my old college roommate, who had taken over for me as coach at Birmingham.
I’m sure I must have gone back after that to close up my apartment in Belgium and gather up whatever belongings I had there, but I have no memory of it.
* * *
At this point, you may be thinking, quite reasonably: Why didn’t this man just come home? If he wanted to coach basketball, why did he not return to its worldwide capital, the good ole US of A, where the sport runs a little more logically and he probably wouldn’t have to work for a Mr. V?
There are several answers. One is that in every job I was in, I felt like it was still possible for me to keep on learning and getting better. Even if no one else was taking notice, I believed I was becoming a really good basketball coach, and it looks now like I was right.
I was also, by and large, enjoying myself. In the years I was coaching overseas, during breaks in the basketball schedule, I spent time in the great cities of Europe—Paris, Amsterdam, Barcelona, and many others. My sister Maureen came over every year with her husband. We went to Greece, St. Moritz, Lake Como. In London, I went to the theater and the museums.
If things had gone differently when I was coaching college ball in the US, I suppose I could have moved on from South Dakota to a better assistant’s job at a Division I school—and then on to another assistant’s job—and then maybe a college head coaching job—or maybe skipped that and jumped over to the NBA to start moving up the pro coaching chain.
But I had a natural curiosity and maybe a wanderlust that goes back, at least in part, to my father telling me I wasn’t leaving Iowa to go to Cornell. I’m not a better person than any other coach for the nontraditional path I took. But I’m pretty sure I’m a different person than I would have been.
When I coached the Canadian national team in the summer of 2019, we stopped in Australia to play some exhibition games on our way to the FIBA tournament in China. I took all the guys to the Sydney Opera House to see West Side Story. I know not all of them wanted to go, but I figured they’d thank me in twenty years. A few months before that, on an off night in New York, I arranged for our Raptors players to see Hamilton on Broadway.
It’s not my job, of course, to show them this stuff, but I do feel it’s a little bit of my responsibility. It’s not going to hurt their basketball to open up their minds a little—and it might actually help.
* * *
There was one other reason—the biggest reason, to be honest—that I did not come back to the US sooner to coach. I couldn’t make it happen.
I always returned in the summers. By that time, I’d be a little homesick. It wasn’t terrible. But I did miss family and friends and some of the comforts of home, even the little silly stuff like Godfather’s Pizza.
I’d hang out in Iowa and travel from there to basketball camps and wherever else I could make some contacts in the coaching fraternity. I definitely knew that I was going to have to resurface back in the States at some point.
The NBA Summer League takes place in Las Vegas now, and it’s this big extravaganza. The gyms are sold out if a prized rookie is playing, and the games are all televised on ESPN. It’s a way for the NBA to capture some attention in the dead of summer.
For many years, though, the Summer League took place in Long Beach, California, and it was more low-key—just a series of practices and games for teams to get a look at their draft picks and at other younger players who might have an outside chance of getting on a roster. But just like Las Vegas, it was a big gathering of people in the basketball universe—agents, scouts, team executives—and it functioned as a job fair for aspiring coaches.
The first summer I went was probably 1999. I was in between my two seasons of coaching the Manchester Giants, which is where I went after Belgium.
Long Beach is not one of the glamour spots on the Pacific Coast. It’s a port and industrial town about twenty-five miles south of LA. I got a hotel for forty or fifty bucks a night and stayed for the month that the Summer League practices and games were taking place. I’d walk up the beach to the gym in the morning and back down the beach to my hotel at night.
I hung out that first summer trying to meet people. During conversations, I’d slip in every now and then that I was a coach and say something like, “If you know anybody who needs help on the sideline, I’m here the whole time. Just grab me.”
There were plenty of other guys like me doing the same thing. I was networking or whatever you want to call it, but I had to force myself. I think it’s fair to say that most of us Iowans are not natural networkers. I wasn’t any good at it.
I came back to Long Beach the next year and I did better. I was given a team of free agents to coach. These were guys who went undrafted and could not get on the summer rosters of any of the NBA teams.
We did really well. We won some games and it was a pretty big thrill for me just to be on the sideline coaching in that setting. It wasn’t like I was hanging out with Popovich, but he was there. Pat Riley was there.
From then on, I was working hard trying to get in the league. I was calling people, writing emails from England. But I didn’t have the ideal profile. I wasn’t connected to any famous coach. And I wasn’t a former NBA player, and those were the guys they were trying to hire, which I totally understood. They had put their time in on the court and were getting a late start coaching.
David Kahn, the former president of the Minnesota Timberwolves, at one point owned four teams in the D-League and he had jobs open at all of them. I figured, that’s a lot of open positions! I’ve got to have a shot at one of them, right? I reached out to him, but I never heard back.
In my heart, I wanted to be an NBA head coach. That was the dream. But I was not having conversations with people, even friends, and saying my goal is to coach in the NBA one day. It would have sounded stupid. The reality was that I couldn’t even get an interview for a job as an assistant coach in the D-League.
* * *
Manchester, which I coached two seasons, from 1998 to 2000, was the most well-funded team in the British Basketball League. Some fans considered it the evil empire, like the New York Yankees. They paid more than anybody else and had beautiful accommodations for the American players they brought over.
The owner was Bill Cook, a billionaire from Indiana who made his fortune in pharmaceuticals. The general manager, my boss, was Scott May, a former NBA player and one of the stars on Bobby Knight’s undefeated 1976 national champions at Indiana.
The franchise was run very professionally and they were a notch above the rest of the league in every way but one: they almost never won anything. The first year I was with them we won the National Cup, one of the in-season tournaments. The second year we finished first (“top of the table”) in the regular season, which is the big prize there.
After chasing a championship with a lot of money for years, they finally succeeded. That night, we were celebrating down in Wembley like you always do when you win a championship in England. And the owners gathered us together and took us across the street to a hotel lobby—the coaches, team executives and employees, a whole bunch of folks.
They gave us an extra $20,000 bonus and said, “We’re selling the team. You’re all free to go. It’s over.”
* * *
I would coach in England for another five seasons. All of it was useful. Looking back on it, none of it was exactly normal. (Did I reference Dennis Rodman a few chapters back? I’m getting there.)
To explain the full history and financial twists and turns of British professional basketball would take me hundreds of pages. But just to go through it really quickly, the league, depending on its sponsorship status, has been known by various names over the years. Just since 1990 it has been called the Carlsberg Basketball League, the Budweiser Basketball League, and the Dairylea Dunker’s Championship. (If you don’t know the name Dairylea, it’s a popular brand of cheese over there.)
When I was still playing, I was awarded a case of Carlsberg beer when I got “man of the match.” I gave it out in the locker room. No one that I’m aware of, under the Dairylea regime, ever got postgame cheese.
Unlike in the NBA and other US professional sports, which add new teams as the years go on and never subtract them—and where the rare struggling franchise picks up and moves to another city—British basketball teams often just go out of existence. The league made some bad decisions to become even more unstable—the main one being a shortsighted move to leave Sky TV and sign a contract for more money but with a less visible broadcast partner. In the US, it would be like leaving ESPN and jumping to a channel that reaches only half as many homes.
Several of the teams I coached are no longer around. The Birmingham Bullets, the longtime losing franchise where I won a championship in 1998, were liquidated in 2006. The Manchester Giants, the club that was so well funded that everyone resented them, hit the financial skids and went dark for a decade before resurfacing in 2012 under new ownership. There are two franchises in London at the moment, but neither is the London Towers—which is where I moved after the Manchester owners told us we were free to go and sent us away with our twenty grand.
The London job was like accelerated learning. Other British clubs had been invited before to play in the Euro League, which is the top level of basketball outside of the NBA, but usually did not have the money to make it work. The London Towers did.
There were some crazy stretches where we would play three nights in a row—Germany one night, Lithuania the next, and then back to London for the last one. I had a couple of different rosters. I would play certain guys in the Northern European League games (that was our section of the Euro League) and different ones when we competed against the teams in the British league.
We held our own most nights against the Euro competition and won our share of games, but we were up against some really top players. Pau Gasol, who would go on to win two NBA titles with the Lakers and make six NBA All-Star Games, was still playing for Barcelona. Back home, we won the regular season championship in the BBL.
The following season I joined the Brighton Bears as both the coach and part-owner. Very quickly after that, my partner made clear he had better things to do than run the team day-to-day.
Like a dumbass, I agreed to take on that role and also to become the sole owner. Keep in mind, this was not the same as assuming ownership of something with real value—it meant that I was the guy responsible for making payroll and keeping the lights on even if we were losing money. I also assumed the team’s debts.
Brighton is a beautiful seaside town, an easy drive from London. Lots of people come for long weekends. Of all my stops, it was probably the most pleasant in terms of living in a cool place.
We played in two different arenas and the smaller one, downtown, held about 1,500 people. It was first come, first served—we had no real season ticket base—but before games there would be a line outside of people waiting along the beach. Tickets were really cheap, or some nights we would give a lot of them away. We were trying to get eyeballs, build interest.
We were also doing some incredible work in the schools—bringing in local kids and using our players to teach them basketball as well as reading and math skills. We hoped to attract more attention in the city and become a bigger presence, which might get us what we needed: more money in corporate sponsorships.
We had some on-court success, especially in the beginning, but it was a financial slog—and then, ultimately, a financial bloodbath. I spent a lot of time on non-basketball affairs: promoting the team, begging banks for lines of credit, trying to figure out, at one point, why our share of the league’s TV money, which was supposed to fund our operations for the season, disappeared out of our accounts.
* * *
At the time I was coaching what would be my last season in Brighton, Dennis Rodman was on a London-based reality show called Celebrity Big Brother. It was one of those absurd but addictive shows, and it seemed like the whole country was watching it.
A friend of mine sent me an email suggesting I should try to get him to play for us when he got booted out of the house, and I said, “Yeah, that’s a good idea,” not really taking him seriously. But then he sent me an email contact for Rodman’s manager. I got in touch with him and found out they were 100 percent interested. My first reaction was: Holy shit. But why not? Let’s try to do this.
Then we found out the details. Rodman wanted $25,000 for each game he played, plus extras—his travel, hotel, lots of specifics about food and other stuff we should provide. To my shock, when I got in touch with the CEO of our main sponsor, he said, almost immediately, “I’m in,” and agreed to put up the money.
The first game that Rodman played for us was at the 1,500-seat arena, which was attached to a community center and what was called a “multipurpose fun pool”—a splash pool with waterslides and so forth. So it wasn’t exactly the United Center in Chicago.
Tickets sold out in a matter of hours. We put folding chairs in every space we could find, sold standing room, and probably stuffed five hundred more people into the gym. We issued about 175 media passes to journalists from all over Europe. This wasn’t just unusual for British basketball—it was unprecedented.
The game was supposed to start at seven-thirty. At about seven-ten, Dennis still had not showed up. We got a call that he was late leaving London but should be at the arena soon. We pushed the game back to eight.
He got there at about seven-fifty—it took about eight security guards to get him out of his car and push him through the crowds gathered on the street—and he came into the locker room where everybody was sitting in their uniforms, waiting for him.
The first thing he said was, “Hey, I always shower before the game,” and he dropped all his shit—his bag and whatever he was carrying—and walked into the shower room. When he came out and got his uniform on, we had a quick little meeting, just to let him know what we were running.
Everybody was nervous as hell, including me. I mean, yeah, he was in his mid-forties and he’d become this bizarre kind of celebrity—dated Madonna, in the tabloids all the time—but we were basketball people sitting in that locker room. To us, he was not a novelty act. He was Michael Jordan’s former teammate on the Chicago Bulls championship teams. Phil Jackson’s power forward. In his prime, he was one of the best damn players on the planet and he remains one of the greatest rebounders in the history of the sport.
As we were all together pregame, I began to tell him how we play, our offense and defense and so forth, and he stopped me and said, “I don’t want to start. I want you guys to go do your thing and I’ll come in off the bench.”
A few minutes into the game, I put him in. I was still running the triangle, which of course he knew from Chicago, and one of the many options out of it is called the Blind Pig. You don’t call the play; like everything else in the triangle, it’s improvised.
The first offensive possession, Dennis flashed into the post. A guard passed him the ball and he immediately threw a no-look bounce pass to a cutting teammate for a basket. It was the Blind Pig, executed perfectly and instinctively, like he just made the same pass the day before with MJ on the receiving end.
He ran down to the defensive end, took a charge, and the building went absolutely crazy. He stretched out on the floor, and his new teammates, whom he’d met fifteen minutes ago, pulled him up off the floor and gave him high fives. We won the game by a few points and he scored a handful of points and grabbed maybe eight rebounds.
The second game he played was in the bigger arena. For some reason, I ended up riding with him to it in his limo. There was me, Dennis, his security guard, and Faria Alam—who was in the house with him on Celebrity Big Brother. She was one of these B stars whom everyone knew at the time because she was in the news for having an affair with the team manager of the national soccer team, which in England is a position of great prominence. She had been his secretary.
On the show, she and Dennis were trying to get together, but they couldn’t in the house. It was an ongoing thing, a source of dramatic or sexual tension or whatever. But now they were out of the house. The show was over but there was still interest in them.
All these paparazzi were trailing us, and the next thing I knew, Faria was on the phone with her agent, who was screaming at her that she had to get out of the car. It’s not a picture they wanted to see in the tabloids. She told the driver, “Pull over!” and jumped out.
We played the game and I went to a party afterward at a nightclub Dennis reserved. “Come on, Coach, you’re going to the club,” was how his invitation went.
Faria was there. Everyone was snapping her picture. I have no idea to this day why she had to jump out of the car—or why it was then okay to show up at the club.
Having had one game under his belt, Dennis had been more in the groove in the second game. He played thirty-eight minutes and pulled in twenty-three rebounds—which I thought was a damn good night for a forty-four-year-old guy who had been spending all his time on the set of a reality TV show.
There was all kinds of chaos afterward involving the league. (Of course there was.) They had wanted us to deactivate one of our American players for the games Rodman played—because he put us over the limit of our allowable non-English players—and I wouldn’t do it. I figured this was their one chance to play alongside someone like Dennis and I wasn’t picking a guy to miss it.
The coach of one of the teams we played complained, although he pretended to be nice about it. “It’s wonderful people had the chance to see him play and it was a great experience for me and my players, but that isn’t the point,” he said. “It has been like a circus all week leading up to the game and now the BBL need to be seen to be strong in dealing with this.”
We had to forfeit two wins, but I really didn’t care. We had brought a ton of attention to British basketball, which it needed.
* * *
It’s not an easy thing for me to look back on that last year in Brighton. The Rodman episode is funny, but it came about because we were in a really bad spot. (And Dennis, by the way, was a gentleman and a pleasure to coach. I saw him at the Las Vegas Summer League in 2019 and he gave me a big hug.)
One story in the British press, written after I won the title with the Raptors, said that it seemed I had “bitten off more than [I] could chew” in Brighton and it’s hard for me to argue with that. I was spending probably 90 percent of my time on non-basketball stuff, trying to keep the thing afloat. I worked my ass off and there were a lot of sleepless nights. I drained my savings, such as they were.
At the end, as we were sinking financially, I was having a hard time paying the secretaries, ticket-takers, and other employees. Even so, I thought we were close to a significant new partnership, but the bank that held our line of credit was breathing down our neck. They wouldn’t wait.
I went to the bank manager and was like, “Don’t do it, man. You either wait six more months and you got a shot at getting your money back, or you get nothing.”
He was a soccer guy. I think he was just tired of seeing Brighton Bears Basketball come across his desk.
The franchise folded when the season ended. As I’ve written, lots of basketball teams over there go belly-up. It’s a normal occurrence, but when it happens, there has to be a villain, and it was me. I understood it. I was the owner, the responsible party.
I’ve mostly been able to distance myself. But when I won the title with the Raptors, I got lots of texts and emails letting me know that British basketball fans were following the games and rooting hard for us. They were proud and happy that someone who came out of the BBL was succeeding in the NBA. Hearing that was meaningful. It gave me hope that they would remember the good times and forget about how it ended.
* * *