The Team from My Country will DESTROY YOURS! (maybe)

The famous Van cat takes on a creepy, human-sized likeness and becomes the mascot. The stuff of kindergartner nightmares.

Howdy…it’s been a while since I rapped at y’all. Just wanted to remind all you basketball fans, baseketball fans, women in love with tall skinny dudes, etc., that the FIBA World Basketball Championships are coming to Turkey starting August 28. 

Now as most of you know I am from the US, and this is our sport. No more puppy dog team USA soccer hoping to upset the big boys. We better win it all or there is going to be hell to pay. It’s like soccer and Brazil, or handball and Puerto Rico, or steroid woman’s swimming and East Germany. When we play, we hopefully play for it all, for the motherland…I guess….or something.

*Sigh* No Kobe, No Dwayne, No Lebron (too busy seeing how much farther he can put his head up his own ass this summer). None of those dudes seem to care (have any of you noticed that they pulled those adds with “giant” Kobe superimposed over the ancient Istanbul skyline?)

I was playing Super Mario 1 at my cousin's house when Derrick Rose was born.

But hey…we have soft spoken Kevin Durant of the OKC Thunder. He isn’t an international household name yet but he should be. All he did last season was almost singlehandedly lead his team to the playoffs with 30 points per game and more than 7 rebounds. Then there is main man Chauncey Billups, a clutch veteran leader at guard who lead the toppling of the Shaq Kobe regime. Then there is Derrick Rose, an up and comer who has maybe fulfilled two-thirds of his potential so far at 20 points per game and 6 assists, born in 1988.

The games will be broadcasted locally on NTV , according to a guy handing out promotional flyers from a sponsor on the street. (I see that day passes can be purchased through Biletix for as little as 5 euro. But after signing up with Biletix, I was directed to an annoying screen that told me that there was no way I could get the tickets no, sorry, maybe it’s because of this, maybe because of that. We don’t know. Too good to be true.)

The official FIBA site is a good place to start research into teams, who is who, and youth teams you probably don’t care about unless you are a parent of a hoops prodigy. That flyer guy on the street’s employer, Beko (makers of household appliances), has a graphics-rich site in English with some seriously awkward wording. The site details venues and generally has a more local flair.

“Five Questions for Team USA” is a nice article outlining challenges for the homeboys. And it’s written by a Mannix (Chris of SI).Here we have info on the real homeboys. There are now FOUR Turkish players under contract in the NBA. Not bad for a country that started loving hoops 30 years ago thanks to “My White Shadow”. (It’s true!)

Maybe you will see me out there cheering them on!