SEMI-PRO-AM: The Basketball Reality You Never Knew

By GR Wilson

SEMI-PRO-AM is the untold true story of a Basketball Reality you never knew existed. A world where NBA All Stars matchup against Footlocker Employees, where FIBA World Champions face High School Wannabes and where the salary of one team’s twelfth man equals that of this team’s entire roster. Faced with a physically torturous and spirit crushing season like no other, fifteen men battle the opposition, each other and themselves to succeed simultaneously against everyone from the Sport’s Bottom Feeders and those who feast at its Highest Table. Eighty one games over a mere eight months in fourteen countries for just one team; this team.

The spotlight of Professional Basketball shines brightest on the chosen few, however once in a lifetime a select few from the humble majority get their twenty four seconds of fame. Semi-Pro-Am follows the reality of fifteen such men forever connected by their shared experience of reaching competitive heights beyond their wildest dreams while simultaneously battling though the juxtaposition of Basketball Backwaters.

When offered a chance, the Manager of London’s biggest Basketball Club laid everything on the line to compete at a level no British team had ever before reached. Craving to sit at the top table with Europe’s most established Clubs as a part of the fledgling Continental Basketball scene, his story is one that will ring true for any underdog that has ever given their all and struggled to be unleashed.

Charged with guiding his team through a torturous eighty game season, The Coach fought an ongoing battle to reach the summit of his Profession. Challenged daily by his Players, the Management and his own temperament, he was forced to handle the pressures of coaching three seasons in one. His plight and struggle to endure will be familiar to anyone who has ever or wants to succeed in this most stimulating of Professions.

Recruited from all walks of life, twelve Players willed their overmatched bodies to compete with the very best in Europe while simultaneously searching for the motivation to retain their domestic title in Basketball’s Basement. Through a sometimes unwinnable schedule often compromising of nine games in five different countries over fifteen nights, their ambition to overcome will motivate everyone who has ever felt the fire of competitive spirit.

Continually overstretched to breaking point and pushing the limits of a collective will, Semi-Pro-Am provides a firsthand insight into the intricate relationships that exists between all levels from Semi Professional to Amateur and the full time Professionals caught in between. A firsthand account of how an ever changing set of incredible circumstances set off a chain reaction with ramifications effecting everyone closest to them. Filled with a heartbreaking realism, at times almost fictional coincidence and the cruel humor that became everyday occurrences when people spend more time with their teammates than their families. Seasoned Veteran Professional Players, Unpaid Interns, Part Time Postmen, Wealthy Businessmen, Amateur High School Drop Outs, Next Generation Coaches and Semi Professional Athletes all play their part.

Semi-Pro-Am continually shifts the spotlight from Center Court to the shadows of Professional Basketball and back again. Connecting Flights to Tour Buses, Locker Rooms to Hotel Rooms, Health Clubs to Night Clubs and Barcelona to Brighton; the reader follows in the footsteps of this once in a lifetime team that became like no other. For the first time, revealing true stories played out by those closest to the game you love; unwrapping secrets that you thought existed but could never before see. Over twelve years in the making, Semi-Pro-Am is an essential addition to the bookshelf of anyone who has a passion for Basketball and a hunger to learn more about the reality of Professional Sport from one of the few people that witnessed it all first-hand.

• Language: English
• Publisher: GR Wilson
• Release date: Jan 31, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311399526

GR Wilson

GR WILSON is to Coaching as Waiting Tables is to Acting; between teams having emigrated from London to New York City, he sat in his studio apartment, on Thrift Store Furniture with a phenomenal view of the East River and started typing. After eighteen days of late summer sunshine and inspiration in 2013, the story of ten months in his basketball life that began at the turn of the millennium was finished and in your hands fulfilling his lifelong ambition. He foolishly followed that in 2017 with a entirely dispensable guide to New York City living titled "Save Our Salary: NYC" which gives readers over $35,000 of savings for New Yorkers and Tourists alike. Let's Make America Cheap Again. @iamGRwilson

Book preview

Resigned to defeat and with a look of unashamed apathy, the General Manager’s gaze wondered across the court. It passed his exhausted team, through the crowd and stopped momentarily to focus intently on a familiar figure, but one he needed a split second to recognize. Confirming the identity to be that of a player’s agent, he recalled a conversation he had with the Coach many months before and cursed his decision to settle on a player which changed the course of his season.

This agent was one he had known for years, a nice guy but one he had never been able to do business with by closing a deal to sign one of his players. It prompted him to remember his own words to the Coach back in December, This agent tells me he has a French kid who just wants exposure and likes the fact his guy can play in the Euroleague and also learn English while playing in London. He reckons he’s the next big thing. Point Guard, 6’2 so good size and jets; but just not a great shooter yet. Just like lightening they say, he’s super quick around the court. Something Parker, can’t remember his first name off hand. Trouble is he wants six figures for the season and here’s the best one… He remembered the pause being broken by an intrigued Coach saying, Go on… Smiling in disbelief at his own words to follow the Manager smirked, He’s Seventeen years old. Ha! Just came out of the Institute of Sport in Paris, has an offer from Racing Basket to stay in town, but he likes the look of the Euroleague before the NBA Draft and well; London is London after all."

Hoping the Coach would continue their shared line of thought the Manager welcomed hearing, Seventeen? I mean that’s young. Wow. Um, I’d probably rather go with a known quantity than roll the dice with so much at stake. Realizing the Coach was on the same track and also polite enough to not mention the Manager’s happiness at not having to consider a six figure salary he replied, Plus, can you imagine our front court vets taking play calls from a teenager? Let alone in French.

The two men had laughed at the time, humored by the prospect but it was no laughing matter now, as the soon to be victorious opposition had been led to victory by their own jitter bug quick point guard today. The American import was keen to impress for the TV Cameras and also the richest club in the Country. He had used his whirlwind speed to tie the hapless defenders in knots throughout the game on his way to twenty six points and eight assists.

The Manager’s daze was interrupted by the blare of the horn that refocused his vision back to the view immediately in front of him, as he shared one final piece of common ground with the fourteen men he saw traipsing towards him. It wasn’t the first time in the record setting ten month marathon for Britain’s Biggest Professional Basketball Club in which that event had occurred. With the now familiar feeling flooding across the court and down the bench like a tidal wave somewhere between relief and disbelief. Strange then that the overarching feeling of finality was not coupled with one of expected disappointment or loss. Or not even a warm fuzzy feeling of what could have been, the team’s unfounded potential or a sense of lasting togetherness. None of these emotions were possible for the fifteen men, twelve of which dressed in the matching numbered shorts and vests on a nightly basis. It was as impossible as turning back time to reverse the eight point loss. Because to feel those emotions required an attachment that only ever existed for fleeting moments that year, never in danger of sustaining its impact on a team spirit that at its core, was only skin deep.

The majority of managers and coaches who construct teams with championship intentions and limitless possibilities every summer, don’t possess a degree in chemistry or for that matter any scientific qualification. Yet that is what everyone in their chosen profession claims to be able to search for and once found, more than qualified to retain. Something not taught in a coaching qualification or learned from a mentor, yet a fabled feeling supposedly necessary for all teams to truly reach their pinnacle of performance. Books have been written across a wide spectrum of topics from Basketball to Business, Finance to Football with each author claiming to have captured the lightning bolt of team chemistry. Having harnessed it for a week, month, season or generation, they are willing, for $19.99 and a place on your bookshelf, to share the sacred secret of their success so you, the enthusiastic reader can apply the very same philosophies to your own life.

Unlike a Hollywood script, reality rarely plays out to a familiar scene, like the one found in the wake of the team’s residency on the bench in this converted Ice Hockey Arena in middle England. From the lenses of a multitude of TV cameras, the bench seemed to be a haven of professionalism, similar to their outward appearance for each of the past ten months. That vision, like so many others from the outside looking in was taken from a place as far away as victory seemed tonight. The sofa dwelling fans at home saw a perfect row of fifteen chairs and the blinding message of the cardboard pyramid advertising boards that sat between the court and the bench. The reality behind that was a clutter of half folded shooting shirts, bloodied towels, crumpled cups and discarded tape that held the athletes together increasing more so with every passing night, until now.

The fans who gathered in the stands saw a pristine hardwood floor and sparkling upright hoops of Olympic standards. This hid the freezing temperatures from the ice underfoot, causing the Coach to stamp his feet to circulate blood rather than inspire his charges. The wet spots on the floor from condensation representing a potential train wreck injury and the tight nature of the baskets in what had become a graveyard for the reputation of long range shooters. Several players often left this building after a career low night, thanking their lucky stars the league only scheduled games here in the post season. Had such a performance been mailed in during the autumn, their contract with their team stood every chance of being revoked. What you see is definitely not always what you get, unless that is you knew what you were signing up for in the first place. But none of these fifteen men foresaw the extremes they would be forced to push their bodies beyond or the torment their minds would be subjected to. For them it started out as just another season, with just another club and just another contract; yet strangely they had come full circle, instantly searching for just that all over again.

The end to the season’s finale had been acted out in the most spectacularly benign manner, with an eight point deficit which never budged with three minutes to go in the game. Unmoved by the almost sincere comeback attempts to chip away at the lead matched only by the ability of the soon to be victors to cling on for victory, without ever knowing that their opposite numbers were secretly rushing headlong towards the light at the end of their tunnel. A television producer’s nightmare is a contest of top billing that never quite matches the undercard nor grips their audience at home. One that saunters along with moments of drama that never intersect between quarters or possessions into the soap opera required to attract ratings and the more important thirty second sponsorship filled promotion it will inevitably be edited into online.

Basketball has a perplexing way of taking the viewer on a hedonistic ride of passion and athleticism interspersed with mind numbing time outs and a frustrating drawl of foul shots; even during the closest of games. This match failed to deliver even that. Saved only by the fact this was but a mere semifinal playoff game and not the show piece final of the following week which guaranteed to draw a larger crowd in the stands of historic Wembley Arena rather than the brand new SkyDome in Coventry where they sat today. Saved in a televisual sense and not in a sporting one, which was the biggest irony of the day given the reason everyone attends such a gladiatorial contest in person rather than watching at home. This season had been such that at times you could have been forgiven for presuming every key event had been orchestrated for the benefit of the cameras. With the pure competitive nature of every twist and turn held in the lowest regard. So the Coach and team’s Captain needed to almost be physically dragged from the locker room to speak to reporters in the requisite string of clichés of what was learned, how well the opposition played and never about what comes next. This closing act allowed everyone to move on in the same way the season played out, individually together forever.

The historical impact of one’s actions is rarely thought of during the actual event, regardless of the length of time spent in the moment. What had occurred would be remembered as an upset of unthinkable proportions. The lowest seeded playoff team beating the league champions and bookie’s favorites for the first time in their club’s history in a tabloid shocker. Something dreams are made of, which in this case was the same for both sides. David’s dreams of beating Goliath and marching on towards the mountain top were just like those of the cash strapped team from the smaller city marching on passed the league’s highest paid team from the Capital, towards what would soon be their first playoff title. The Giant’s dreams of the end now being at hand and the marathon eighty one game season coming to a merciful end with the tunnel’s light finally upon them. No more taped limbs, ice packs or pain killers. Only finding the energy to speak to the assembled clutter of reporters and TV crew serving as a necessary evil to finally bury the specter of a season that proved to be a step too far.

2 The Coach.

It has been said that Chemistry is the scientific art by which people learn to dissolve bodies, thus drawing from them the different substances of their composition to ultimately unite them at a higher level of perfection. When reading this statement he could be forgiven for thinking a newly signed Coach would see this as the applied science to concoct a winning formula for his new team. Success had found the Coach after nine long years of searching for something that came so naturally to him as a player. A standout shooter in his home town in the mid-west of America, he went on to break high school records for long range accuracy, which he carried with him slightly further up the road to his home state’s university of choice. Five years later following a graduate assistant coaching position, with degree in hand and yet more school records taken for good measure, the next obvious step was into the professional ranks of basketball. Like so many others with the ability to play and the unwillingness to work, in the traditional nine to five sense at least, he embarked on a Trans-Atlantic voyage from the United States to the United Kingdom taking with him all he had learned. While not a journey of titanic proportions, the small step from education to employment is all the more difficult for those wanting to live the five to nine life of professional sports. The Coach knew that the demanding lessons ahead would stand him in good stead for a future career in the board room of a multinational company or the side lines of a more glamorous league.

The small English town renowned for being the birthplace of the industrial revolution was the one he would call home for his first season and came with the ideal position of Player / Coach which would ease his transition to the sidelines allowing him to fall back on his well-practiced athletic ability in times of unease. As one of only two imported players on his team, it would allow the ball to be in his hands whenever necessary and with it control over at least half of the game at hand, or so he thought. A comfortable percentage given that the opposing Bad Guys, as he called them would naturally take up the remaining fifty percent of events, a bet he was more than willing to take on a nightly basis. His fears were further minimized by the nature of his new surroundings at the organization when he realized it was a small town with a neat community feel that felt almost like home. There was an air of low expectations and the league worked on a franchise basis with the benefits of the playoffs to consider without the threat of relegation for those found lacking, unlike other professional sports.

There was a friendly media network of local newspaper editors, who he quickly befriended through a series of dinners and minimal television exposure to what was considered a tertiary level sport at best. Football, Rugby and Cricket dominated the vast majority of the media with very little space left for the Champions of Basketball, let alone the minnows from middle England. This suited the Coach just fine but made for his first career quandary of mixed professional emotions given the sanctuary of media ignorance he now lived and worked within, providing a stark contrast for his inner desire for the spot light that comes with the biggest jobs on the best teams. For now the glare and the need to perform on court for his club was enough while he found his feet. That feeling, as expected failed to satisfy and soon following the season’s end he declined the offer of a contract extension. Knowing that he had to commit full time to his chosen profession of coaching if he were to give himself a fair chance to succeed and leave his playing days behind once and for all. After all, Players can only play into their mid-thirties mostly, while Coaching is a game to be played up to retirement. His limited physical skill set and marginal athleticism indicated from an early age that he would be able to coach to a much higher level than he ever could reach as a player.

His journey to the top took several years and more than one trip back across the pond, jumping between jobs as his fellow professionals learn to do. Weighing up the need for personal security that comes with a long term contractual commitment from an owner, with the desire to take the next step. The Coach’s resume built on successes and minimized defeats but never lasted longer than two seasons in any one city. Head Coach at one level led to an assistant coaching position at the next and with it came the need to play someone else’s game instead of your own.

Dressed up as the perceived requirement to learn from those better than you and at a level beyond your own proven stomping ground, this notion was acceptable given his tender age at the time. The Coach’s frustrations with the two steps forward, one step back approach that seemed to be needed for a twenty something coach to make it in an old man’s game simmered continually below the surface. Only occasionally did the pot boil over into a display of public annoyance cunningly disguised as a reaction to his team’s failings. Mostly this came behind the closed doors of a practice facility but the one that would gain him the most notoriety was during a time out of a nationally televised live game, where the cameras and microphones intrude on the privacy of the team’s huddle.

Well, the visiting Coach has seen enough and has called time out to stop the bleeding, with the home team on a ten to nothing run, explained the Commentator to his audience at home, who were watching the live action late on a Saturday afternoon following the traditional classified check of the day’s football results. For nine out of ten games during the season in this situation the Coach would be free to use every one of the sixty seconds he was allowed to ensure his charges left the bench and returned to the floor, more than motivated by his words. Gone were the days where he would listen to his own coach, knowing the next play would be drawn up for him to stop the bleeding with a long range jump shot finely crafted by years of practice. Also gone were the days where he himself would deliver the diatribe and then join his team mates on the court to once again take the shot or make the right pass to ensure a successful possession and his tactical adjustments were spot on.

Now all he had were words. But this wasn’t his first team talk and time outs had become a place of comfort for the Coach to sculpt his words into the action of others by whatever means necessary. Renowned across the league for making the most astute tactical adjustments during games, his teams always came out of breaks in play with a new wrinkle or added zest to play at a higher level. With some six years now under his belt in the British League, those under educated fans at home rarely left their sofa to put the kettle on when this Coach called a time out on TV. Players, fans and other coaches all clamored for the latest piece of magic from the mind of one of the league’s top tacticians.

As the scoreboard horn blared into life and the lead referee blew his whistle to signal a time out, the unplanned link between Commentator and Cameraman could not have been smoother as the Coach entered the huddle center stage and kneeled in front of his seated players, most of whom were relieved to be safe in the surroundings of their teammates, away from the barrage of the boisterous fans and implications of a substandard televised performance. The audience around the Country in their living rooms consisted of amateur coaches and fledgling teenage players, all now waited with baited breath to take a mental note of the forthcoming suggestion from one of the League’s best to selfishly enhance their own game. The Commentator also waited, pen in hand to add to his game notes which he and the Analyst sitting next to him would break down immediately after the magical minute to follow. Assured to enhance their reputation as an up and coming play by play combination, capable of bigger and better games to cover.

The Coach scratched at his whiteboard, paused for breath and screamed, Jesus Fucking Christ! You Mother Fuckers! What the hell kind of… only to be interrupted by the temporary silence brought on by a talented young producer in the TV truck outside the arena who acted quickly enough to ensure only damage limitation was required by the commentary team who stumbled back into life some forty seconds early as the camera stayed with the Coach but the microphone turned back to them. Well, oh… I do, um… apologize for the choice language and also the interruption to the Coach’s time out. We seem to have lost sound. We’ll do our best to get that back to you.

When the game resumed, the play called out of the time out was a great one which resulted in a successful jump shot from the American shooting guard, reminiscent of a shot the Coach himself had made countless times in the same situation. It was also something that the Coach had saved for such a situation which not even the opposition coach, some twenty years his senior had seen executed before. The shot went on to fire a comeback by the Coach’s team and an eventual fifteen point win which secured their place at the top of the table for another weekend. What was remembered by all though was the outburst that resulted in a league wide coaching memorandum insisting that certain choice language be reserved for the locker room or anywhere without the TV microphones who send the pictures and soundtrack of professional sports, unedited into millions of homes on a Saturday tea time after Baywatch.

Even unintentionally, regardless of the changing uniforms of his players and the changing rosters of his team, with tenure in a league came notoriety. Which was a suitable emotional replacement for fame, given the low levels of popularity basketball experienced in the United Kingdom. However, notoriety came at a price with some seeing examples like this as the Coach winning by whatever means necessary, a trait that turned on a certain demographic of success starved owners. Falling by the wayside though, were the franchises who saw this win at all costs, public relations disaster as a reason to never contract the Coach to lead their team and more importantly represent their fledgling brand. His two steps forward, one step back career path had inadvertently made its way into his psyche, but it mattered not. He could only beat the team that was in front of him and likewise, he could only coach one team in each season. The confidence required to succeed at this level and the levels above, meant coaching your own way and that’s exactly how the Coach saw this episode. He would always say to his younger assistants, Get fired coaching your way, otherwise you’ll never know if what you wanted to do would have worked.

This moment in the memory didn’t get the Coach fired, far from it. There’s no such thing as bad publicity his operations manager at the time would say, so hungry for media interest and recognition for his team’s success was he. That transpired into a League and Cup double that season and more importantly a growing bond between the coach and front office, born out of shared success and a mindset that was almost brotherly. The Coach considered for a moment this could be the end of his continual movement between cities, countries, teams and clubs that had trade marked his professional career and limited his private life. That moment at the season’s end lasted just long enough for the champagne corks to pop and the confetti to fall, when the owner of the franchise stepped into the room just as he had when the team lifted the Cup some three months before.

The reclusive owner ran his team through a bank account and a series of considered front office hires, not like his staff had to, through the newspapers and TV timeouts. Winning mattered most and while he would have like to have won with an eternal class and effortless style, the league was becoming too competitive and winning stood above the other nonessentials for the money he invested. At least until now. As he congratulated his team and staff on another successful season, he then delivered the hammer blow which the Coach will always remember, knocked him sideways at the time. Congratulations everyone, said the modestly dressed middle aged business man while standing next to his wife, a petit but slightly plump mother of three. Congratulations, thank you so much for this season. You are all free to go. It would turn out he wasn’t suggesting that the free bar had dried up, more that he was pulling his money out from the team with immediate effect. Letting everyone from the Cleaner to the Coach know they were at liberty to seek employment elsewhere. Freedom had never before felt so limiting.

Here comes the one step back said the Coach under his breath, slightly disbelieving in what he had just heard only moments after he had let the emotional, humane side of his mind convince him that this Club, this City above all others could become home. The long search for professional success and personal salvation had almost come to bear, right before having the rug pulled from under him as he pictured another year in front of him as an Associate Head Coach in a better European League or a Division 1 College back in the States. Another year of teaching another coach’s system to a team he had little say in recruiting combined with the obvious personal impact of the required move. Getting to know the new neighborhood of the company house, places close by to park the new club car free from parking tickets or vandalism and even finding new women, which at almost thirty years of age was becoming somewhat tiresome. It wasn’t that the status of the City’s new basketball coach didn’t come with its advantages, far from it, recruiting in that respect had always been easy for him. It’s just that out of his three part time girlfriends over the past couple of years here, he had become quite attached to a certain hairdresser and was considering cutting his roster of talent down to one, next autumn when the games began again.

What he didn’t know was that for the first time in his life he was about to take that all important third step forward to a bigger team, in a better league only somehow, in the same country. Small town life in Middle America and Middle England had taught him that news travels fast, which is exactly the same as a small sport like Basketball. Once the grapevine kicked into gear, it needed only a few days since the announcement to make