When the former Sports Illustrated reporter and author Alexander Wolff was looking over his notes from Big Game, Small World, notes he’d not considered much since the book’s release 20 years ago, he was struck by his chapter on the 1999 NBA Draft in Washington, D.C. The chapter has him attending the event alongside a UNC Wilmington professor who’d written his dissertation on the draft as a rite of passage, but Wolff recalls the night as pretty forgettable. Duke had a big night setting a record of four first round picks that began with Elton Brand at number one. Steve Francis was picked second. The draft class would produce some noteworthy careers and champions, but that all came much later. Also, in the category of “much later” was the second to last selection in the draft: with the 57th pick, the San Antonio Spurs took Manu Ginóbili of Argentina. An insignificant event that night that would produce a Hall of Famer. In Wolff’s notes, the selection was a small detail he jotted down from his hotel room.
“That to me, that was like this 20 years-later update—the little seed for that was dropped that night when my head was hitting the pillow,” he said.
Big Game, Small World was published in 2002, and is largely Wolff's reporting for Sports Illustrated up to 1999. He was tracking the spread of basketball on a global scale. The journey included 85 mph countryside drives through Lithuania to follow the national team, growing the game in Angola, war-torn airports in Sarajevo, a woman who sells men in Bosnia, player mutiny in Poland, convents in Alexandria, Virginia, Gus Macker tournaments in Florida, and rezball in Arizona with coach Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. In the book, some places he visits represent established zones poised to challenge on a global scale at the FIBA Cup and Olympics, while others are more remote and decades away from producing international stars. In Peoria, he’s tracking the crossover dribble training at Ft. Sooy that produces Shaun Livingston and over 20 NCAA Division 1 athletes. While in Brazil, women’s basketball reigned to a point that their best players were declining offers from Pat Summitt and beating WNBA All-Stars like Lisa Leslie and Sheryl Swoopes in international friendlies. At the time of Wolff’s reporting the WNBA was only three years old. Now, it’s leading civil rights movements, ousting politicians from its league, battling for equal representation in endorsements and television deals, and had one of its All-Stars become a political prisoner.
A great deal has happened since the publishing of Big Game, Small World. But, the seeds of what’s to come are planted in Wolff’s book.
The drafting of Ginóbili, in retrospect, guides basketball to this moment. It’s the catalyst that will revolutionize play. American children will have the euro-step in their arsenal at age 8. The Spurs will win rings with players from France, the Virgin Islands, China, Slovenia, Italy, Brazil, and Australia. By 2020, it will be difficult to name the Top 5 players in the league and not mention international players like Luka Dončić, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Joel Embiid and Nikola Jokic. Wolff’s book resides at the precipice of this moment. He’s tracking the existing information that has gone out into the world, and soon, the innovations created in those far-reaching regions will be sending players back that will shape how the next generation plays the game.
Even before he joined Sports Illustrated, Wolff was a college athlete who went on to play semi-professionally in Switzerland, an experience that makes it into the book. Here, Wolff meets a young man named Fesser Leonard, who struggles in the remote Swiss town as a target of racism and prejudice. There is a dark cloud over Leonard, especially after he is accused of stealing by a local woman, and he is eventually found dead after hanging himself in his apartment. Big Game, Small World mostly leans on the positive effects of the globalization of basketball, but Wolff has also witnessed first hand the conflicts and growing pains in the process. It happens early in his life, and while it is not a constant, these issues often loom just beyond the court.
Photo by Clara Wolff
I spoke to Alexander Wolff on the phone about the 20th anniversary edition of his book and we talked about the tragedy of Fesser “Stretch” Leonard.
[At the time of our discussion in October, Brittney Griner had not been released from Russia.]
Being in Switzerland and the incident with Fesser Leonard, it’s such a sad moment in the book. I’m curious about that experience, and how that shaped your understanding of how this game, as it travels through the world, had growing pains?
I thought a little bit about Stretch Leonard in connection with the Brittney Griner thing. That kind of loneliness and vulnerability that you can be subjected to. One, she’s black. She’s unusually tall. I’m sure she’s oversized in Russia in all sorts of ways, even if she was making a good living. That’s been a phenomenon with the American mercenary athlete brought overseas for a pretty long time. Particularly African Americans in, let’s face it, largely white, European settings. I would hesitate to blame basketball in any broad brush sense for the Stretch Leonard tragedy. To me, it was more likely a combination of his own demons and what was a pretty inhospitable environment. He was treated with hostility or weariness from the locals. You know, people weren’t looking out for him. I’m a little hesitant to jump to too many conclusions.
In the book you write of Switzerland “wanting basketball players and people showed up.” It’s a very powerful way to touch on a topic that pre-dates and echoes the phrase “shut-up and dribble.” There’s wanting the game and not truly wanting the people who play the game as their full selves.
In the Poland chapter there was the whole Richard Dumas saga. You can almost see a Fesser Leonard thing starting to play out there. The farther east you go in Europe the more that was going to be a thing. Switzerland in the 70s was very insular and very hostile to immigrants. It was still a society that wasn’t very welcoming to outsiders.
I do think today, notwithstanding what is going on with Brittney Griner right now, it is a little easier just because of some of the phenomena we talk about at the beginning of our conversation. People all over the world are consuming culture very similarly. Games are piped in. It’s not as foreign an environment. If you suddenly get dispatched to Malta or Romania to play, it’s not quite as lonely and devoid of something familiar. You can get a pizza everywhere in the world now. It’s the same way that culture has been homogenized. It’s not a good thing for the most part, but I think for the health and ability to flourish or at least survive in these foreign environments it would be a little bit easier for a guy like Fesser Leonard today.
Was playing in Switzerland as a teenager an impactful experience that put you on the path that became this book?
To some degree. The game was so crude at that point in the 1970s over there and I was playing for a third division club. On the flip side of that, my [Swiss] teammates were completely smitten by the game. I think I recognized that the idea they would ever go to Madison Square Garden just seemed impossible. The future where you could stream any game you want anywhere in the world, nobody could have conceived of that yet. I did have a little window into how much pent up passion there was even if the mastery wasn’t there. They knew who Julius Irving was, plus all the mercenary Americans who’d come through Switzerland and played, not in their league, in the French and Italian speaking parts of the country where the game was much better developed and funded by real sponsors. They did have a sense of the style of it and how it could be played at a super high level. Being exposed to that set me up a little bit.
What was the entry point then?
I was the beneficiary of this incredible timing once I’d joined the magazine in the early 80s. I was thrown on the basketball beat. In ‘82 I became a writer full-time. In ‘84 I get thrown this assignment for the Olympic preview issue before the LA games. More or less, if the U.S. is going to get beat—they're not gonna get beat—but in a parallel universe if they did, how would it happen? The Soviets were boycotting so it would either be Yugoslavia, Italy or Spain, we decided. I went to those three countries and talked to people. Tried to do diagrams. Xs and Os as to what they would pull. It was all basically a cocked up premise because it was going to be a coronation for the U.S. team. But it was my first exposure to elite national team basketball being played outside the U.S.
Yugoslavia was a powerhouse that was about to export some major players to the NBA in Vlade Divac, Dražen Petrović and Toni Kukoč. And the region continues to be a fertile home for basketball with Serbia delivering Nikola Jokic. What was your impression of Yugoslavia on that first trip?
I remember going to a game in Zagreb. It was basically the Celtics and the Lakers of what was then the United Yugoslav League. The place was packed and there was smoke in the air. It was kind of like what I imagine would be a big arena back in the late 50s. It had that feel to it. That was my first sense that there was something out there. Then you had these little things that would happen like the Atlanta Hawks—because Ted Turner was chummy with the Russians—they take a tour of the Soviet Union. It became a thing in the 80s. That cracks open the door. Then Alexander Volkov [of the USSR, now Ukraine] goes and plays for them. After Seoul, Sharunas Marčiulionis [of Lithuania] goes and plays. [Arvydas] Sabonis [from Lithuania] winds up playing. There’s a little bit of leakage of players coming over from Eastern Europe.
There’s hiccups along the way. There’s a Bulgarian guy who played for the Suns who was a bust. Mostly it’s big guys because you can’t teach height. It didn’t have a sense that it was changing the game yet, it’s just that the borders were starting to be permeable.
And in 1999?
What was happening by the time I worked on the book by the end of the 90s is that you had the Dream Team in ‘92 and you had enough of some of these non-Americans come into the NBA that they were starting to actually influence the NBA. Not just hanging on, but imposing themselves and what they could do stylistically and philosophically.
A guy like Toni Kukoč is a good example, probably the classic example. There was all this skepticism about him from Jordan and Pippen. He wasn’t a revolutionary player, but he brought a skillset—the idea that if you’re 6’11” you’re not necessarily going to play with your back to the basket. You’re not only going to face the basket, you’re going to pass and dribble and shoot three point jumpshots.
You’re going to get the rebound, dribble up the court, and make the play ahead to somebody.
Right. U.S. guys would do that. Magic and Barkley would both do that.
But they were the unicorns of that era.
They were, and the Euros who would come to do it. Kukoč was just one. Vlade is a great example too. A great passing center with great skills. Now what we see, which is my great takeaway since the original edition came out, is you see James Harden doing the Manu eurostep and you see KD lift his knee up high like Dirk does. You see the high ball screens, hell, all the offenses from travel teams on up to the NBA, you see a high ball screen and a guard cutting off of it and the world opening up to him. That’s very, very European. That’s the moment over the course of the last 20 years. The knowledge is going both ways. It’s not some state department sponsored guy being sent to Moldova to run a clinic. Who knows, the Moldovan national team stud might come over and put some rankle into a roster. It’s the transfer of knowledge to me that’s so exciting, but it’s also totally predictable. There are no borders now.
You can sign up for NBA League Pass in any country on the planet, whereas when I was working on the book it was a big deal that the point guard from the Ivory Coast grew up in this high rise next to a basketball court and on the roof of the high rise had a satellite dish. So he could watch Iverson play. That explained the way he played.
Or the fact that there are more NBA fans than in any country on earth in China as opposed to the U.S. That is because it is now possible to watch NBA games whenever you want in China.
I recently watched the Redeem Team documentary and so much of that felt relevant to reading your chapter about China. Kobe Bryant has replaced Michael Jordan as the basketball icon of China. But it’s because he carries so many qualities that they admire in Jordan. He has that emperor quality.
I watched that doc too and I’d been struck by that same sense that Kobe was Michael’s heir in China. For me the great counter example of that is Grant Hill. How come they don’t love Grant Hill? Big Tsu, my minder over there, reminded me it’s because he doesn’t have the qualities of an emperor. He’s a nice player. He’s skilled and he’s talented. He doesn’t have that ‘put my stamp on the proceedings quality’ that the other players have.
It’s also interesting that at that time in China, they didn’t want to watch the Chinese league. It wasn’t up to snuff and nobody was going to fool them. It’s just like how they know what real Nikes are and what the knock off is.
The book was at the precipice of the explosion. Now, these same situations have geopolitical consequences. Players and GMs are under fire for speaking about China’s relationship with Hong Kong. That’s where basketball is at. It’s in the conversation on some of the biggest issues on the planet.
Yeah, what happened after I did the book too is the whole Dennis Rodman going to North Korea thing. And in the book, I do talk about the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. Guys working out in this gym and saying they’ll never bomb this gym because there’s too many NBA prospects here. And that’s just kind of a laugh line. A whistling past the graveyard laugh line. But you’re right. It’s so broadly integrated now internationally. We know that Kim Jong Un is a huge NBA fan. If there’s any way to crack open the door of that place, basketball has as good a chance of doing it as anything.
Ambassador Rodman, who did end up securing the release of a political prisoner, which is just wild.
Dennis specializes in wild.
In the coda of the China chapter, you take your friend Big Tsu from China to West 4th, the legendary outdoor court in the West Village, and you break his brain by showing him community-run leagues. He’s seen a new path of community, rather than state-sponsored tournaments, and he wants to take it back to his country.
When it comes to organized sports in China, it’s still very rigid and regimented and bureaucratized and all that. I think I mentioned how Patrick Bauman, the late FIBA chief, told me how they were trying to institute this whole 3x3 thing and they’re trying to get the federations to just let go and let it grow at the grassroots. The Argentine federation was like we can’t do that! We need to be in charge!
It’s the entropy that is basketball. The spirit and essence of the game is entropic. Woe be unto you who tries to step in and keep this thing from tentacling out the way it wants to.
Yes, the new preface illustrates that there are so many ways through community organizing and social media that you can practically build your own league with an international viewership.
One of the fun things that happened in the last 10 years, there’s been the explosion of the 3x3 game that FIBA has. Very unlike FIBA they pay a lot of attention to the grassroots. They realize the technology now exists with an app that can empower anybody to start a 3x3 team and enter a tournament. What’s great about that is you're seeing these teams excel in these tournaments and they’re from countries like Andora or Thailand. They don’t have to be highly developed countries. They don’t have to be huge countries. All you need is three players and a sub. Before you know it, you’re entering a competition and winning it and moving on to the next. When you get to the elite level the medals and trophies are going to who you’d expect for the most part, but every now and then somebody sneaks in for a bronze. That’s pretty cool. That’s the basketball that in my very first book, The In-Your-Face Basketball Book, that’s the basketball that I fell in love with. Really you can go from the streets to the Olympics. In the preface I write about this street crew from Tokyo that I ran into and they represented Japan at the Olympics and they are not part of a basketball club. They’re part of an urban collective that’s into art, and music, and hip hop, and graffiti. That’s about as modern as it gets. Twenty years ago no way could I have seen that on the horizon.
When you were looking back on this book, in reviewing your writing, were there things that you could tell were on your mind, but you weren’t entirely conscious of?
I wanted to get to Australia for the original book, but it wasn’t enough to just go to that place. I needed to have a real story that encapsulated the place. I couldn’t find my way into Australia. Come to find out I had to wait 15 to 17 years for that story to emerge, but damned if I wasn’t going to tell it.
That and the 3x3 and the internationalization of the whole Gus Macker concept was begging to be told. Also the athlete activist. What was nice about Patty Mills is that he is that on an international scale. He played for the Spurs which is Pop’s team and is so international and activist anyway, but he had this amazing personal story and he was so invested in telling it and redressing his country’s shameful history. His was the story that melded my unfinished business with the original book and globally where we are today. He was the guy.
When I needed to write a new preface for the new edition and I was wondering where do I start, it became obvious there were all these logical tie-ins or outgrowths from the original book. They are pretty meaningful. I’d written up Patty’s story for the magazine and it really fit in here.
When the book takes place, the sense of the athlete activist is still in that lingering era of “Republicans buy shoes too” and Mahmoud Abdul Rauf’s refusal to stand for the national anthem wasn’t…
It wasn’t a movement yet. It took Obama, I think, and then The Bubble and George Floyd are the tipping point. It was interesting to see the reaction to Mahmoud because it was kinda fidgety nervousness. David Stern was the one who essentially blackballed Craig Hodges for essentially being a community activist more or less. He was raising some uncomfortable truths. I don’t want to put it all on David Stern, but there was clearly a whiff of what went on with Kaepernick in the NFL. Craig Hodges was expendable. Kaepernick caused more of a stir because he quarterbacked a team to the Super Bowl.
In the 90s you’re talking about the Jerry McGuire era. Jordan dominated that era. He was so rigidly a-political. As was Julius Irving. Kareem was kind of the exception. But then people kind of wrote him off as angry and quirky. Sports writers didn’t know how to interact with him. It really took the Obama-era to bring that to fruition. That wasn’t a central focus of my new preface, it wasn’t necessarily an international and basketball related thing, it was a basketball in general thing. That’s the beauty of Patty Mills. His life story, his biography is so tied up in that stuff. It wasn’t an American story. It was an Australian story, but it still had a Black Lives Matter quality to it.
One of my favorite chapters in the book tells an anecdote about discovering an obscure book called Enlightenment Through The Art of Basketball by Hirohide Ogawa. It’s a very funny passage as you passionately seek out the Japanese ex-professional turned author only to find a polite Englishman. But, much like you that intersection of sport and spirituality spoke to me, no matter the source. That passage was an early inspiration for Sacred.
It’s funny when I realized the book was kind of a hoax, I felt for about 10 seconds disappointment or betrayal. Then I realized no one was really trying to pull one over on anybody. There’s a lot here. I tried to readjust my attitude on it. It was helpful in shedding some light on what I wanted to write about.
It was a very funny story. Discovering the book in a London bookshop, trying to track down an author that didn’t exist, and then the guy actually having mercy on me by confessing so I wouldn’t run around half of Japan trying to find the guy.
You would have done it?
I might well of done it. Or I would have kept haranguing people. Wasting their time. What do you mean you haven’t heard of this guy? He’s famous!
As the game continues to travel the globe, it just feels like basketball is a unique sport in which people can draw deeper understandings about life that go beyond the physical activity.
I’m more of a basketball person than anything else. I was exposed to enough sports to have a sense of their differences. I can’t think of any other sport that is so suspended; you know, the jump shot. One moment you can be sprinting the 94 feet to block a shot and the next moment you have to take a bunch of deep breaths to calm yourself for a free throw. It’s just… there’s so many different situations you get placed in during the course of the game that it really tests the whole person mentally and physically. I think that’s one of the reasons it’s so beguiling.
The 20th Anniversary Edition of Alexander Wolff’s Big Game, Small World is out now on Duke Press. To check out more of Wolff’s books, visit his website.