A Foreign Game

A youthful Boston University men's basketball team took to the hardwood in Kainan, Taiwan, for a little conversation in the international language of basketball and came home with more than just a championship trophy. The Terriers spent this summer together on a campus thousands of miles away. And the few days they played in a world leagues different from their own just may make the difference between winning and losing this winter. At the end of May, the Boston University men's basketball team played teams from Hong Kong, Japan and Canada in the Kainan University International Basketball Invitational. The Terriers earned themselves a championship trophy, beating out the University of British Columbia in the final, but the experience changed more than just the contents of a trophy case. While BU coach Dennis Wolff said that the trip couldn't have been any better from strictly a basketball standpoint, he also said it was about having the opportunity to get a young team together in the offseason, away from the draws of school and learning about different cultures, and vice versa. "The main purposes of the tournament are to promote the internationalization of our school, strengthen Kainan University's ties with other schools, promote intercultural understanding, and help everyone - coaches, teams, players, students, faculty and outside fans alike - have a good time through some great basketball games. We think we've been pretty successful in this so far," said Kainan spokeswoman Venus Chang in an email. Terrier players made the gesture of attempting simple mandarin phrases such as nee hao, but what they thought meant "hello" in fact meant "how are you?" Responses to their attempts at the local language were naturally indecipherable. Even with the language barriers, America East Rookie of the Year Tyler Morris said that on Kainan's camus, the Terriers were treated like rock stars, especially Ibrahim Konate, the 6-foot-8 forward from Bamako, Mali. "Ib was the man over there. They thought he was like some sort of god resurrected in Taiwan," Morris said. "They just loved him. I thought it was the funniest thing ever. We were all like, 'You go back to reality in a couple days, you better soak this up.'" "When teams go over there they are treated like gold and made to feel quite special," said UBC coach Kevin Hanson in an email. "This is always a healthy thing for the student athlete." During their weeklong stay, the Terriers visited a national museum, a small fishing village and an antiquated shopping area, among other places. Wolff noted that the pigs tied up traffic on the city streets, not something he is used to seeing every day. The Kainan campus organized activities such as a demonstration of Chinese hand puppets, which were given as gifts to players. Visiting teams had the opportunity to reciprocate the gestures with some culture of their own, and BU offered gifts of various Terrier apparel and performed skits that included a performance of the "Macarena" and dancing to Right Said Fred's "I'm Too Sexy." The Terriers, who didn't have the financial resources in past years to take such a trip, went as the guests of Kainan. Morris, who netted 20 in the final game, called it the "experience of a liftime." "Kainan, which is Taiwan's fastest-growing university, is particularly interested in forming ties with schools in the Boston area," Chang said. "This is both because of our existing ties there and because Boston - as a center for higher education in North America and a vibrant, fascinating city - is one of the best places in the world for students from Kainan to spend a semester abroad. Wolff said he did not expect to host Kainan in Boston in the future, but plans on looking into more trips of this nature in the future. According to regulations, Division I schools are only allowed to play overseas once every four years, a rule that is meant to "stop the big shots from getting invited places," Wolff said. But similar regulations do not exist for Canadian squads, which therefore operate on more of a two-way street in the exchanges between the schools. "These types of competitions are good for us, as we can use these for recruiting purposes," Hanson said. "We try to go somewhere every two years. As for the relationships part we are representing the university and the two universities really benefit through the exchanges of Faculty and Students. "The trip really becomes about building relationships," Hanson added. So for BU, the purposes and results are smaller than the air-mileage would indicate. The invitation to Kainan could have not been timed any better for the Terriers, a team which a little over a year ago was looking to regain direction after five players left the team amid a torrent of controversy but still managed a third-place finish in the America East Conference with four freshman logging starters' minutes. With the pieces now in place, it was time to improve on the already good chemistry - the final and perhaps most important attribute for any successful team. Evidence says the Terriers have improved, simply by the fact that the team, which had lost all four of its overtime matches last season and only scored 80 points once, overcame four- and five-point deficits at the end of the championship game's regulation and overtime periods to gut out a double-overtime victory and top the century mark in points. "Sometimes [last year] it seemed we didn't really know how to react in the overtimes and really put teams away," Morris said. "It was kind of like, 'Oh yeah, we're in overtime.' It wasn't like, 'Yeah were in overtime and let's put them away now.' We kind of just laid back and hoped to win instead of just going and winning a ballgame. "I think that's something as we get older and play together more," he continued. "I think that's something we'll be able to do: put teams away and step on their throats when they're there. I was really pleased to see that we were able to do that." Wolff has often said that with a handful of different bounces of the ball last year's 12-18 (8-8 America East) record could have been reversed. If BU's performance under pressure in front of 5,000 fans - ten times more than they usually attract at home - in Taiwan is any indication, a reversal might be in their fortunes. The Terriers' end-game cohesiveness all came despite a tournament schedule featuring schools such as Tohoku Gakuin University (Japan) and Hong Kong Polytechnic University which were coached by American-educated basketball minds but featured talent below the standards of the elite college basketball conferences in Division I. "The competition the first three games were awful. I mean, ridiculous," Wolff said. "You and me could have beaten the Vietnamese team. But the Canadians were decent. They were like a Division I team." "There really isn't pressure in the games. You can play everyone and you are going to win," Hanson said. But while the competition was mostly far from their standards, the Terriers still fought hard in the double-overtime victory against UBC, 105-98, that had the Kainan crowd cheering for both sides. So in the end, it all comes back to basketball. Back to Corey Lowe's 34-point outburst and game-winning drive. Back to Matt Wolff scoring 20 points in his first game action in over a year in the championship game against UBC. Wolff couldn't let go of his graduating seniors, Omari Peterkin and Brian Macon, without bringing them on the trip as well and even letting them coach the game against Hochiminh City Technical Education University (Vietnam) - a game that featured a moment which made even Wolff do a double take. "I just said to them before the game, 'We don't want to embarrass them,'" Wolff said. "So Corey ended up on breakaway and went up and dunked it hard. And the kid from Vietnam is giving him skin as he's running back and the ref is trying to hug him. You're sitting down on the endline and you're thinking, 'Did I just see that right?'" "I threw him an alley-oop and he dunked it ridiculously hard," Morris added. "I don't even know, he caught it and just slammed it home and the ref was just going berserk. He had never seen anything like it." Sometimes, it seems, it takes just a ball shoved really hard through a hoop to break even the most rigid language barriers. But even though the teams couldn't get nee hao right, at least they were getting it wrong together, and that's all a coach can ask for.