Thunder from Down Under

New Zealand has been the surprise at Worlds

INDIANAPOLIS -- How chronically bad was New Zealand basketball only two years ago? Since 1971 the Kiwis had gone 1-36 against Australia in Oceania Zone play. They'd appeared in an Olympics or a World Championships just twice, and then only when the Aussies had qualified automatically, which opened up a spot for a second country from international basketball's most geographically far-flung region.

The lousy performances of all New Zealand entrants at the last Olympics spawned a joke going around Sydney, in reference to a certain leading man then publicly canoodling with Meg Ryan: "The only Kiwi scoring at these Games is Russell Crowe."

And then, during last September's Oceania championships, the Tall Blacks made history. Despite playing without 6-foot-11 Sean Marks, the former Cal and current Miami Heat center, and Kirk Penney, the shooting guard who'll return to Wisconsin in a few weeks for his senior season, they nonetheless took two of three from the Aussies to sew up a trip to these Worlds. To beat Oz, said Phill Jones, the sweet-shooting swingman who plays his club ball for Cantu of Italy's Serie A, was "almost orgasmic."

I fielded an anguished e-mail from an Aussie friend in the aftermath of that loss, which would cause the Boomers to miss their first Worlds since 1967. He was generous in his praise for New Zealand but couldn't imagine the silver fern doing anything but wilting in the States. "NZ are hard-nosed, but will not win any games in Indy unless they beat the African countries," he wrote.

Yet here we are, two days into the Worlds, with the Tall Blacks 2-0 and certain to advance to the second round regardless of what happens Saturday evening against Argentina. They've beaten Russia and Venezuela, in each case overcoming early double-digit deficits. The team's defeat of Yugoslavia, at a tuneup tournament in Braunschweig, Germany, in mid-August, had come the same way, on a late 3-pointer by point forward Pero Cameron, a 6-8, 265-pound former rugby player, after the Kiwis had trailed by 20.

It's all been enough to cause Marc Hinton of the Sunday Star-Times of Auckland to send dispatches back home full of references to Hoosiers.

To the real Hoosiers in Conseco Fieldhouse and the RCA Dome, the Kiwis must seem a bit more exotic than Hickory High. The Tall Blacks perform the haka, a traditional Maori dance, before every game. Think of those defensive slide drills you see at Five Star, only with chanting and gesticulation. The haka is both a sign of respect for your opponent and an expression of your own determination to meet a challenge. The New Zealanders expect opponents to look on politely, but the Russians turned their backs and the Venezuelans derisively imitated the haka's movements, infuriating their American coach, Jim Calvin, who had warned his players not to let the haka get into their heads. "They misunderstood," Cameron, one of four Tall Blacks of Maori descent, said of the Venezuelans. "It's just to prepare us to go into battle, to do what it takes."

Less exotic is the Tall Blacks' American coach, Tab Baldwin. In 1981, fresh out of Notre Dame, he took a job as a grunt with an accounting firm in Chicago. Not two years later he quit to follow his bliss. He became a grad assistant at Auburn-Montgomery, then a full assistant at Central Florida. In 1988 he began coaching club teams in New Zealand and, upon taking over the national team for the Goodwill Games in Brisbane last year, he made an immediate mark, leading the Kiwis past Brazil and Canada.

The Tall Blacks run the legendary triangle offense, and when the guru of trilateral basketball, Tex Winter, passed through New Zealand for a series of clinics several years ago, Baldwin attached himself to the Texster like a remora. "The perception is we're not supposed to be here," said Baldwin. "Though that's just perception. Reality's out on the court. We're not the biggest country on the planet, but in our mind we're pretty important."

Safe to say that the New Zealanders -- with their triangle, toughness and nod to indigenous culture -- are a team after Phil Jackson's heart.

The game in New Zealand is still fragile. Rugby dominates sporting culture, and the national league, with only nine teams and but a single game a week, isn't much of an incubator. But the Tall Blacks' dramatic move to parity with the Boomers raises the question: If soccer can invite 32 teams to the World Cup, why can't basketball expand the field at its quadrennial jamboree from 16 to, say, 24? As it is, four of the top five finishers in Sydney -- France, Lithuania and Italy, as well as Australia -- aren't even in Indy. Such European stalwarts as Croatia, Greece and Slovenia could also hold their own here, as could one more representative each from Africa (Nigeria would be my nominee) and Asia (the Koreans' style would be a huge hit with the locals).

Certainly, the Kiwis are making the case that there are enough worthy national teams to fill out a larger field -- that (to use an Oceania-appropriate image) the rising tide of the global hoops vogue is lifting all boats.

During the Sydney Olympics a picture of the team doing the haka ran in an American newspaper under the headline THEY CAN'T PLAY, BUT THEY SURE CAN DANCE.

Sweetheart, get me rewrite.

Sports Illustrated senior writer Alexander Wolff is author of Big Game, Small World: A Basketball Adventure, available online and in bookstores everywhere. He can be reached at http://www.biggamesmallworld.com.

 

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