So it is now it is 20 days that I am in Israel playing for the National Basketball Team and I have to say that it has been an eye opening experience. The first thing I notice is the passion and intensity that each country plays with. We had 3 games in 3 days including Holland, Great Britain, and Belgium and all of them were hard fought games that fortunately we won. The most exciting game was definitely the Great Britain game we played. There were a few great individual performances as well as some incredible highlight dunks and some big shots made down the stretch . However, the most exciting part was watching and hearing the Great Britain cheering section. It was the GB under 20 team making all the noise and showing so much enthusiasm for their team. <\/P>
They were acting as if they had just won all the games they played when in fact they had lost all of their games. It reminded me of when I was younger and basketball was just a game to get excited about and to not worry about the results. I guess things change with time and at this point of my career, life and ability to support a family is based upon wins and loses and how well you play. However, seeing those young fellas enjoying the game and the friendship they seemed to have with each other really put things in perspective for me and reminded me that basketball is still just a game and there is more important things than winning and losing.<\/P>
Having said that, it is off to Bari Italy yesterday for our first game in this summer 2010 basketball campaign. I have played with or against all the guys on the Italian team so it should be really interesting to see them again all these years later. Mostly I am excited because now is the time when the games count. Now is the time when all the physical and mental preparation become reality and this whole summer basketball sleep over camp thing actually becomes a WAR on the court.<\/P>
I believe our chance of doing well this summer are good mainly because of the fact that Israel has put together such a great team and staff. So far our delegation of coaches, players, medical staff, and team managers has done a great job of preparing and executing what needs to be done to have a successful campaign. Everybody is very professional and more importantly very kind. I have really been welcomed with open arms by the team and it means a lot that the guys think of me as one of them.<\/P>
Thats all for this week. I hope next week I begin with a story about a glorious trip to Italy including a big win and some Amarone to celebrate. Stay tuned….<\/P><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Blu: “I believe our chance of doing well this summer are good. It means a lot that the guys think of me as one of them.” <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":29820,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"custom_author":[],"class_list":["post-29845","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-other"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maccabi.co.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29845","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maccabi.co.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maccabi.co.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maccabi.co.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maccabi.co.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29845"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/maccabi.co.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29845\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":495575,"href":"https:\/\/maccabi.co.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29845\/revisions\/495575"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maccabi.co.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29820"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maccabi.co.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29845"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maccabi.co.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29845"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maccabi.co.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29845"},{"taxonomy":"custom_author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maccabi.co.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/custom_author?post=29845"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}