Philly basketball players are at play everywhere

WROCLAW, Poland - Six time zones from home, a ballplayer from South Philadelphia sends a basketball crowd, a flag-waving Polish basketball crowd, to its feet.

After he has taken over the game, Rashid Atkins looks pretty excited himself: He whips off his headband and tosses it in the air, throws the basketball high into the crowd, and flings his own jersey off.

Far from his days growing up at 23d and Tasker, Atkins isn't alone. He shares his position with another Philly point guard, a second-year professional from the city's Germantown section.

"A complete coincidence," Dawan Robinson, a former Philadelphia Public League scoring champion at Martin Luther King High, said of landing on the same club as Atkins, a former Big Five player of the year (1996-97) who went by the name of Rashid Bey when he played at St. John Neumann High and St. Joseph's.

But is their connection so random? Over the last decade, so many local players have forged lucrative careers overseas that the mantra of generations of high school coaches - don't even dream of a pro career, use the game to get an education - may no longer ring true. These days, dozens of Philadelphians make a living playing hoops around the globe, many earning six-figure salaries. The best of them, like former Temple star Lynn Greer, rake in NBA-type money - he got a two-year deal worth $7 million to leave the Milwaukee Bucks this season and join Olympiakos, a top Greek club. One of Greer's teammates is his fellow Owl, Marc Jackson, a former 76er.

Wroclaw is a 10-centuries-old university and manufacturing community of 635,000 in southwestern Poland. While its arena may not be an NBA venue, on a chilly early February night, it was full, packed with over 3,000 shrieking, stomping, hardcore fans and cavorting cheerleaders. Polish national TV was broadcasting, and the level of play was surprisingly high. And yes, it is possible to dream of playing in the NBA even in this remote outpost - Greer once wore these same green and red colors and is remembered fondly in Wroclaw. Robinson, Slask Wroclaw's leading scorer, played preseason ball in 2006 with the Los Angeles Clippers, and he hopes his experience here is a path to "the league."

But if the University of Rhode Island graduate doesn't make it in the NBA, he can make a good living abroad, as Robinson and Atkins and their Philadelphia compatriots have discovered. Both say their salaries are in "six figures." In addition, there are free housing and a car, three months off in the summer, and decided tax advantages.

"That's Wall Street money," Atkins said, mentioning that his wife back home in Philadelphia can't find a job matching that package. "She's got a finance and biology degree from Penn."

Atkins, 32, is on his third Polish team. In fact, he was working on taking out Polish citizenship last year after being sounded out about becoming the point guard on the national team, an idea set aside after he suffered a knee injury that required surgery late last season.

Tough guards who honed their game in Philly - from Norristown's Marques Green in Italy to Temple's Pepe Sanchez in Spain to Penn's Michael Jordan in Belgium - have become increasingly prized commodities around the world. "I have the two best point guards in Poland," bragged Slask Wroclaw's Lithuanian coach, Rimas Kurtinaitis, unaware that Robinson and Atkins grew up in the same city.

Atkins and Robinson like to think there's something about the culture of Philadelphia basketball that exports well.

"The way we're taught, especially in Philly, you've got to dominate your man," said Atkins, a St. John Neumann product.

"Kill him," Robinson added.

But the way international teams have gotten the better of the United States in recent years, including at the last Olympics, where the Americans could muster only a bronze medal - that style is taught every day on the club level. Guards need to make the pass at just the right moment off a pick even if they could just as easily get to the rim or take the jumper.

"You take any of these players and take them to a summer league game in Philly, they'd get demolished," Atkins said of his European teammates. "But here, running off screens . . ."

There's a different mentality here, he said. Americans are taught from a young age that the goal is to get to college ball. In Europe, players come up through the club system and are taught to be professionals.

Kurtinaitis, a Lithuanian who was one of the great shooters in European history - he won an Olympic gold medal in 1988 playing for the Soviet Union - is Slask Wroclaw's third coach this season. He has his team practice twice a day, running for most of it, even the day before games. At first, the Americans thought this was just temporary, to put in his system. Now, they see it is permanent. Kurtinaitis tells his players that if they play more than five minutes in a game and aren't tired, they aren't working hard enough.

Atkins -- whose name was Atkins Bey at St. Joe's, but he shortened it when he turned pro -- said Philly players are adaptable. There are more Philadelphia players in the Polish first division than players from New York or any other city.

"A lot of those guys seem to be uncoachable," Atkins said of New York players. "They wouldn't listen to these coaches. . . . Before, they had so many guys here from Chicago. But those guys are crazy. They'd get drunk and want to fight the coach."

Typical of a seasoned professional, Atkins has a full European resume. Right out of St. Joe's, he did a quick stint in Slovakia. Then he played in a little village in Poland and fired his agent after that ordeal. Next, he went to Switzerland, Turkey and Israel, then back to Turkey, and then to the biggest club in Poland, before moving to Wroclaw this season.

"My agent keeps sending me to Poland," Atkins said.

The Philly guys are lucky that Slask Wroclaw has a coach who usually speaks English at practice. Atkins said his coach last season spoke only Polish. Another player with Philly ties, St. Joe's graduate Chet Stachitas, who grew up in Wyndmoor and played his share of Sonny Hill and Positive Image ball before moving to Florida for high school, now plays for Polpharma, a smaller Polish club near the Baltic Sea. His coach speaks Polish, and an assistant sort of translates.

"Broken English seems to be the international language of basketball," said Stachitas, who played for another Polish club that folded last October, leaving him out $3,500.

Other Polish clubs have Philly players. Widener graduate Kris Clarkson, out of Overbrook (Pa.) High, averages 14.6 points for Gornik Walbrzych, a smaller first-division club. Another first-division team, AZS Koszalin, just picked up a new guard, Phil Goss, out of Drexel; the team already had Christian Burns from Philadelphia University.

The team that Slask Wroclaw was playing that night, Prokom Trefl Sopot, the league's richest club, has yet another point guard from Philly. But Friends' Central graduate Mustafa Shakur didn't make the long bus ride from his town near Gdansk, up by the Baltic Sea. He was out with a back injury.

If basketball fans in the U.S. are surprised that Shakur, a former high school all-American and University of Arizona star cut by the Sacramento Kings just before this season, is in Poland, the fact that Shakur is on a Euroleague club right out of college is, in fact, a big deal. The continent-wide Euroleague is easily the second-best league in the world after the NBA. There are only two other such rookies in the 24-team league.

It's not like the NBA, where rookies can sit or go to the Development League. In the Euroleague, Americans play or get cut. Camden's DaJuan Wagner also did a stint with Prokom, but was never fully healthy and left the club over Christmas.

Robinson, who grew up on Woodlawn Street in Germantown, puts his thoughts of getting to the NBA at "60-40." In addition to its domestic play, Slask Wroclaw played this season in the ULEB Cup, the second tier of European competition. That's why Robinson decided to sign here, he said. With the club playing several ULEB Cup games a month, Robinson has flown to Moscow, to Athens and Lyon, to the Canary Islands.

Robinson had been the top scorer in France's second division last season, but his agent needed to offer more proof of his professionalism. The key recommendation came from Tony DiLeo, the 76ers' senior vice president and assistant general manager. DiLeo, who had watched Robinson work out last summer with Sixers players, told his Slask Wroclaw counterpart, among other things, that Robinson is "a winning-type player" and "an NBA defender."

Except for the occasional familiar word - halibut - there wasn't much recognizable on the menu, and the staff spoke only Polish.

After a couple of minutes, Robinson and his girlfriend, Jennifer Simbaqueva, who had quit her job in Rhode Island over Christmas to join him in Wroclaw, decided to switch to an Italian place with a more familiar menu. Robinson sent a text message to Atkins about their plans. He caught up just as some water was brought to the table.

"These Slavic languages are not easy," Atkins said over pasta. "It's not easy to pick up a dictionary and say, 'All right, I want to learn this word.' Most letters are pronounced different" - he offered a little tutorial on how the W is pronounced as a V, the J is pronounced as a Y, and to get a J, you combine a D and Z. "And the way things are conjugated, the whole word changes."

They probably wouldn't make perfect spokesmen for any Polish chamber of commerce - Robinson and Atkins both offered only long pauses when asked separately what they like about Poland - but they feel they are lucky to be in Wroclaw, with well-stocked supermarkets and choices for dinner at 9 p.m. The night before, Robinson and his girlfriend had seen the movie Cloverfield.

Dawan and Jennifer mostly eat in their one-bedroom, fourth-story apartment on the city's outskirts. Jennifer brought Goya spices from home to liven up their dinners, usually chicken. Robinson learned to drive a stick shift last year in Limoges, France, and he gets around this sprawling city easily. But the language barrier is tougher than a full-court press. For instance: the time they tried to exchange some sheets.

"They thought we stole them," Robinson said. "They were in the bag. I said, 'I don't want them. I want to return them!' They brought security. Nobody spoke English. They were like, 'Where do you get them?' I'm like, 'Yo, I've got the receipt right here.' . . . We finally just left."

A couple of decades after the Iron Curtain disappeared, Poland overwhelmingly remains a country of Poles. Playing last season on the Baltic Sea, Atkins ate in a Chinese restaurant. His curiosity got the better of him, and he walked back to the kitchen. He found a Polish cook.

"I went to China and got some recipes," the cook told him.

The guidebooks highlight Wroclaw's Gothic spires soaring into the skyline and all the canals - Wroclaw has the fourth-most bridges in Europe - as well as the "blooming cultural scene and nightlife." But away from the cobblestoned central square, Wroclaw is mostly a working city of smokestacks and endless apartment complexes.

It isn't always a city of pleasantries. Robinson has found that you can hold a door for somebody who won't necessarily look your way walking by.

"It's going to take a generation," Atkins predicted, for more post-communism openness to arrive.

You can't blame the locals for not welcoming every non-Polish speaking visitor with a smile. Wroclaw is not far from the present Czech and German borders. Since the first settlers, members of a Slavic Slezan tribe over 1,000 years ago, Wroclaw has been razed by marauding Tartars, then ruled by Czechs, Bohemians, Austrians, and Prussians.

The 17th century brought the 30 Years' War and the plague. Wroclaw eventually became Breslau, a German city for two centuries. It was ethnically cleansed by the Nazis, and the city basically turned to rubble by the end of World War II. Afterward, the Germans were sent back to Germany by the Communists, and Poles brought in from villages to the East to repopulate the city.

There are still lingering reminders of this haunted past, such as when Atkins talked about Slask Wroclaw's old arena where he had played as a visitor.

"Perfect acoustics," Atkins said. "The Nazis built it for Hitler."

Within the Polish League, the team takes a bus, sometimes for seven or eight hours. The bus has a couple of televisions, and the last five rows are beds.

Around town, the players all have company cars, little Daewoo compact sedans from South Korea, which have the name of the team and its sponsor, a security company, painted on. A lot of the Polish players, who figure to stay with the club long-term, have their own names painted on the side of the car.

A young Polish player told Atkins that the club had just painted his name on his car, a sign that the club wanted to keep him.

"That thing is like a tracking device," Atkins told his teammate about the name being painted on the door. "They'll know when you're out late at night."

When the Daewoos pull up to the arena, half the ballplayers are Polish, but the rest are as imported as their cars. Slask Wroclaw's roster includes two Lithuanians and two Serbs, a Swedish center and a Bosnian forward, plus its four Americans.

Under league rules, at least one Polish player has to be on the court all the time. The club likes to get its Polish players even more involved.

However, the biggest paychecks typically go to the Americans. Kurtinaitis knows his most talented players are sacrificing for the team. He used his highest compliment - "professional" - to describe his two point guards. He mentioned how during the game, Robinson said to him he was sitting too long on the bench.

Kurtinaitis told him: "Come on, man, just wait. We make them tired, then you come in, then you are fresh, we'll kill them."

That's how it played out, with both Philly guards out there together. Robinson caused a key turnover, but it was Atkins  who took over against his former team, hitting jumpers, driving and dishing for assists, grabbing a key steal. His surgically repaired knee was finally feeling a little better - Atkins had 20 percent of his patella tendon removed last spring - and he finished with 15 points, 12 assists and nine steals. Then he did a quick TV interview and headed to a multilingual news conference.

An hour later, Slask Wroclaw's cramped basement locker room was empty except for Atkins. The shower offered only cold water.

It's not a pampered life. Atkins hadn't been sure about returning to Poland after Christmas, after the coach who had brought him here got fired. It is obvious, though, that Atkins still has affection for the game; his jersey flying off at the end made that clear. But this ballplayer from 23d and Tasker remembers the words of his uncle in South Philly - "You're not that good until you do it for a living" - and Atkins knows that as well as he is doing, making decent Wall Street money, there are bigger paychecks around the globe.

In the quiet of the locker room, Atkins said: "I think this coach is going to get me paid."