City Of Basket Cases Japanese-American Relations Survive The Hoopfest Test

There were 442 Hoopfest teams who adhered to the dog-ate-my-homework philosophy of posting their entries.

Meaning they were late.

And meaning that Diane Sullivan, as one of Hoopfest’s charges d’affaires had to handle a slew of calls wondering if they’d get in anyway, as she did with a fellow named Jun Kitajima.

“When he called, I told him we were still doing the brackets and that it would be a few days,” she recalled. “He said he needed to know soon so he could call the other players to get their plane tickets. I said, ‘From where?’ and he said, ‘Japan.’

“I figured even if it wasn’t true, it was the best story I’d heard yet. So they were in.”

For the 250 teams which didn’t make it in, don’t get any ideas.

Or do. Call up three friends of friends - people you don’t know and have never played ball with from somewhere far across the sea - and ask them if they want to come to America and be like Mike, or at least one of the 17,000-odd beyond-reasonable facsimiles that make Hoopfest Hoopfest.

Just get it postmarked on time.

It’s been obvious from the start that the notion of Hoopfest has been one worth exporting, but to the extent it was worth importing has been cloudy.

Until now.

Sure, your relatives now show up on your doorstep every June. It’s a conga line of minivans on I-90 coming in from Missoula and Moses Lake.

But when you can get three guys to come 6,000 miles - at $1,400 a pop - on the word of someone they don’t even know to play a game they only occasionally bother with, well, that’s a sale.

And that’s four gents of Oreni Makasero. Loosely translated, we were advised later, it’s a male-ism for “we dominate.” Not untypical Hoopfest bravado, it was tempered considerably by the competition in the 18-24 bracket for teams 6 feet and under - much of which, as it happens, is being staged on the Hoopfest equivalent of the Pacific Rim, the Post Street Bridge. Every so often, a game ball sails over a not-high-enough chain link fence and into the thundering waters of the Spokane River - eventually, for all we know, to wash up in Yokohama harbor.

Gives new meaning to the plea, “Little help!”

But then, so do the men of Oreni Makasero.

This was the deal: Kitajima, a third-year student and inveterate intramural player at EWU, had an itch to scratch in Hoopfest. Conversations with friends had led him to believe he could recruit a team from students at Tokyo’s American University who would be coming to EWU for a summer Asian-American studies program.

That was true, as it happens, for Masaomi Nishidi and Yuichi Watanabe. But Oreni’s fourth, Takahisa Fukuyo, was coming only if he could play hoops - hence Kitajima’s anxious phone call to Sullivan.

So Taka plays a ton in Tokyo, hmm?

“Never,” he said, laughing.

But through Jun’s translation, Taka explained that “the whole point is to play basketball against Americans.”

“He just wanted to have the experience,” Jun said. “He said there’s no point coming to Spokane otherwise.”

Hey! Is that trash talk?

Hardly.

For what the Japanese visitors noticed immediately about Hoopfest is something we’ve discussed here before - it’s that melting pot America is supposed to be that surfaces so seldom in Spokane.

“A mosaic,” Taka called it. “So many different kinds of people.”

But all doing the same thing.

In Japan, Kitajima explained, basketball is just “we don’t have courts to play on outside. We have to play in gyms, and you have to pay money and usually the gym is already reserved, so people can’t get in to practice. Most people just quit playing.

“Also, in Japan, I’m kind of big (he’s 5-foot-9). I’m muscular. Here, I’m really skinny.”

By way of getting acquainted, Oreni Makasero practiced twice last week - and in the interim, Kitajima tried to calm his new friends’ predictable anxieties.

“He wondered if he could play against Americans,” Jun said, translating for Yui. “Because in Japan, we have stereotypes from watching the NBA on TV, that everybody in America is that good. So everybody was kind of worried.”

And he assured them how?

“That Americans are not that good,” he said. “Wait - that not all Americans are that good. Only some of them.”

Which is not exactly what Taka will tell them back home.

“I’m an NBA player now,” he joked.

Best story we’ve heard yet, all right.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Blanchette The Spokesman-Review