NBA players offer a major assist to Africa

PHILADELPHIA – With the NBA season over, players, coaches and administrators who aren’t obsessed with the June 28 draft have scattered to the four winds. But a new breeze is sending many from around the league to Africa, a continent long neglected, for both humanitarian missions and an increasing emphasis on potential player development.

The National Basketball Players’ Association announced Wednesday that it will send a 10-player contingent to Kenya next month, partnering with Feed the Children, to help distribute 11 million pounds of rice to try to feed 1 million people. The league’s Basketball Without Borders program will once again be in South Africa in late summer, where it has sent players to clinics for many years.

And the continuing efforts of Cavaliers forward Ira Newble to draw attention to the ongoing genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan will continue, with Newble traveling to that area next month.

The union has made humanitarian trips to Kenya – where, according to Feed the Children president Larry Jones, unemployment runs at 50 percent and about 500 people each day die from AIDS – for the last couple of years, working with former NBA player Kermit Washington’s Project Hope. This distribution, an in-kind donation from the Republic of Taiwan, is its biggest endeavor to date.

“We do a lot of events during our season that, a lot of times, are either required by the NBA or through our teams,” union president Derek Fisher said. “And an event of this magnitude is something that we’re choosing to do separately from our teams… . To do this type of event is refreshing to us.”

The union did not provide specific dates of the trip or names of the players who will be going because of the unstable political environment in Kenya, where a bomb blast in Nairobi last week killed one man and injured 37 others.

Billy Hunter, the executive director of the Players’ Association, said that the union might expand its efforts to other countries such as Angola in the near future.

Newble got the signatures of 11 of his Cavaliers teammates on a petition last month calling attention to China’s role in supplying economic aid to the Sudanese government, which has been killing and uprooting the non-Arab farming populace in Darfur for the last five years. China’s policy has added resonance given that that country will host the 2008 Summer Olympics.

NBA commissioner David Stern said during the Finals that he would not discourage players from taking more active roles in political issues, saying there is “a proud tradition of people being encouraged to speak their mind, unless they’re criticizing the officials or the commissioner.”