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Britball.com Front
Jazz only a lament for Amaechi













Mark Woods

Hindsight is a marvellous thing. Three summers ago, John Amaechi could have accepted the reportedly guaranteed sum of £18 million to join the Detroit Pistons. 

Or even 16 Big Ones to sign up for the Los Angeles Lakers where he would have snagged a couple of National Basketball Association championships for good measure along the way. 

Then playing for the Orlando Magic, he was feted for his openness, this articulate and talented giant from Manchester who had returned from exile in Europe with an outlook distinguished from the norm.

It must seem like an age ago now. Spurned in Orlando, Britain’s most successful basketballer instead joined the Utah Jazz in 2001. Joining a team which had been propelled for nearly two decades by superstar tandem Karl Malone and John Stockton, and coached by savvy veteran Jerry Sloan, this was a chance to compete along side the very best. 

Instead, Amaechi’s elation has turned into despair, a journey from Stockport to Salt Lake sidetracked by bitterness and a clash of personalities in which no-one can win.

Back in the UK to guest on Sky Sports live coverage of the NBA Finals, Amaechi reflects with both anger and melancholy on a season wasted. The Jazz were early casualties in the NBA play-offs but the figure on the end of the bench could only sit idle and wonder where it all went wrong. 

Sloan, a much-admired disciplinarian who stresses team over individual flair, has largely ignored his British import for much of this campaign, unimpressed by what he claims is Amaechi’s less than whole-hearted embrace of the game which has made him a millionaire several times over.

“The thing than annoys me is that I don’t like to be tarred with somebody else’s insecurities,” Amaechi counters. “So you’re upset with me because I like to do other things outside of basketball? Jerry last year told me that people who don’t love basketball don’t deserve to play. What kind of nonsense is that?

"We could have done. I could have just been left alone which he does with certain players. The only ones who have problems with me are those who think they can walk over me and I’ll just stand there and take it. I’m not."

Utah Jazz declined to comment on the accusations. Yet in a spat more familiar from the playgrounds of kids than millionaires, the former Sheffield Shark claims that bullying was an ever-present menace. 

“From the very beginning it wasn’t as if I had a chance of playing this season. I came in at the beginning of the year and they were all talking about me. ‘Different player, in great shape, new person’. They were saying all that stuff. 

"And Jerry came to me and told me he was having a hard time getting over an article in ESPN The Magazine in which I made absolutely zero quotes regarding him. But he was quoted several times talking about me and he came across as a bit of a jerk. It made him look bad.

“I wanted to know what someone else had to do with my playing time. Apparently quite a lot. Then later in the season I was accused of being a bigot. A member of staff came into the locker room and in front of (Jazz owner) Larry Miller, he told me, and I quote: ‘you hate white people, you hate Americans and you think you’re smarter than everybody else.’ 

"I told him that one of out of three of those might be right. My mother was white. The two kids I’ve adopted are white and American. So that shows how well they know me.”

Amaechi, who is studying towards his doctorate in child psychology, has never fitted the NBA stereotype. One former team-mate concedes that his acute intellect can sometimes alienate others. His conflict with Sloan has been well-documented. 

Twice this season, he was suspended for ‘conduct detrimental to the team.’ 

“Jerry called me a stupid f***ing c**t and then suspended me when I went right back at him and told him that wasn’t going to happen again,” he states. “That’s not old school. It’s just rude. Who says that to a grown man?”

“I am not overly sensitive; I went to an English Grammar school where the masters walked around with canes.  I just thought that when I reached adulthood, that other adults would treat me as I treat them.  I could probably take a few decades of distain, five years or so of contempt, but I will not be walked over like a piece of diseased meat.  I have worked too hard in every facet of my life to endure that type of treatment.”

The end may be nigh for his stay in Utah. With two seasons left on his contract believed to be worth a total of £3.5 million, Miller has raised the prospect of negotiating a mutual settlement which would allow both parties to quietly divorce. 

“John doesn't like being here; it's pretty clear that Jerry doesn't like having him so, what can we do that works for both sides?”

He appended a barb though. “I don't think we've ever had a case where even the team didn't like a guy in the locker room,” Miller added. 

Amaechi, who averaged a career-lows in points and rebounds amid a series of ineffective, cameo performances, is incensed at that idea. “It’s laughable. Ask them. Greg Ostertag just built a house next door to me in Phoenix and Karl and Mark Jackson have asked me about coming over here to visit this summer.”

He adds: "I don’t feel it’s my job to make it easy for them to get rid of me. I have friends in Utah and although I don’t want to fizzle and die there, I’m not going to give up huge sums of money to make them happy. I could have played for them and helped them. 

"Yes, my stats are horrible but if you go into a game with 1:30 left every seven or eight games, which is pretty much what I played, all you need to do is go 0 for 1, then 0 for 2, pretty soon your percentages drop. I’m not going to play well like that and besides, I’m 32 years old. I’m not going to be spry coming off the bench."

At least, for a short spell, there is temporary solace in Manchester and the Basketball Centre which he funded there from his own pocket. He will take a hands-on role at their summer camps, which run this year from July 27 - August 8, the latest in a line of events to keep fresh blood pumping into the venture. 

“I walked in there the first day I flew back and it was packed to the gills. I could barely get through the door because of spectators. Every court was being used. There were teams waiting on the sidelines. A tournament was being organised. That’s real. 

"Part of the reason I’ve been upset about this season is that all of a sudden, I’ve got this community in Salt Lake who haven’t had a chance to know me. The media don’t often talk to me and when they do, they don’t print anything I say. They just go along with the idea that John is lazy, John has a bad attitude, John’s an uppity Brit. So I have a group who are of the opinion that I don’t care about basketball, which is not true, and that I’m some kind of evil malcontent.  It’s just nonsense."

If only the good folk of Utah knew him so well.

Information on the Amaechi Summer Camp is available here
 


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