Sunday, after dinner, I called my mother in Indiana. I told her about the game of the week in the EuroLeague: Fenerbahçe beat Olympiacos, sixty-four to sixty-one. She asked if that was a halftime score. No, Mom. Final.
I explained the rest. Fenerbahçe had only fourteen points after eighteen minutes. They were down by sixteen. And they won. The coach, Sarunas Jasikevicius, told Eurohoops: “Some days you play beautiful, some days you play ‘ugly.’ I just didn’t expect it to be so ugly.”
Let me tell you, it took me back to 2000. My first season in Charleroi, one bag, a one-year contract. One December night we won a game with fifty-something points, in a hall with badminton lines on the floor. I drove home furious. I felt we had wasted a good basketball game. The club president bought me a coffee and said: we won, it’s not bad.
It took me twenty years to understand that “not bad”.
My mother listened. The coach also said his team had been much better over the last twenty-five minutes, and that everything was going very badly at the start. I read her the line he gave Eurohoops: “We won this game with our character and belief.”
Fenerbahçe are joint top, six wins and one defeat, and travel to Valencia. Olympiacos are five and two, and play Besiktas in Istanbul. My mother asked nothing about that.
She asked one thing only: how many Olympiacos scored in those twenty-five minutes, if Fenerbahçe were the better team the whole time. I didn’t have the number. She said it didn’t matter, that with sixty-one points in forty minutes for the other side, somebody had played defence, and that it’s rarely pretty to watch.
She said: see?
It’s true, we checked: Eurohoops.
