Looking For Mr. Really Big

TONY RONZONE LIKES TO BOAST that he knows a word or two in several foreign languages. He might be better off if he didn’t try to use them all at once. A few weeks ago, Ronzone, director of international scouting for the NBA champion Detroit Pistons, appeared at a basketball clinic in Mexico, where he attempted to teach a young Spanish-speaking prospect how best to position himself around the rim. “Demand the qiu!” Ronzone shouted. “Get your cerveza under the basket!” Qiu (pronounced chee-yo) is Chinese for ball. Cerveza means beer in Spanish. Ronzone may have confused cerveza with cabeza, Spanish for head, though he admits, “I’m not sure I knew that.”

The irony that the world’s best international basketball scout is also the world’s worst student of foreign languages is not lost on Ronzone’s peers. “He can’t speak any language at all,” laughs John Hammond, the Pistons’ vice president of basketball operations. “Yet he travels to these obscure places and builds lasting relationships with all kinds of people. It’s amazing.” Adds Donn Nelson, the president of basketball operations for the Dallas Mavericks and one of Ronzone’s old friends: “Tony’s success is a tribute to his personality. He’s just–I guess the word is unembarrassable.”

Most people think of scouting as the ability to recognize talent. This–it turns out–is relatively easy. Good basketball players are usually quite tall, quite fast and quite adept at shooting a basketball. The difficult part in a world of 6 billion people is actually finding those who are tall, fast and coordinated, and the extremely difficult part is finding them before the competition does. Ronzone has conquered this problem despite his afflicted tongue by building a global network of coaches, journalists and friends who tip him off to the location of the world’s most gifted young players. This network explains how, without a single word of Turkish, Ronzone was delivered to the remote island home of Mehmet Okur, an unknown even in his home country, who became a burgeoning star for the Pistons. And how, with little more than qiu, he wrangled an invite to a cramped Shanghai apartment for the 18th birthday party of a 7-ft. 6-in. kid named Yao Ming.

In order to stay in touch with more than 400 people on five continents in a meaningful way, one has to have a certain natural exuberance. “An uptight guy would not succeed at this job,” says Pistons president Joe Dumars. “Tony will try every single food and drink. He’ll smile. He’ll laugh. He’s easy to like.” Ronzone was born bubbly, though he didn’t take his act abroad until his college basketball career at Long Beach State ended, in 1988. At 6 ft. 2 in., he was too short to be an NBA prospect, so Ronzone played in leagues from Italy to the Philippines before becoming player-coach of New Zealand’s Wonganui Wolfpack. Then, after an encounter with Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, he became the first head coach of the Saudi national team. “It was right after the Gulf War in ’91, so I hesitated,” he recalls. “Then the prince offered to triple my salary.” At the 1994 Goodwill Games in Russia he ran into Donn Nelson. “I couldn’t believe how many people Tony knew and how much knowledge he had accumulated about international players,” says Nelson. “I told him, you’ve got an incredible niche. You’ve got to bring this to the NBA.”

After a few more years in the Arabian sun, Ronzone joined the Dallas Mavericks in 1997 and based himself in China, where he and Nelson nudged the Chinese government into letting the Mavs sign 7-ft. 1-in. Wang Zhizhi (paving the way for Yao Ming’s arrival in the U.S.). In 2001, Ronzone was poached by the Pistons, who, never having drafted an international player, gave him carte blanche to travel. After years of frequent-flying, though, Ronzone discovered he could cut back. “If I’m going to three normal countries–say, Italy, Spain and France–I now have friends I call in advance who direct me to players. A trip that used to take two weeks now takes four days.”

This allows Ronzone to tack on what he calls “a random country,” a Kazakhstan or a Congo, to the end of each journey. When he arrives–friendless and unannounced–his strategy for expanding his network frequently consists of walking up to people, saying hello and starting to talk about basketball in his train-wreck sentences. More often than not, they talk back. In Kazakhstan, a conversation with a hotel bellman led to the discovery of three raw but promising players at a club team. “Tony talks a lot, and that gets him into these places,” says the Pistons’ Hammond. “But he’s also a very bright guy, and that shows up once he’s inside.”

As a rule, Ronzone looks for the same things most scouts look for: hand skills, shooting and footwork. “I’m really into watching feet,” he says. “Can they run? Do they have balance?” Unlike most scouts, though, he never takes notes while evaluating players and usually refrains from asking a coach questions until a third or fourth meeting. “The big reason,” he says, “is respect. Some guys go to practices and they focus on one player and scribble a bunch of notes; it comes off arrogant. The Kazakhs feel their club team is as important as the Pistons, and just because we like a player doesn’t mean they’ll give him up. I’ve got to respect their club that has bad rims, bad balls, bad floor. I’ll invite them to Detroit to see one of our practices. Because if I do like one of their guys, we’re going to need their help.”

Most players Ronzone scouts have signed contracts in their home countries. These arrangements often have escape clauses, but they are generally at the discretion of management, and the NBA does not allow teams to pay international clubs more than $350,000. Ronzone can usually charm a team into releasing a player, but then he has to ask for an even bigger favor, often related to the NBA draft. That process has two rounds, with the worst teams having the best odds of picking first. Because the Pistons are one of the league’s best teams, as many as 30 teams have to pass on a player before the Pistons get a shot at him. The only way to ensure that the Pistons get their man is to make sure the other 30 teams do not know the player exists. (In Yao’s case, Ronzone saw him early, but you can’t keep a guy like that a secret for long.) “We’re getting into some shady territory now,” says Ronzone, with a smile. “You don’t really ask anybody to hide a player, but you make it clear you’d appreciate it if they don’t show him off.” Because Mehmet Okur was effectively hidden until a week before the 2001 draft, the Pistons were able to grab him in the second round with the 38th pick. “To get a kid in the second round that should be in the first round, save the organization money and beat out other teams,” says Ronzone, “is a huge high.”

With so many people helping him find talent and keep secrets, Ronzone now spends as much time maintaining contacts as scouting players. Some of the favors he does are fairly minor. When an Israeli journalist he knows asks for an interview with a Pistons player, Ronzone sets it up instantly. “It’s easy for me to do,” he says, “and there are a couple of players over there I really like. This guy could help me find out their contract info, or at least get me some good falafel.”

For the short-term future, Ronzone’s latest project is a 7-ft. Greek player the Pistons drafted last year, Andreas Glyniadakis. “He’s tall, he’s agile, but he’s getting a little soft playing in the Greek leagues,” says the scout. “No offense to the Greeks; it’s just a soft league. I may try to move him someplace tougher in Europe, and in a year or two he could be a force.”

In the meantime, Ronzone continues to seek talent in out-of-the-way places. The hoops clinic in Mazatlán, Mexico, is not a hotbed of basketball talent, but the country’s national team coach, Guillermo Vecchio, is an old friend. “The first time I met Tony,” says Vecchio, “I think, who is this crazy son of a b____? But he comes here, he teaches our coaches and tries to make us better. I would do anything for this crazy son of a b____.” Says Ronzone: “It’s a couple hours on a plane and a few days of talking basketball. Maybe I’ll never get a kid from here. But I love seeing Vecchio, and now all these coaches from all these little towns are my friends too. And, by the way, I think I will find somebody here. It’s a nice little untapped market.” A few minutes later, Ronzone is smiling broadly. “Vecchio said he’s got a kid outside Tijuana I gotta see–6 ft. 11, 14 years old. Excellento, baby!”