Sport: Heroes Away From Home

Jimmy Wilkins is a pro basketball star. With 25 to 30 points a game, he is among his league’s top scorers, and last year he carried his team to a national championship. When he plays in his club’s home arena, screaming girls shower him with confetti and every game is S.R.O. Despite his popularity, Jimmy Wilkins of San Jose, Calif., is unfamiliar to American fans; he plays for Spiel und Sportverein (Game and Sports Club) in Hagen, West Germany.

Wilkins is not Germany’s only imported basketball player. Nearly every one of the 16 teams that make up the Bundesliga, or major league, has at least one American in the lineup. He is usually the star. The same is true for semi-pro teams in Spain, Italy, Belgium and France. With basketball rapidly becoming a big attraction in Europe, more than 150 Americans have signed on.

Bill Bradley, former Princeton star and present forward for the New York Knicks, started the influx nine years ago when he led Simmenthal of Milan to a European championship while attending Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. Some of the current crop of imports are also well known back home: Tom McMillen, the 6-ft. 11-in. star for the University of Maryland last year, continues the Bradley tradition by commuting from Oxford to play weekly games for Sinudyne of Bologna. Jim McDaniels, who plays for Snaidero of Udine, was once a high-priced player for the Seattle Supersonics.

Minor Masters. A few of the super-ringers draw pay that is almost up to pro standards back home. Because the Italian teams are nominally amateur, but are owned by industrial companies, a number of American players are officially paid as company public relations men, receiving between $30,000 and $40,000 a year. In Spain the going rate for an American star is close to $50,000 a year. Many Americans do not fare nearly so well. In France the average U.S. player earns $700 a month, though a “grand Américain ” (a player with exceptional talent) takes home as much as $3,000 a month. In Germany $1,500 a month is considered tops. Players like Wilkins have part-time jobs. Wilkins spends four half-days a week doing promotion for a record store.

If money is not an overwhelming attraction for most of the expatriates, the acclaim of being a superstar is. Most of the Americans would be only marginal players back home; even with the creation of the A.B.A., the American leagues cannot absorb all the talent being trained on collegiate courts.

Measured against the cumbersome style of their European teammates, even minor masters of the U.S. playgrounds look like Earl Monroe. It does wonders for their confidence. “I wasn’t very happy in Houston,” says George Johnson, a former Rocket who now plays in Italy. “I wasn’t playing my best ball. Now I feel I’m playing to my full potential.”

Playing on a foreign court with foreign teammates is bound to raise problems. Communication is one. In Italy, when Americans want the ball, they have learned to shout “Guarda! Guarda!” (Look! Look!) or yell “Dammi, man” (Give it to me, man). Predictably, plays break down frequently. Another problem is hotdogging. Some of the Americans play tough only on offense, producing resentment among hardworking, if less talented teammates. One U.S. player in Germany recently left, reportedly because he could not get along with German players. Such tensions have been limited so far by a quota on American competitors—a team can use only one on the court at a time.

Off the court, Americans face adjustment to a foreign community. “I felt a little lost at first,” says Wilkins. “I had never been to Europe and did not speak the language. It was difficult to get around.” He is now comfortably settled in a Hagen apartment with a German girl friend. Unlike some other blacks in Germany, he has suffered little racial static. In fact, he is one of the best-known personalities in town.

Despite the drawbacks, few of the U.S. players plan to cut out of what is usually a two-year contract. Why should they? Before he came to Hagen, Jimmy Wilkins was a blackjack dealer in a Lake Tahoe casino and a little-known college basketball player (San Diego State). “In the U.S. I was one in thousands,” he says. “Here, I’m like a god.”