If the trip from Port Wing, Wis., to Madison seems big, imagine picking up and going all the way to France.
Former Wisconsin women's basketball star Jolene Anderson followed a rising trend and signed with a French basketball team in early September after playing in the WNBA for most of the season. This move just highlights the little-known world of professional basketball outside the NBA.
The biggest topic in basketball circles over the summer was an exodus of players across the Atlantic, headlined by former Hawk Josh Childress, who took big money to play in Greece.
Few fans seem to realize just how many teams there are that are willing to pay people to play basketball. Simply put, if a player is a starter or top sub on a good college team, they will have a chance to play somewhere overseas.
Many former Badgers have crossed the seas to continue playing the game they love. Brian Butch now makes his home in Spain, as do Zach Morley and Kammron Taylor. Michael Flowers is playing in Germany, and Greg Stiemsma joined a Turkish team.
The European teams have rules allowing only two Americans to join most teams. This leads to players getting dodgy foreign passports.
A Badger who took advantage of this was Mike Wilkinson, who played for two high-level European teams and makes over $1 million per year.
Wilkinson managed to get a Macedonian passport, which makes him a European in the eyes of prospective employers, and even went as far as playing for Macedonia's national team under the name Majkl Vilkinson.
The most successful Badger in Europe, however, may have been Rashard Griffith. After leaving Madison as a sophomore, Griffith was drafted, but ended up playing for several Euroleague teams and won a European title with Manu Ginobili in 2001. He never played in an NBA game.
The world of European basketball is a strange mixture of experiences. Players can be treated to low quality facilities, arenas filled with thick cigarette smoke and a little trick where fans heat coins on cigarette lighters and then pelt opposing players with them.
They often take long bus trips through exotic locales like the Russian countryside or the mountains of Greece. On the other hand, players are paid to live in countries that most Americans only vacation to.
The décor for teams is also quite different than in the United States Some teams have few scruples about not paying players large parts of their salaries after a season. The contrast to that is the Spartak Moscow women's basketball team, which pays players up to $500,000 per year, charges nothing for admission and is run by an owner who was once arrested as a spy.
This world can really only be described as foreign, but the experience of playing there sounds like a pretty fascinating voyage.
As for Anderson, she will have another chance to play in the WNBA next year, but for now spending a winter in northern France does not seem like a bad alternative.
Think Ben should just go abroad already and stop reading about European basketball? Tell him where to go at breiner@wisc.edu.
