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A Texas Boy on his way to the Final Four!
First of all, I would to thank god for making this possible, for me and Tau Ceramica to be a part of the Euroleague Final Four. It's a dream come true for me, making it to the Final Four after trying for three years with two different teams (Partizan Belgrade and Lietuvos Rytas). Well, when I first arrived to Partizan from the United States in the middle of the season, I didn't know anything about the Euroleague. I thought all basketball was the same, but it's not. Here you can do a little bit more than at home in the States. For exmample, you can knock the ball off the rim and take one more step when you go for a layup. Since then, watching these last four years how Barcelona, Maccabi Tel Aviv and CSKA won the title has made me want to be a part of that list too. So I feel that I waited long enough to be a part of something special. I knew that if I made it to another Euroleague team that I would give my all and play hard whenever I stepped on the floor, because there is no tomorrow and no turning back.
I still can't believe it! As I write this, I have less then 13 days, exactly 312 hours, until tipoff in the semifinals! I think that my team will be in great shape because we've been working hard every day to get ready. We have some tough games to play in the Spanish League before we head to Athens, Greece. I'm very happy and proud of what we have done so far but this is just a small step for us to get to what we want to achieve in basketball. Also this year, I watched Igor Rakocevic win the Alphonso Ford Trophy. What a great award to get, especially one named after such a great basketball player: sad to say we will miss him.
We just need to fix some little things in our game plan before we get on the plane to head to Greece. Panathinaikos is a very good team that runs and guns, from what I've seen. They have a couple players that I've played with on their team, like Robertas Javtokas and Milos Vujanic, but I think their key players are Ramunas Siskauskas, Dimitris Diamantidis, Dejan Tomasevic, Michael Batiste. It's going to be a great game for us and for them. But the way life is in European basketball, we can't think too much about Panathinaikos because we have some other games to play before we get to them. In the meantime, I'll try to not to get too excited about the Final Four. I will read some books, play some video games, walk my dogs and - of course - work on my basketball game to get ready.
Oh yes, and I will have to learn some Spanish, too. I have Pablo Prigioni, Luis Scola, Jesus Cilla and Tiago Splitter always making fun of me when we go out to restaurants to eat because I don't know much Spanish yet. I will get that one day, too!
POSTED BY
Fred House - Vitoria, Spain
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