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On a cement basketball court surrounded by concrete bleachers and sheltered
by a corrugated metal roof, an exhausted Malik Harris looked up at the scoreboard,
looked around at the people congratulating him and looked down at his severely
skinned knees. “This is my dream come true,” Harris said. “This is the closest
thing to the NBA to me.” Harris had just scored 33 points to lead Los Tiburones
the Sha-rks of Mazatlán to an overtime victory over Los Caballeros of Cul-iacán
in the home opener of the professional CIBACOPA league before a packed house
at sweetly scruffy German Evers Court. The National Basketball Association
used to be Harris’s dream. It’s every basketball player’s dream. “Yeah,
when players talk, that’s what they talk about,” said Harris, “and I always
thought I had the potential to play at the highest level. But when the talking
stops I’ve always taken a realistic approach to basketball and to life.
That’s why I’m playing basketball here.” Basketball or life, it doesn’t
get much more real than the games that Los Tiburones play at German Evers
Court (La Cancha German Evers), located on Calle Zaragoza at Calle Obregon,
in the shadow of the Pacifico brewery. While players launch jumpers and
stuff dunks through a couple of scraggly nets, hip-hop and banda blare from
a bank of speakers and a skinny guy in a straw cowboy hat hawks bottles
of beer from a bucket he drags through packed grandstands that could probably
double as a bomb shelter. Harris is 29 and a basketball vagabond. Raised
in Northern California towns like Valejo, Martinez and Ben-ecia, he played
at two junior colleges (Diablo Valley and Solano) and two university programs
(Fresno State and Stanislaus State). He subsequently bounced from tryout
camps to small international exhibitions-from the Pro-Am League in Long
Beach, California, to stints in |
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Venezuela and China—looking to hook up with a professional team. “Everybody
told me to give up,” said Harris. “But knew I had the ability and the desire.”
This is Harris’s second season in the CIBACOPA, and it’s already better
than the first. Last year he played in Cabo San Lucas for an owner that
rarely paid the players-and at one point didn’t pay Harris’s hotel bill,
causing him to be evicted and move into a creepy motel behind a stripper
bar. “I choose to see all that as the bad stuff I had to go through to get
to the good stuff I have now,” said Harris. There are 10 teams in the CIBA
COPA-that’s (ITLX) Circuito de Balon-cesto de la Costa de Pacifico (ITLX)—and
each is permitted two non-Mexican players. Most come from the United States.
Harris’s compatriot on Los Tiburones is Akua Floyd, an agile 6-foot-7 center
with impressive leaping ability. At 26, this is Floyd’s first professional
season but he scored 45 points in his first two games. Mazatlán was about
to lose its team after a couple years of bad management. But a new owner,
25-year-old Yolanda Sanchez, stepped in. She changed the team name (from
the Dolphins to the Sharks) and its colors (now a blood-in-the-frothy-water
combination of red and black and white) and its philosophy. “We have put
together a good team and we are going to pay our players fairly and provide
a place where the people of Mazatlán can bring their families to enjoy good
sport,” said Sanchez. Ticket prices are $35 pesos (about $3.50) for adults,
half price for children between 10-13 years and free for kids under 10.
“We are dedicated to integrity and success.” Harris, for one, is convinced
that Sanchez and Los Tiburones can pull it off. “Look at this,” he said,
while signing autographs and posing for pictures with fans. “It’s everything
somebody who really loves the game could ever dream of.” |
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