In Israel, basketball is king.

It isn’t the only sport here. They have baseball but the Israel Baseball League didn’t form until last year and doesn’t seem to be all that popular yet.

They have soccer just like every other non-American country. (We have it too, but I can’t think of one person that actually watches soccer in America.) Soccer is actually considered the number one sport in Israel in front of basketball but I wouldn’t know the difference.

They don’t have a professional American football team at all. (gasp!)

But what they do have is basketball.

Right now it’s an exciting time for Maccabi Elite which is the national basketball team based out of Tel Aviv. They’ve found a spot in the Euroleagues Final Four and are close to a championship. It’s kinda like getting to the NBA Finals only the competition is between countries instead of cities.

E’s cousin S just returned to Israel from traveling the United States for the last six months. He made it back just in time to see Maccabi play Barcelona last week. Being the sports fan I am, I jumped at the opportunity to watch it with him.

We went to the store prior to the game to pick up some beer. I was ecstatic to find Miller Genuine Draft sitting in the cooler for me! These small American finds are what make my day. Little reminders of home to make me smile. I made a mental note of the Miller and then grabbed the local beer instead which is also called “Maccabee”.

What better way to support your team than to drink a beer of the same name? It’s like drinking Cubs Beer. Or White Sox Brew. Maybe even Bear Beer. Although that might be a little too challenging to pronounce after a few.

With beer in hand, S advised me that they usually eat pistachio nuts during the game. It’s just like how we eat sun flower seeds at a baseball game. This time, though, we bought a couple bags of pastries called burekas. They’re filled with everything from cheese to mushroom to pizza sauce to potatos.

After half time, he heated up the pastries and we ate them with coffee. Needless to say, it was a little different from watching American sports at home. Especially American football, which usually consists of far too much beer, junk food, a river of bad mouthing, and the occasional breaking of something (body parts or otherwise). I think the tameness of watching the Israeli basketball game was situational considering he was still recovering from jet lag and I wasn’t all too familiar with the team. It was much more civilized.

I made a game of finding the differences between the Euroleague and NBA. I found that the Euroleague more closely resembles our college basketball rules rather than the NBA. And I couldn’t quite grasp the idea that each team was from a different country. I mean, America is so self contained in this way. Our national competition is so fierce between cities and states that we can’t be bothered with other countries until the Olympic games come around.

Maccabi Basketball 2008

It was this idea of “world competition” rather than “national competition” that got me to look at the players on each team.

Does the Barcelona team look Spanish? Do the Israeli players look Israeli? When I’m watching the Olympics, it’s not unusual for each national team to look decidedly Swedish or Japanese or German. Was it true in this competition too?

To be quite honest, half of the Israeli players looked and played acutely American. The style. The attitude. Their movements on the court. Was I watching Maccabi or the L.A. Lakers?

I pointed this out to S who advised me that just like in the NBA, they could recruit players from different cities and states. But here it’s on an international scale! There is no rule saying that every player on a national team has to be from that nation. It just so happens that all the best basketball players are from the United States.

A lot of Israelis find this recruitment of non-Israelis to be insulting to their national pride. I can understand this when trying to imagine if the Chicago Bulls were mostly made up of players from Australia. It wouldn’t feel very…. I don’t know… CHICAGOAN.

But just like in America, we have to throw away national pride in order to win. And in a sporting competition, that’s the ultimate goal.

So when we saw the black American point guard fly over a Barcelona forward for a “Jordan-esque” slam dunk we joked by saying, “Macabbi sure does have some fantastic Ethiopian Jews on their team this year!”

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