Import Helps Macedonia Find Unity
Mindaugas Kulbis/Associated Press
Bo McCalebb, who was born in New Orleans, has led Macedonia to the semifinals of the European championships.
By DAVE SEMINARA
Published: September 15, 2011
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A look at the scoring leader board at the European championships reveals some familiar names — Deng, Bargnani, Parker and Gasol, to name a few. But sitting fourth, averaging 20.9 points a game, is a previously obscure player from New Orleans playing for Macedonia — population two million — which earned a highly improbable berth Wednesday in the tournament’s semifinals with a 67-65 win over host Lithuania.
That man is Bo McCalebb, nicknamed Borche McCalebbovski after attaining national hero status with a 27-point performance in a preliminary round upset of Greece, which has effectively blocked Macedonia’s entry into the European Union and NATO in a dispute over the country’s name.
On Friday, McCalebb, 26, will lead Macedonia into a David vs. Goliath matchup against Spain, the defending European champion, which is led by Pau and Marc Gasol. But how did a guy from New Orleans end up starring in what could be the sequel to “Hoosiers” in an obscure former Yugoslav republic?
“I was playing in Serbia last year and I got a call from the Macedonians — they asked me to play for them,” explained McCalebb, who grew up in the Algiers section of New Orleans and went on to play at the University of New Orleans. He bounced around professional leagues in Turkey and Serbia before signing a contract with an Italian club, Montepaschi Siena, last summer. “I didn’t ask any questions about the place,” he said. “I just said, ‘Yes,’ and I got a plane for Skopje the next day.”
Three days later, Bo McCalebb had morphed into Borche McCalebbovski, a newly minted citizen of a country he was previously only vaguely aware of.
“Every team has the right to one naturalized player,” explained Dejan Lekic, the secretary general of Macedonia’s basketball federation. “He came, he liked our country, he liked us and everyone liked him. He is Macedonian in full now.”
Passed over by elite N.C.A.A. programs and N.B.A. scouts, McCalebb would indeed seem to be a perfect fit for Macedonia, which has experienced armed conflict, trade embargos and severe economic deprivation since gaining independence in 1991.
But McCalebb’s decision to play for Macedonia was not entirely based on a shared us-against-the-world mentality. He and 14 other American-born players are playing in the tournament largely because gaining citizenship in a European country makes them more marketable in leagues on the continent.
Lekic said some European countries paid non-Europeans large sums to play for their teams, but added that Macedonia could not afford to pay McCalebb. “Our annual budget for our entire federation is only 350,000 euros, which is like pocket change for some of the stars playing in this tournament,” Lekic said.
After the win over Lithuania, the team danced and sang in the locker room, while revelers in Skopje poured into the streets brandishing flags and jugs of homemade rajika, the national drink, as the sounds of honking horns and fireworks ensured that few got any sleep — not that anyone minded.
“Borche and the players have positioned us shoulder to shoulder with giant nations and have shown us that Macedonia is a great nation,” Georgi Filipovski, an information technology specialist from Skopje, said in a telephone interview. “They wiped out our inferiority complex about being losers from a small, insignificant country.”
Lekic said that the team’s triumphs and McCalebb’s popularity had crossed ethnic and religious lines — no small feat in a country that experienced a brief but violent conflict between ethnic Albanian nationalists and the central government in 2001.
“When we play, the entire country stops what they are doing,” he said. “Even our Albanian population is rooting for us, which is important for unifying us a country.”
The team is led by McCalebb, but has succeeded thanks in part to contributions from players like Vlado Illievski, who knocked down a 3-pointer with 11 seconds left to beat Lithuania, and Pero Antic, who plays for Spartak St. Petersburg in Russia.
Despite the national euphoria in Macedonia, Betfair has established the team as the biggest underdog left in the field, at 40-1, to win the tournament. Few are betting on Macedonia to shock Spain, but a host of other teams that took the squad lightly have already been ushered out of the tournament.
McCalebb said that neither he, nor his new country, had lost the desire to prove doubters wrong. The team has qualified for the 2012 London Olympics, and McCalebb said that he would represent Macedonia. He lives in a hotel in Skopje for just a month each year, and cannot speak Macedonian, but his teammates have taught him some swear words, which he said he hoped he would not need against Spain.
“To be honest, I feel like one of them now,” he said
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