We playin basketball

It has occurred to me that very little has been written about basketball, which is the primary reason I am down here. If you didn’t know already I am playing for the Escazú Brujas. For those of you that don’t habla español, a “bruja” is a witch. Yeah that’s right I’m a witch, not a wizard, a woman with a broom and black cat. We only actually use the witch hat in our logo (see left photo), but you can find witches all over Ezcazú. The biggest liquor store in town is named La Bruja, and the first thing you see when you walk into Hooters is a giant stuffed witch. If you know spanish you can read about the legend of the witch here: http://www.guiascostarica.com/mitos/mitos22.htm
To summarize it, a grampa found his granddaughter (who was a well-known witch and quite possibly a prostitute) naked and in a trance behind his house. She told him not to tell anybody and the old man waited 2 days before he blabbed to his neighbors. After that some kind of crazy curse takes over his house where shit falls off his roof and he hears cows trying to tear down his house, and when he goes outside, there is nothing but the smell of shit. I swear that I am not making this up. I dont really understand the rest of the story, but there is something about an earthquake and a knife fight with a giant black pig. Anyway, despite our lame mascot, we have one of the 3 best teams in the league. Costa Rican basketball is a lot like playing at a city park. Some of the guys are pretty good athletes (as evidenced by this photo of me getting dunked on), some of the players are relatively skilled, but almost nobody really knows how to play basketball. Most of the gyms in the league are worse than your average high school gym in America. I never thought it was possible to have a rain delay in basketball, but we have already had 2 in our home gym. We actually played a half with newspaper covering all the wet spots on the floor, and I am not talking a sheet or two, more like 10 full pages, making the court a quasi-obstacle course. We have also had games delayed for power outages, camera crews failing to show up, and well...just for the hell of it. Most of the teams are in the San José area, with the exception of Peréz Zelderon which is a few hours away in the mountains, and Limón on the Caribbean coast. I feel like the league might be down in comparison to last year. Maybe this is the result of the recession which would actually benefit an economically strapped team like our team. Here are the major players in the league:

Barva: The reigning champ and deepest team in the league. Led by a pair of Panamanians, they are the most athletic and best constructed team in the league.

Liceo: They are like the NY Yankees of Costa Rican basketball. They overpay players assemble a massive amount of talent and often come up short in the end.

Limón: A team of all black guys from the Caribbean, they are the bad boys of the league. They are talented, exceptionally dirty and have a pair of massive postmen.

Santa Ana: Funded by a wealthy gringo who also coaches, this team is talented enough to compete with anybody, but with the discipline of a high school JV team, they rarely do.

UCR: The sneaky college team that overachieves. They don’t have the most talented team, but they do well by playing fundamental basketball and shooting well.

The rest of the pack: They mostly suck.

The refereeing in the league is incredibly inconsistent. They will allow a style of play somewhere in between “don’t get within one foot of the shooter” and “go ahead and beat the living crap out of each other” Being that I am a gringo and the tallest player in the league, most teams get the go ahead to incessantly beat my ass without penalty. We are coached by Nic Marin, a Nicaraguan who was a former student manager at UNC. He is not the best coach I have played for, but he is one of the coolest. Nic is a family man and works at a bank by day. To paraphrase Nic, he is robbing from his own children to partially fund the team and my living situation. I am not sure how his wife feels about that, but I am cool with it. Rule number one in basketball: you need to feed your big men. Team updates can be found at the facebook group page listed here: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#/group.php?gid=53631384741&v=wall&ref=ts

BASKETBALL - KURTIS BLOW