NZFOI: For those who don’t follow Basketball, they may be surprised to find that the coach of NZ’s only professional basketball team, the Breakers, in the Australian Basketball League, is from Israel. Readers may guess from the headline that they had a nightmare first half of the season before pulling off an astonishing comeback, only to miss the play-offs by a whisker.
Dan Shamir can talk basketball till the cows come home. He’s a hoops tragic who has invested his life in a sport he’s been besotted with since he was an aspiring young point guard growing up in the holy city of Jerusalem. Now his hardwood pilgrimage has brought him to the far corner of the planet, that passion and intensity remain undimmed.
So, in a long, at times probing, conversation around the season of two halves that he has just undergone with the Breakers, his first coaching in Australia’s National Basketball League in a two-decade career, the game face is very much on. Huddled in his corner office at the club facility on the North Shore, he dives into difficult questions with transparency, passion and insight. It’s only when you question him about the wisdom of this move to the relative hoops backwater of New Zealand that a smile finally crosses his bespectacled face.
At last we get a glimpse of the man behind the clipboard-clutching coach. The 45-year-old husband, father of three and citizen of the world finally relaxes and rips it strictly from the heart.
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