OUR GAMES FINALLY MADE IT HOME

One of the hardest things to explain about playing overseas is how invisible your career could become back home.

I could be playing professional basketball on the other side of the world, have a great game, and there was a pretty good chance nobody I grew up with saw a second of it. My family wasn’t pulling up an app, nor were my friends scrolling through highlights on Instagram.

You know how they saw me play?…When I came home.

The club would burn my games onto DVDs. I’d throw them in my bag, fly back to the States, and that was basically the American television package for my professional basketball career.

“Hey, how was Australia?” Pretty good. Here are 34 DVDs.

I don’t think I understood how strange that was while I was living it. I was playing in front of thousands of people, with newspapers and tv cameras at every game. Then I’d come home and my entire season basically existed inside my 300 slot DVD case, next to my bootlegged copy of season 5 of The Wire.

International basketball is becoming easier for Americans to find through platforms they already use. Major FIBA events have U.S. distribution through TNT Sports, and more international leagues and competitions are available through global streaming platforms. 

Think about what that means for a 23 year old American playing overseas now. Your parents can watch. Your friends can watch. Agents, teams and sponsors have more opportunities to find you. Somebody who has never watched basketball outside the NBA can stumble onto a game and realize there is an entire professional basketball world out there.

I would’ve killed for that.

There was something cool about coming home with those DVDs. I still have some of them. They are pieces of my career that I’m glad exist.

But I also would’ve loved for the people I cared about to experience some of that career while I was living it, instead of sitting on my parents’ couch three months later watching a game where everybody already knew the final score.

That’s the change I think gets overlooked when we talk about media rights and streaming deals.

For a long time, going overseas could mean disappearing from the basketball world you came from.

These players don’t have to disappear anymore.

And thank God, because I’m pretty sure half of America doesn’t even own a DVD player anymore.

And if you want your people back home to actually know when and where to watch you, we post the overseas viewing schedule every week on our socials and inside the OverseasX community, so tell them to follow us.