Basketball: Kong at Canadian national team camp

There's a little news about Bol Kong.

Kong, just for anyone needing a refresher, is a guard from Vancouver who was supposed to go to a big-time basketball school, Gonzaga, two years ago but, as a citizen of Sudan, was kept out due to visa issues. However, Kong is among 19 college-age and slightly older players whom Canada Basketball has invited to a development camp which begins Monday in Toronto. It wouldn't figure that Canada Basketball would invite someone unless he had received citizenship or was very close to doing so, right? SB Nation's Gonzaga blog, The Slipper Still Fits, jumped to that conclusion, so might as well join 'em there.

"If Bol is a Canadian citizen, he can clearly enter the United States of America. Therefore, if Bol can enter the United States of America, he can play basketball for Gonzaga University (look at my Gonzaga education at work).

"This certainly goes along with what we had been hearing, which was that everything was looking good for Bol, and I wouldn't be overly surprised to see him here in late June for the second session of summer school. What I do know is this is the most definitive news I have seen publicly on the status of Bol, and I think we can start preparing to finally see Bol in a Gonzaga uniform, after over a year of speculation."

Coincidentally, Monday is also the deadline for underclassmen to decide whether to stay in the NBA draft or pull a Rodney Dangerfield and go back to school. Gonzaga's Austin Daye seems to be leaning toward staying in the draft, which would alleviate any concern for Gonzaga about having more players than scholarships. (NCAA Division 1 teams are capped at 13 — no sharesies! — and Gonzaga would have 14 players on the roster if Daye had withdrawn from the draft.

Kong's predicament was pretty big news in the summer of 2007 when he was initially supposed to go to Gonzaga after tearing it up in the B.C. high school ranks, where he played at St. George's School for coach Brian Lee (who has ties to Ottawa; he might have played his high school hoops at Sir Robert Borden at Nepean). The New York Times wrote about him and so did some major political bloggers. Kong decamped to Douglas College in the CCAA for the 2007-08 season. After that, the trail ran cold; even today, there's nothing on Google News when you do a unique search for his name.

There was strong speculation about six weeks ago Kong might play at Trinity Western University if it didn't work out with Gonzaga. The position, as one of cisblog.ca's charter contributors, is that if someone is very, very good at her/his sport, then a NCAA Division 1 school is in most cases the place to be since the U.S. institutions have more resources dedicated to sport.

Anyway, calls and e-mails are in to Canada Basketball in hope of getting some confirmation.

Related:
Here Comes Kong!!! (The Slipper Still Fits)

CIS Corner: Looking out for Bol Kong, part II

There are rumblings surrounding Vancouver baller Bol Kong.

Kong is the Sudan-born swingman who's been trying to get a visa to enter the U.S. since 2007 so he can play at Gonzaga. It got a lot of coverage two summers ago. He's lived two-thirds of his life in Canada but is a Sudanese citizen, which is the cause of a lot of red tape.

Since Rob Pettapiece put up a cisblog.ca post late last week speculating that he might opt for a Canadian school this season, three anonymous commenters have said that the 6-foot-7 Kong is likely to join the Trinity Western Spartans out in Langley, B.C. Trinity has already added one semi-notable transfer, Tyrell Mara, who played in the NCAA Tournament twice with Portland State (he can play right away since he's starting a new degree), so their time is now.

Understandably, maybe this only becomes newsworthy for the dead-tree medium once it is clear whether Kong can enter the U.S. or the Vancouver Canucks are out of the playoffs, whichever comes first.

One commenter thought there was something to the fact Kong's former coach at St. George's School in Vancouver, former Ottawa resident Brian Lee, has joined TWU's staff after previously stating he planned to pull back from coaching. To reiterate Rob's point, Gonzaga is also budgeted scholarship-wise if Kong can't come.

"Gonzaga's recent acquisition of Dallas-area point guard G.J. Vilarino has excited the fanbase in and around Spokane; however, it leaves 14 players for 13 scholarships. Basically, someone has to go. All else being equal, if you were the Bulldogs and had one player whose candidacy unfortunately required lots more work than the others, who might you lean towards when choosing your odd man out?

It makes one wonder whether Kong will stay closer to home. His adopted hometown is Vancouver, and the improved TWU Spartans are but one team in that area who could use a player of his talent, but we'll leave the speculation for his basketball career (NCAA, CIS, or wherever), to those who know more."

It is something to keep an eye on. The role of a blog is to say, "I bet people would like to hear about this," and hope that the paid, professional media follow suit. It's the difference between flipping rocks over and pointing out there are some rocks that need to be flipped.

One would hope Kong gets a resolution soon. It's past the point of doing a passionate plea. It does seem unusual that he would practise with Trinity Western players if he was only doing so to keep in shape. Lee's role is is neat variable, too. He is a former coach at St. Francis Xavier and Kong has been previously been rumoured to be headed there.

Mara, Kong and reigning CIS player of the year Jacob Doerksen all on one team would be pretty formidable, on paper. This will also be the first season where a B.C. team's road to the CIS Final 8 won't go through the UBC Thunderbirds, since the Canada West conference is dropping down to two divisions with cross-over playoffs.

(Cross-posted to cisblog.ca.)

Snark break...

It's not clear what the Boston Red Sox are thinking by introducing new uniforms. New Englanders aren't the type to jump on the bandwagon and snap up officially licensed merchandise willy-nilly.

Will Leitch has suggested that instead of saying you're going to "scalp" an extra ticket to a sports event, you should say you're going to "Blago" it.

Disgraced Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich should have been indicted long ago just for what he told ESPN.com's Gene Wojciechowski during a 2004 interview, "Baseball is a metaphor for life, and it's very much a metaphor for politics. Politics is very competitive. The campaigns are long, just like baseball seasons. Like innings in a ballgame, you have a certain game plan. You have tactics and strategies." Enjoying baseball is hard enough without the George Will-type dilettante drudges who are always looking for meaning between the white lines.

It's owners such as the Tampa Bay Lightning's who are responsible for leading the Frank D'Angelos of the world to believe they could own a NHL team. Investigate Barry Melrose all you want, fellas.

The Philadelphia Phillies ace Cole Hamels called the New York Mets "choke artists" yesterday. You'd think he'd just led his team to the World Series title or something.

A day in the life for a Minnesota Vikings fans: Interior linemen kick butt in court, team courts disaster by going with Tarvaris Jackson as its starting quarterback.

(Seriously, T-Jack is gonna be OK. He just needs a receiver like the Chicago Bears' Devin Hester, who can draw a pass interference flag whenever the QB underthrows him or overthrows him by 10 yards, which happens a fair bit with Kyle Orton.)

A happy 58th birthday to Battlin' Billy Smith. It seems like yesterday that the last welt he left on a crease-crashing NHL forward's leg healed. Actually, it probably was yesterday.

The Columbus Blue Jackets are letting Nikita Filatov play in the World Junior Hockey Championship for Russia, which is training in Kingston. This will be the first time any Frontenacs fans have seen a good European player up close since Larry Mavety's been GM.

(OK, Radek Smolenak. That's one in 11 seasons.)

You know what's great as a Toronto sports media consumer? Hearing Howard Berger do a fluff piece on Lee Stempniak being from Buffalo in the afternoon and then reading the same damn story in the paper the next day. Isn't pack reporting great?

This post is worth nothing, but this is worth noting

• Vancouver basketball phenom Bol Kong, who's been barred from entering the U.S. due to his Sudanese citizenship, is practising with the NEDA program in Hamilton. This is such an underreported story that's it not even funny.
• Doug Marrone, the next coach of the Syracuse Orange football team.
  
• It was nice of the Globe & Mail to pick up on the story about the Chicago Blackhawks busing up to Gravenhurst, Ont., to visit GM Dale Tallon after his father's death. It would have been even nicer to credit Deadspin for the scoop (the Chicago Sun-Times did)
  
• The score in last night's potential preview of the OHL final: Mike Murphy 4, Windsor 0.
• Baseball Hall of Famer Jim Bunning, now a U.S. senator, is ballsy, give him that much.
• Jason Clermont is apparently a Saskatchewan Roughrider.
  

That's all for now. Posting, will be light on this second-to-last Friday before Christmas, since plans are to head to an OHL game out-of-town, the Barrie Colts at the Kingston Frontenacs. No one will Blago tickets outside that one.

(Listen to Offsides, Kingston's most-listened-to sports talk show, 4 p.m. ET with Kinger, cfrc.ca).

CIS Corner: Kong could play in Canada

No less a roundball oracle than TrueHoop has provided the latest on Vancouver basketball phenom Bol Kong, which involves the possiblity that he might take his game to a Canadian school:

"I have heard rumors that he has given up on getting the visa to play in the U.S. this year, and has decided to play for St. Francis Xavier in Nova Scotia. I talked to St. Francis Xavier, and they acknowledged the rumors, but say there is nothing to report at this point. If he becomes a highly sought NBA prospect, I wonder if other forces -- Better lawyers? Politically connected bigwigs? -- will come to bear on the immigration process."

It's nothing shy of an outrage that Bol Kong's predicament has not become more of a national story. It only comes up as a local-news item Vancouver as a hot topic on hoops-nut message boards.

Silence speaks volumes. It's just brain-bashing, beat-your-head-against-the-wall that there's no sense of obligation to do right by one of our best and brightest young people. It's even more galling when the Prime Minister of Canada has spots playing every 10 minutes on TV where he talks about being a leader in the world and not just "going along to get along."

Not just going along to get along would mean there would be some leadership exercised to try to help the U.S. State Department realize that Kong is only a threat on the basketball court, so he can better pursue his dream of playing the NBA. On merit, the 6-foot-7 swingman should be embarking upon his freshman season at Gonzaga, which is a pretty fair basketball school. That has fallen through since the U.S. government, in its infinite wisdom, turned down his visa application since Kong a citizen of the Sudan, which America views as a sponsor of terrorizers (hat tip to the Harold & Kumar franchise).

Never mind that Kong has lived in Canada since age seven and that his family got out of the Sudan for the same reasons that the U.S. government is looking askance that African nation with good reason. Who knows, perhaps there would some outcry if Kong played hockey instead of basketball (hate to go into hypotheticals, but with players such as Nigerian-born Akim Aliu and J.K. Gill, a Sikh, now playing in the Canadian Hockey League, it's not that far-fetched).

It would be great if someone, anyone on the campaign trail tried to find out what our federal government is doing to support Bol Kong, who could do a lot for this country.

He would be an asset to any CIS team. In the larger picture, it's not a win that he's being kept out of the United States.

(There's post over at The CIS Blog which touches more on the possibility of Kong playing for St. Francis Xavier. St. FX would be a decent place for him to go for a year or two as he tries to get his visa situation squared away, or waits for a good opportunity in the improving European leagues. The Antigonish, N.S., school also has an alumni base that works very hard to support the basketball team, so it wouldn't be a shock if they made an overture to Kong.)

Taking up the cause of Bol Kong

Bol Kong's situation was the subject of a sympathetic newspaper editorial in the States today:

We can't help but look ahead and wonder how many other losses we're racking up under the post-9/11 immigration rules.

There is an online petition. Signing it would not necessarily change anything, but a little empathy isn't such a bad thing.

(Incidentally, while we're here, if you happen to encounter a man of great wisdom named Neil Acharya, wish him a happy birthday. It's one of those round-number milestone birthdays.)

Related:

Immigration: Rules are a maze (Seattle Post-Intelligencer)

Hoops: Bol Kong, revisited

The New York Times has picked up the Bol Kong story, which is of national concern but has never drawn much interest anywhere east of his hometown, Vancouver.

There's an entire level of geopolitics and international diplomacy that, frankly, is way beyond the ken of a blog about sports. The best stab here is that it is completely unjust that Kong, a gifted basketball guard whom a big-time hoops school, Gonzaga, is apparently very sweet on, can't get a student visa to play U.S. college basketball. The U.S. won't let him in since he's a citizen of Sudan, a state which is considered to sponsor terrorism according to laws passed in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

Talk about the law of unintended consequences. Kong and his family left Sudan due to the country's civil war and, according to the timeline, were in Canada by the time the law that is keeping him from being allowed into the States was passed. He poses no threat to anyone, except the guy who's stuck with guarding him (he lit it up against Division 1 teams while playing for Douglas College last season).

The question is where is Canada's government in this? Prime Minister Stephen Harper never misses a chance to attach himself to hockey. There might not be a lot of political capital in helping Kong, but it's the right thing (presuming something can be done to change the Americans' minds).

The 6-foot-7 Kong would be attending a top basketball school, study at a highly-ranked private university and team up with another Sudan-born Canadian, shooting guard Mangisto (Manny) Arop, who's committed to 'Zaga for the 2009-10 season. Why not pull out all the stops to help him realize his dream?

Related:
Player Caught in a Web Not of His Spinning (Aaron Kaplowitz, The New York Times; via The Postmen)

HOOPS: THE BALLAD OF BOL KONG

The saga of Bol Kong figures to get more media play in the weeks to come. Kong is a 19-year-old hoops phenom from Vancouver whom most NCAA D-1 basketball coaches would kill to have on their teams, but as a Sudanese citizen who's lived in Canada since he was seven years old, he's been unable to get a visa to enter the United States.

Kong, a 6-foot-7 guard, is playing at Douglas College in Van. The school's website includes a link to Kong hurdling another person to throw down a dunk in practice (it works if you have the VLC media player). He's apparently the total package: He's got the drive, the midrange and perimeter shooting and he's a tough defender. For anyone who's in the East, Douglas will be playing in the Montreal area on the Oct. 25-27 weekend.

Related:
Unstoppable Vancouver basketballer mired in red tape (Howard Tsumura, Vancouver Province; Sept. 2; link via cishoops.ca)