SHEFFIELD, England -- Their NBA peers may not believe them when Luol Deng and Thabo Sefolosha swap locker room stories about their summer of international basketball, but playing for your country is not all about the Las Vegas Wynn, stretch limos and high-stakes poker games.
Take Tuesday night, for example.
The pair of Chicago Bulls, close friends and neighbors as well as teammates, squared off on opposite teams in the first leg of a European Championships B Division promotion game in front of 500 spectators in the northern English steel town of Sheffield (remember the 1997 Oscar-winning movie "The Full Monty"? THAT is Sheffield).
It was hard to imagine a setting farther removed from the United Center -- or even the Eurobasket tournament currently going on in Spain -- as Deng's Great Britain and Sefolosha's Switzerland met in an inner-city "leisure centre" famed mostly for hosting international swimming galas and for staging the first fights in the career of local lad and former WBO world featherweight champion "Prince" Naseem Hamed.
Not that the modest surroundings made for an easy night for either player. At stake was not only promotion to the A Division of the European Championship (which allows a nation to enter the qualifying tournament for the 2009 Euros in Poland) but also a year's worth of bragging rights in the United Center locker room.
The winner -- by a knockout blow that "Prince Naz" would have been proud of -- Luol Deng.
source : sports.espn.go.com
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