- Slug: Sports-Suns Mexico-MLK, 500
By ADONIS DEES
Cronkite News
PHOENIX — From eating grasshoppers in Mexico, to celebrating an iconic civil rights leader in the United States, the Phoenix Suns in the last week have embraced the importance of culture in basketball and in life.
In Mexico, the Suns saw some cuisine they wouldn’t on a normal NBA trip.
“We’re going out to eat places,” guard Devin Booker said. “They had us try grasshoppers, things that they like that we don’t quite understand. But that’s the beauty of this game, we get to travel the world (and) we’re role models to people that are not even in the same culture as us.”
Center Tyson Chandler said, “I thought it was great. Not only for the NBA, but for us as individuals to get out there and see the culture.”
Booker might have enjoyed the Mexico City Arena the most of anyone. He scored 39 points in each of the Suns’ two games there.
The Suns highlighted the trip to Mexico with a 108-105 win over the vaunted San Antonio Spurs. Then they came home to play Utah on Monday on Martin Luther King Day.
Coach Earl Watson expressed his concern at not having been asked in two media sessions on Monday to explain what MLK Day meant to him.
“Culture’s everything,” Watson said. “Being in Mexico was a big part for me just because it’s the first thing I can trace back to my beginning. And then coming back on MLK Day, it’s very disappointing because no one asked a question on MLK Day.”
For Monday’s game, Suns players wore shirts that said, “His dream inspired the world. Never stop dreaming.”
Watson talked with his team before the Utah game about Jazz forward Gordon Hayward, whom he mentored during Hayward’s first three years with Utah, and guard George Hill. He discussed their skill sets and abilities.
“In any of those descriptions, we never said one was black, one was white,” Watson said. “So when we talk about MLK Day, you talk about everything that he stood for — this is exactly it. You’re describing a person, describing the skill, and ethnicity is not even a factor. Because it’s not.”
Watson’s mother is Mexican and his father African-American. Booker’s mother is Puerto Rican, his father African-American. Two Suns players (Leandro Barbosa and Dragan Bender) are from outside the U.S.
The Suns and the Jazz played in the first game hosted in Japan in 1990. Terry Lyons, the former NBA vice president for international communications, said in an interview Wednesday that the Suns have been “eager participants” in globalizing the NBA.
“Whether it was a trip to Mexico City, or going to Munich, or going to Asia — the Suns were there,” Lyons said.
The international flavor continues with Sunday’s game against the host Toronto Raptors. With that contest, the Suns will have played in three countries in just more than a week.