BELLINGHAM — So what do you do for a living?
I play professional basketball.
Oh? For which team?
The Bellingham Slam in the American Basketball Association.
Never heard of it.
Not many people have.
Nor are they likely familiar with the teams Brian Dennis played for in Amsterdam and Tijuana. Or the teams he was supposed to play for in Brazil and Argentina. “The coaches and I didn’t see eye-to-eye,” is the explanation he offers for the latter two not working out.
Call it part of the worldly education of the 25-year-old Meadowdale High School alum.
He got his undergraduate degree in general studies from Western Washington University in 2002, and since then he’s been working on his master’s — or maybe it’s his doctorate — in basketball as a globetrotting professional player.
Eric Sandrin is another who keeps his passport handy. Recently signed by the Slam, Sandrin — who prepped at Shorecrest — played 1 1/2 years in Europe and took advantage of his French major and history minor from Seattle Pacific University to explore the continent in his free time.
Neither will get an advanced degree for bouncing a ball around the world, but both are getting an eyeful of what life is like in places they might not otherwise have visited.
The Mexican border town of Tijuana, for example. “Everybody thinks it was just great fun and party times,” Dennis said. “I lived in a hard part of town, downtrodden, despairing. All the worst things I’ve seen on TV, I got to live across the street from. Kids selling sticks of gum (to survive).
“It was an eye-opening experience. The basketball wasn’t great, but I can’t say that I didn’t have some fun days.”
Oh to be in your 20s, footloose and fancy free, and getting paid to play basketball. “I’m blessed (to be able to do this),” Dennis said, “although there was nothing luxurious about any of my stays.”
Which is not to say he would rather have been cooped up in an office, working a mundane 9-to-5 job earning a lot more than he is by pulling down rebounds with his burly — 6-foot-6, 290-pound — body.
“I’m not making enough to have that new car I’d like to have,” he said one night before a Slam game at Whatcom Pavilion on the Whatcom Community College campus, “but it’s good enough to pay for a roof over my head and to put food in the fridge.”
He is living the life he wants to live … for now.
“Today, all I have to think about is basketball for two hours,” he said, then looked across the lobby at several young women entering the gym, “and I get to look at all the beautiful dancers.”
That he is right back where he started from is ironic. Back to the town where he went to college and, with his 7-foot wingspan, was known for his rebounding and shot-blocking. Back, and it feels like home, sweet home.
“This,” he said, when asked what is the most extraordinary thing that’s happened to him in his roundball travels. “Coming home to Bellingham and being able to play basketball here.”
He shares a house with four other guys, two of whom play basketball for Western and one of whom is a Viking football player. Unlike some Slam players, he doesn’t hold down any other jobs. “This is all I do,” he said, meaning play basketball.
He feels proud and blessed to be able to call himself a professional basketball player. He’s doing what a lot of young guys would like to do.
The league in which he plays, the American Basketball Association (ABA), is considered the equivalent of a Class AA minor league baseball league. It’s a fast-paced, high-scoring, entertaining brand of basketball with players from every division of college basketball, from the smallest NAIA schools to Division I schools and now and then an ex-NBA player sprinkled in. Teams have seven seconds to get the ball across the midcourt line and 24 seconds to shoot it. It’s always open season on the basket.
Most of the Slam players are in their mid-20s. Some have played professionally overseas, but for others, this is their first taste of play-for-pay ball. Players on the Slam make $1,000 to $3,500 a month, according to Keith Kingsbury, the team’s player personnel director.
Kingsbury, of course, is better known as the legendary coach of the Edmonds Community College basketball team, a position he held for 32 years until retiring after the 2004-05 season. He also assists with the Northwest Indian College men’s team on the Lummi Reservation just north of Bellingham. A natural transition would have been for him to coach the Slam, but as he put it when someone asked him about it recently, “I’ve got enough problems.”
So Kingsbury gets the players and Rob Ridnour coaches them. Yes, he’s related to the NBA player. The former Blaine High School coach, Rob is the father of Luke Ridnour, the SuperSonics’ point guard.
Luke showed up at a Slam game in Tacoma one night but left halfway through. It seems the referees hadn’t been paid before the game and refused to come out for the second half until they were paid. The break lasted 40 minutes and Luke told his dad, “I’m outta here.”
The ABA has 42 teams, stretching from the East Coast to the West Coast and beyond (Hawaii), with eight divisions, all named after players who were in the original ABA. The Slam, in its first season, plays in the Ron Boone Division, along with defending ABA champion Bellevue, Tacoma, San Francisco, San Jose, Hawaii and Fresno.
Dennis played for Bellevue last year, but when he found out that Bellingham was going to have a team, he saw it as an opportunity to come home and couldn’t pass it up. He’s glad he didn’t. He calls it a good, solid franchise (unlike several which have already folded this season). Most important, he said, the players get paid on time.
Kingsbury has contacts all over the Northwest, many of them being guys who played for him at Edmonds. So it was natural that when he went looking for players, he brought in some ex-Tritons. One of them, Craig Roosendaal, was living in Bellingham and finishing up his studies at Western, where he played for two seasons and was the seventh-best 3-point shooter in NCAA Division II last season.
The 6-foot-7 forward, who played his high school ball at King’s, hasn’t lost his touch. He can still string 3-pointers like some guys do free throws.
Roosendaal had hoped to play professionally somewhere, and when the Slam called, it was almost too good to be true. “I definitely wanted to be doing this, either here or in Europe,” he said. “You might only get one chance to play professional basketball, and I’d like to do it for a few years.”
Actually, the Slam got more than just a player when it signed him. His girlfriend, Abby Kwan, is a member of the Sonics dance team and has helped choreograph the Slam dancers’ routines.
The guy who has made the biggest sacrifice to play for the Slam is another Kingsbury protege, T.J. Williams. On home game or practice days, the former Lake Stevens High School player gets up at 4:50 in the morning, drives to Redmond where he is a sales rep, then heads for Bellingham.
Was his wife in favor of him doing this? “I’d be lying to you if I said ‘yes,’ ” he replied with a laugh.
Williams hadn’t played any organized ball since graduating from Eastern Washington two years ago, but “when this came along, it was just too much of an opportunity to pass up.”
“Ideally, every one of us would like to play until we’re 80,” said the 26-year-old Williams. “I didn’t necessarily see myself playing basketball at this age, but I’m glad I am.”
Unlike Roosendaal, he won’t be flinging up any shots from 3-point range. As a player at Edmonds CC, Williams fancied himself a long-range shooter, but Kingsbury knew better. “He knew if he shot a three, he was coming out of the game,” Kingsbury said with a mischievous grin.
It wasn’t a trey that landed Williams on the bench for the Slam early in December. He fractured his left hand in a game and was to be sidelined four to six weeks.
That didn’t stop him from making the 200-mile roundtrip the next time the Slam played at home. “I wanted to be here to support my team,” he said.
Kingsbury knew what he was doing when he signed this guy.
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