“I hate the bench,” Bhamara told me via Skype. Speaking in a slow, heavily Punjabi-accented baritone, he complained, “I don’t know why I’m playing for only three or four minutes,” per game. He had felt similarly frustrated earlier that summer, when competing as part of the senior Indian national team in the 2013 Asia Championship organised by FIBA, the sport’s international governing body. He was unable to attend all of the team’s training sessions while in Florida, and head coach Scott Flemming played the youngest member of his squad sparingly. As the Indian team sweated its way through eight games, losing five of them, Bhamara played an average of just under seven minutes per game, while older teammates averaged as many as thirty-five minutes per outing. And despite his limited time on court, Bhamara sustained injuries that affected his training when he returned to IMG Academy in the fall for his senior year of high school. The amount of time Bhamara has spent on the bench is surprising given his relatively high international profile. Among those interested in basketball in the subcontinent, Bhamara has had instant recognition since 2010, when he was one of four Indian boys to win a coveted scholarship from IMG Reliance, a newly formed partnership between the International Management Group Worldwide, a New York-based global sports and media company that runs the IMG Academy, and Reliance Industries Limited, India’s largest private-sector corporation. Soon after Bhamara left his basketball academy in Ludhiana at the age of fourteen to train in Florida, he became the subject of much speculation and excitement in the sports media. In December 2010, the New York Times called him “among the most promising” Indian aspirants to the National Basketball Association, the United States’s top basketball league. The next month, Karan Madhok, a blogger for the NBA and founder of Hoopistani, an influential Indian basketball blog, profiled Bhamara in the popular American publication SLAMOnline, calling him “the biggest basketball hope (literally and figuratively) for India.” Adam B Lerner on the world of Indian basketball and how its hopes have zeroed in on a shy, young Punjabi man.
Posted on: Tue, 03 Jun 2014 09:21:14 +0000
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