| 11 March 2011
In times like these, basketball takes a back seat to life.
While head coach Eric Reveno is busy preparing the Portland Pilots to head to Hawaii on Sunday to compete in the College Insider.com Tournament early next week, his heart remains with the people in Japan.
He's not alone.
Reveno spent four years playing professional basketball in Japan after his days at Stanford, and Thursday night when he heard the news about the 8.9 earthquake off the Pacific coast that set off a massive tsunami, resulting in floods, fires and the closure of airports and transit systems, his "thoughts were immediately with some friends."
One of those friends is former Pilots point guard Taishi Ito who hails from Mie, Japan.
"One of our assistants got in touch with him on Facebook, and he (Ito) said they are still having earthquakes every 30 minutes. Everyone is fine, but it is still nerve racking," Coach Reveno told Beyond the Beat.
At Stanford, Reveno was a 6-foot-8-inch, 250-pound banger on the low block for coach Mike Montgomery. After college, Reveno journeyed to Tokyo to play in the Japan League where he found himself in a unique hoop situation between 1989 and 1993: playing in a pro corporate league.
The late Pete Newell, who famously worked closely with big men like Reveno, recommended him to the Japanese league and a company called Nippon Mining -- now called Japan Energy.
"It was a corporate league, and they paid me to play basketball, but it was in a professional sense. The Japanese guys had to go to the office, and if they wanted me to go, I wanted to make sure they gave me something to do."
Reveno worked a desk job for Japan Energy where he produced crude oil analysis and played basketball against other companies' teams.
"My first year there, I learned the langauge and the second year, I produced reports on the oil market. It was like a college schedule -- I'd get there early at 8am and leave at 1pm to hop the train to go to practice. It was like a college workload," he continued.
"To have that experience of moving to Toyko was amazing. I didn't know the language, but I learned the language. It was real eye opening, and the people were so good to me -- such nice good people and we shared lots of laughs."
For the first six months of Reveno's time in Japan, he lived in a tiny room in a company dormitory with 60 other single men.
"There was no email, and certainly no Skype, so I was calling home a lot," Reveno laughed.
Soon he moved to new living conditions and adjusted to the culture, building relationships that continue to last.
That was Reveno's life for four years; basketball, working a desk job, and more of the same in an unforgetable experience in Japan. It culminated by Reveno helping his team win a Japanese league championship in '93.
Reveno said he hasn't been back to Toyko since arriving in Portland to coach the Pilots, but did make a trip there in the late '90's for some "team clinics". Now, processing the events in Japan take on a new and personal meaning.
"I'd really like to go back," Reveno said, before turning his attention back to the painfelt news of Japan's historic quake.
"I feel bad for the people there."
photo: daylife
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