Just wanted to drop you a line and tell you that I am so jealous of you—that must have been one hell of an adventure.

Just one thing: I would have met the King!

—Rob Orellana, Fullerton, Calif.

Readers will recognize Rob as Fairleigh Dickinson’s irrepressible Rob-o-Recruiter, a character in the chapter on Angola. He’s now an assistant at Cal State-Fullerton, where the Titans roster features a couple of players from Senegal.

As to the question of whether Rob would have met the King of Bhutan had he been in my shoes . . . after reading about his m.o. in Big Game, who could possibly doubt it?
My name is Enda Byrt and I’m a coach down here at Coastal Carolina. I’m the former national coach of Ireland and a product of the Ennistymon “fookin’” Dance Hall—quite a journey from there to here! I am on a career break from Ireland and work here for coach Pete Strickland, who himself played in Ireland for Niall O’Riordan's club Neptune in 1980 (pre-Stadium days, but after they stopped timing the games from the Shandon steeple). I bought an additional copy of the book and presented it to Pete as an end-of-season gift in appreciation of the fact that the Big Game had brought our Small Worlds together!

—Enda Byrt, Conway, S.C.

Enda’s name came up several times during my time in Ireland. I can’t help but notice that, at Davidson, coach Bob McKillop has a fine Irish guard in Michael Bree. There’s a small colony of expatriate Gaelic hoopheads in the Carolinas. With regard to Vlade Divac making the sign of the three after he sinks a three-pointer, and your note that this gesture is also a nationalist one used by the Serbs, I’d only say this: I’ve made the same sign myself hundreds, if not thousands, of times. It's just the way Europeans make the sign for three. Americans use the index-middle-ring fingers; Europeans—and I’ve never seen it otherwise in any country in Europe—use thumb-index-middle. Just like Celsius instead of Fahrenheit. So I agree with you that Divac isn’t out of line with his sign.

—Dan Peterson, Milan, Italy

Peterson, an American who has mastered both spoken and gestural Italian, was a hugely successful club coach in Milan and Bologna. He flashed the same Euro-style three-fingered sign from the bench when ordering his teams into the 1-3-1 zone trap for which they were widely feared.

I thought the international stuff was way more interesting, possibly because of the complete American bias we have. There’s just an assumption that everyone in America understands the game, and nobody anywhere else really does. Could you give more description of the international gyms you went to, so we could get a picture of whether they were like college gyms, pro gyms, or high-school gyms?

—Jerry Price, Yardley, Pa.

In Italy the best arenas reminded me of WAC and Mountain West facilities—spacious and modern yet intimate, often configured
roundhouse-style, as is in Laramie. In Manila there was really only one place everyone played, and while it was plenty big, it was constructed of simple materials and had a shopworn feel. (The PBA teams practice in gyms that you’d expect at a standard municipal rec center in the States.) In Shanghai the arena was modern, with banks of seats on both sides of the court and none on the ends—but it was unheated, so the Shanghai Sharks cheerleaders dressed as if they were prepared to do their thing on a football sideline. In Switzerland, my old club team still played in what is, literally, a middle-school gym, and looks the part. And of course, in Ireland, with the two exceptions I wrote about, gyms are dark, dank and low-ceilinged—not even worthy of an elementary school.

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