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Homegrown yet little known
Sunday, May 20, 2007
Mark Gillispie
Plain Dealer Reporter
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Brian Kortovich proved last summer on the playgrounds of New York that if he can make it there, that he can make it just about anywhere — even Kuwait.
If you’re asking yourself, “Brian who?” don’t be embarrassed. But take note. Brian Kortovich could be The Best Basketball Player From Northeast Ohio That Nobody Has Heard Of.
Here are some Cliff’s notes: Kortovich grows up in Brunswick, a short, skinny kid with a profound love of basketball and an abiding sense of sadness.
His father, a distant figure, dies of cancer when Brian is 10. Mom goes back to college and the family struggles. Kortovich tears up CYO basketball leagues while literally firing shots from the hip, but then endures three so-so years at Holy Name and a disappointing senior season at Brunswick.
When Division I college scholarship offers fail to materialize, he winds up at Cuyahoga Community College, where he becomes the nation’s top junior college 3-point shooter his freshman year and follows that up with a solid sophomore season.
Manhattan College, an up-and-coming Division I program, offers him a full ride and a chance to play in the Mecca of American basketball. But problems ensue before classes begin, and over the next three years Kortovich plays a total of 11 minutes of college hoops.
Time to move on with life, right?
Not if you are Brian Kortovich. Not if you can shoot the rock like nobody’s business. Not if you’re The Best Basketball Player From Northeast Ohio That Nobody Has Heard Of.
‘The Scorer’
Kortovich emerged from a subway stop near Yankee Stadium last summer, fresh off a workday of quoting gold prices on the New York Mercantile Exchange. He’d been invited to play in a summer league game in the middle of the Mount Hope projects and quickly found himself lost in the Bronx.
The game was well under way by the time he found the court. The coach tossed him a uniform and told him to get dressed. Kortovich warmed up a bit at halftime and started the third quarter.
He played passively at first, passing to teammates and refusing to shoot. A guy on a microphone who was providing a running commentary dubbed him “Nick Lachey” for his gelled hair and faint resemblance to the pop singer.
Fans jammed into the courtside bleachers were less complimentary. They saw nothing to make them believe this interloper had the right to play in their ‘hood.
One of his teammates, the guy who had invited him to play, wasted little time reminding Kortovich why he had brought him there – to shoot the darn basketball.
So Kortovich did. His first jumper blistered the nets. Encouraged, he began raining shots from everywhere. When the defense tightened, he blew by defenders and set up his taller teammates for dunks. Sideline hostility melted into admiration.
Thirty points and an easy victory later, the guy on the microphone had no choice but to give Kortovich a new nickname: The Scorer.
His game and his confidence flourished over the summer. He won a 3-point shooting contest and $1,000 at Dyckman Park in Spanish Harlem, one of the city’s top summer league venues. He made a New York City all-star team at summer’s end.
His Cleveland-based agent, Jim Dod, began mailing out tapes of Kortovich’s playground performances to teams around the world. Finally, a team from Kuwait called. Kortovich quit his job on the Mercantile Exchange and flew over in February. He adapted quickly to both the culture and the basketball. Despite a rule that restricts Kuwaiti teams to playing just one foreign player at a time, Kortovich averaged 22 points, six assists and three steals in 10 games for Al-Sahel.
It’s likely that he’ll be playing somewhere overseas this winter, destination unknown.
“I always knew I could play,” Kortovich said. “But it’s like I could never get any love in my hometown. I finally went to New York and that’s when it took off.”
Size doesn’t matter
It might be easy to dismiss Kortovich as a world-class player at first glance. Professional basketball is a game predicated on size and strength. Kortovich might be strong, but he’s hardly big.
“It’s difficult to take a 6-foot-2 white kid seriously, because they’re a dime a dozen,” Dod said. “Once they see him play in person, they’re impressed.”
Of course, it might not help that Dod’s 6-2 client is, in reality, barely 6-feet tall. But put a basketball in his hand and the magic begins.
“I’m a confident guy,” Kortovich said. “I don’t want to sound like a fool in the paper, but I think I can shoot with some of those guys in the NBA.”
Earl Williams, who runs the toughest local games around at Cleveland’s Thurgood Marshall Recreation Center, agrees. Williams has a good feel for what it takes to play in the league. His son, former Cleveland Central Catholic standout Earl Boykins, just completed his eighth NBA season.
“He won’t lead the NBA in scoring, but he can flat out shoot,” Williams said of Kortovich. “And there’s guys in the league he can shoot better than. It’s that plain and simple.”
Incessant ambition
There has been nothing easy or simple about the journey that has brought Kortovich to this point. Yes, there was the requisite hard work and dedication.
But there’s something else motivating Kortovich. As affable as he might seem, there’s a fire burning within, a need to prove to everyone who harbored even the slightest doubt about his ability just how wrong they are.
As a kid in the first or second grade, he would retreat to the driveway and shoot baskets while his parents argued. Laurel and Joseph Kortovich eventually separated, but reunited after Joseph learned he had cancer. He died within three months of diagnosis. He saw his son play just two games.
Laurel Kortovich went back to college a week after burying her husband. Money was tight, but she kept the family together and eventually got a degree in social work and a job with Cuyahoga County Children and Family Services.
When Kortovich was in the fourth grade, a teacher encouraged him to enter a writing contest. He wrote a story about a boy named Brian whose father died when he was 10. That boy came out of nowhere as a young man to win a tryout and a job playing for the Cleveland Cavaliers. He dedicated that story to his father.
Kortovich played baseball until he was 13, but then put that game aside for basketball, the one constant in his life. His mother says he would fall asleep at night with an arm curled around a basketball.
He shot constantly. He’d shoot at the Brunswick recreation center. He’d shoot at the Omni Fitness Center in Middleburg Heights. He’d shoot at St. Ambrose. He’d shoot in the driveway in the dead of winter after clearing snow and tossing down some rock salt.
“It was really a saving grace for him to play basketball,” Laurel Kortovich said. “It was difficult for him because he didn’t have a dad.”
Holy Name coaches attended most of his CYO games and convinced him to enroll at their school. He started on the varsity his sophomore and junior years, but switched to hometown Brunswick High School for his senior year in the hopes it might raise his recruiting profile. But he didn’t have a choice, really. Laurel Kortovich couldn’t afford the Catholic school tuition.
Self-imposed pressure made for a disappointing senior season at Brunswick. His two years at Tri-C proved redemptive enough that Manhattan College coach Bobby Gonzalez recruited him.
For reasons that Kortovich prefers not to go into, the Manhattan project failed miserably. Gonzalez refused to play him and Kortovich got his release after the first semester.
He enrolled next at California University of Pennsylvania, but tore up his left knee in a summer league game just before school started and sat out the year as he rehabbed.
Kortovich wound up at Urbana College for his final year of eligibility but reinjured the same knee 11 minutes into the opening game of the season. His college basketball career officially over, he stuck around and got his degree.
He returned to New York after graduating last May to work at the Mercantile Exchange, first as an intern and then as a clerk. He hooked up with former Manhattan teammate Luis Flores, who enjoyed a double latte in the NBA and now plays in Italy, for early-morning workouts with a personal trainer. Those relationships led to summer league invitations, which helped him get the gig with Al-Sahel in the Kuwaiti Basketball League.
Kortovich went to oil-rich Kuwait unsure of everything. The pay was decent, a couple thousand a month. And the team paid for his apartment and his food. But it was not until he arrived that he learned of a league rule that teams can only play one “import” at a time. Kortovich made the best of it, averaging around 30 minutes a game.
A team from Qatar offered him a job at more than double his salary after a few games in Kuwait, but Kortovich chose to stay with Al-Sahel for the rest of the season.
After a few weeks at home after the season, he’s back in New York to work at the Mercantile Exchange and plan his basketball future. There is a standing offer from Al-Sahel, but he has gotten feelers from teams in Serbia and Australia as well.
“Honestly, everyone dreams of playing in the league,” Kortovich said. “I want to play at the highest level possible. I want to keep playing until I know in my heart that I don’t want to play anymore or I need to move on.”
He hopes to someday land a job with one of the top-flight European teams. The storybook ending of an NBA career remains, for the time being, a work of fiction.
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