01:00 AM EDT on Sunday,
July 2, 2006
SOUTH KINGSTOWN -- I am here at the World Scholar-Athlete Games at the University of Rhode Island with Coach K.
No, not that Coach K.
The Coach K who has far more on his mind than winning basketball games at Duke.
The Coach K who this week brought two Arabs and two Israelis here to URI, a case study in trying to break down the barriers of hatred and prejudice that have crippled his part of the world for generations.
His real name is Ilan Kowalsky, and he is the former coach of the Israeli national basketball team, a man known throughout Israel as "Coach." But he no longer is simply interested in pick and rolls and winning games. Now he's trying to win more important games.
Consider what he did this past week:
The four kids he brought with him this week to URI had never met each other before they met at the airport in Israel. One was his daughter. One was another Israeli girl. One was a Palestinian girl, a Muslim. The other was a Palestinian boy, a Christian.
"At the airport the two Palestinians were on one side, the two Israelis were on the other, and I was in the middle," he says.
By the time their flight arrived in New York the four were not talking to each other.
Kowalsky didn't know what to do. They all had been up for something like 20 hours without sleep, and now it was the middle of the night, and the bus that was to take them to Rhode Island wasn't leaving until the morning, and now what?
So he got a cab and he and the four kids went on a tour of New York City. They went to Ground Zero. They went to Times Square. They went by the United Nations. They went to a drugstore.
"They still didn't speak, but at least they were sitting together," Kowalsky says.
When they arrived in Rhode Island a week ago Muslim girl started to cry. She wanted to go home.
Now what, Kowalsky thought.
What he did was take the three girls to the Providence Place Mall.
In retrospect, he's not sure why. To do some shopping? To change the mood? Because he has a daughter and figured she'd want to go to a mall? Because he had no idea what else to do? Who knows. Whatever the motivation, it worked. The girls started talking to each other.
Now?
"They are all the time together," he says.
This is the concept of the World Scholar-Athlete Games in a nutshell. Get kids to deal with one another. Get kids to connect and so much of the pre-conceptions simply go away. Sports are just one of the vehicles. The arts are another. But the biggest? Familiarity.
"The young generation has no problems," he says. "It's the older one."
Kowalsky is 56, has never known peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians. His parents moved to Israel in the '40s, escaping from Austria. He says his father was always helping people, that this is the climate he was raised in. Kowalsky fought in Egypt in the Yom Kipper War when he was 23, but it was 13 years ago that he started to spend much of his time trying to change his country's future.
"I knew something had to change," he says. "I didn't know what. But something."
Basketball is his vehicle. Because he was known as a coach, he found his name could give him access, get him places where other people had trouble going. One was the West Bank.
He met with Yassar Arafat and other Palestinian leaders. He helped build the Palestinan Basketball Association. He tries to use the game as a bridge between different countries, different cultures, even when sometimes that's unpopular.
"So how many times have you been to the West Bank?" I ask.
"How many times have you been to Providence?" he responds.
Earlier in the morning he had spoken to the roughly 2,000 kids at URI, introduced as Coach K. He showed a DVD of the 2000 Middle East Mediterranean Games he helped run, the idea he got from the World Scholar-Athlete Games at URI. It was held in Tel Aviv, and had kids from Israel, Palestine, Cyprus, Jordan, Greece, Turkey. It showed kids playing together, dancing together, kids being kids, away from governments and entrenched attitudes and the hate that's existed for generations.
"My generation not done it's job well," he said to the kids from roughly 250 countries. "Your generation must carry the ball and do better."
Now he sits on a bench outside Keaney Gym. He says hello to a coach from Iraq who walks by. Everyone seems to know Coach K, this man who has lived with war and hate his entire life.
This man who says he's a great college basketball fan, and once even worked at the other Coach K's basketball camp. This man who has come to believe that the only way the future is going to work is for more things like the World Scholar-Athlete Games, more events that bring kids together and show them that their similarities are more important than their differences, show them that their different religions and their different cultures don't have to cripple the future the way they've crippled the past.
Coach K.
A coach trying to win the most important games of all.
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