12/21/2023 0 Comments Zazu flying![]() ![]() He felt grateful to have a FedEx supervisor who finagled the schedule to free him up for tournaments. But somehow, Byrd always kept the spring in his step. "But I couldn't do it with a wife and daughter."īy then, he was getting old in basketball years. "I could do the starving-student thing on my own," he said. When Patten College, a small Christian school in Oakland, talked to him about playing there, he considered it for a while, enrolling for a summer. "If I had to go to the store, I ran to the store."īut he also had a daughter to support. But he kept playing, entering local tournaments, dunking contests. After he was cut, he knew that his chances for a college scholarship had vanished. HIS HIGH SCHOOL team switched coaches after his junior year, and he didn't fit in with the new scheme. "Well, let me tell you, my knees was hurting." "Someone told me: You have to crawl before you can walk," Byrd said. But he had believed in his chances even when he was unloading FedEx planes, so why wouldn't he see this as a huge leap forward? He could easily have seen the job as a dead end to his basketball dreams. He helped Thunder - whose true identity he still guards closely - with his routines, sometimes joining in. He saw a lot of Byrd, heard about the local dunking contests he had won and decided that he might make a good assistant for the Warriors' acrobatic mascot, Thunder.īyrd, eager to be involved in professional basketball in any way possible, took the job. Joe Azzolina, the director of events and promotions for the team, played there in his spare time. He was playing pickup basketball at the athletic club favored by the Golden State Warriors. A year and a half ago, he was unemployed and going through a divorce. "I'm living my dream," he said from a hotel room in Tennessee.īyrd's story is a tale of possibilities. For the first time, Byrd's 5-year-old daughter, Alegra, will get to see her father perform. The beloved team, the perfect merger of basketball and vaudeville, visits the Arena in Oakland Saturday night at 7:30 p.m. THIS WEEKEND, he is coming home in a Globetrotters uniform. "I said, "Excuse me,' " Byrd said, reliving the moment in a telephone interview this week, "and I walked out of the room, closed the door and screamed my head off." They pulled out a piece of paper, a contract for more money than Byrd had ever made before. At the end of August, unsure of where he stood, he went into a meeting with some team officials. Byrd spent a month there, under an 11:30 curfew every night. ![]() At the end of the tryout, the Globetrotters invited him to their veterans camp in Orlando, Fla. The scout thought for a second, then told him to come back in a few weeks, to a one-day tryout camp.īyrd paid for another plane ticket, back to Phoenix on July 4. The executive introduced him to a talent scout. He went to the team headquarters, shook hands with that one executive, the one he'd kept calling.
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