Former USC basketball standout and Maccabi Tel Aviv star David Blu is headlining a team competing on behalf of Jerusalem’s Shaare Zedek Medical Center in a $2 million, single-elimination, winner-take-all basketball tournament that kicks off on Saturday.
“Israel is like a second home for me, so, for me, once again, I am playing for Israel,” the Los Angeles native told the Journal in April, while seated on bleachers and applying ice packs to his knees after a team practice at Animo Venice Charter High School gymnasium. Sweat was covering the face of the 36-year-old, who wore a USC T-shirt and swapped his basketball sneakers for flip-flops.
The 6-foot-7 Blu made aliyah after not being selected in the 2002 NBA draft and joined Maccabi Tel Aviv, where he went on to win two European championships. Now, he is captain of team Shaare Zedek in the TBT (The Basketball Tournament) five-on-five hoops event featuring 64 teams.
Shaare Zedek’s first-round game is slated for July 9 at the Eagles Nest arena at Cal State Los Angeles (tickets are available at thetournament.com). The championship game will take place Aug. 2 in New York City.
Blu’s team was convened by Adam King, community campaign director for the western region of American Committee for Shaare Zedek Medical Center (ACSZ), the U.S.-based fundraising arm of the Jerusalem-based hospital.
King, a Pico-Robertson resident with a flair for the bold and ambitious — he ran an unsuccessful campaign to unseat Congresswoman Karen Bass in 2014 because he believed Bass wasn’t pro-Israel enough — attempted to turn the team’s practices themselves into community-building events that increase awareness about the work of Shaare Zedek Medical Center. He invited supporters and potential supporters of the hospital to the practices to watch the team play from the sidelines, and he spoke about the work of the hospital to the team’s members, many of whom were unfamiliar with the hospital before joining the team.
“The whole thing circles around the hospital,” King said. “It’s about giving back to the hospital.”
Shaare Zedek is a hospital in Jerusalem that operates the country’s largest maternity ward, treats 70 percent of the country’s victims of terrorist attacks and maintains a partnership focused on emergency preparedness with the Israel Defense Forces.
Paul Jeser, national director of major gifts at ACSZ, is excited about the potential of this tournament to increase exposure of the work of the Israeli hospital, especially since ESPN will broadcast the championship game.
“If we make it to the round that’s televised, it’s a way to tell our story we couldn’t tell otherwise,” he said.
The team’s players include Cory Reader, a 7-foot center originally from Australia who played collegiately at Brigham Young University and who appeared in NBA preseason games for the Los Angeles Clippers and Portland Trail Blazers (he is currently a financial adviser at Morgan Stanley); Nigeria-native Chidi Ajufo, a power forward who played at UC Santa Barbara and in the British Basketball League, and who now works as an actor and stuntman; and shooting guard Bracin Skywalker, who played for American River College in Sacramento.
“Basically, it’s a bunch of athletic basketball players all across the U.S. competing for $2 million … the idea for us, anyway, is to win $2 million for Adam’s charity,” Ajufo said.
For Skywalker, competing for charity was an easy decision: He “met the guys, the vibe was cool” and decided it was for a “good cause,” he said — after taking his driver’s license out of his wallet to prove to this reporter that his legal name is, in fact, Bracin Skywalker.
Not only are the players not playing for any money, members of the team contributed to the cost of renting the gym, King said. But, for Blu, having a place to play every week, in a city where it is difficult to find a good game of pickup basketball, is worth it.
“It’s just a lot of fun to play pickup basketball,” he said.
