Ballin' in Rio: Pro Basketball Life with TJ Benson (11/3/10)

It’s 11:52 pm on a Friday night and I’m writing my blog…Not what I would like to be doing on a the Friday night of Halloween weekend but it is what it is. Having two married roommates and a third who speaks very little English isn’t the ideal group to have at the club. Regardless, I’m finding ways to enjoy my time here in Brazil and will be able to do so even more over the next nine days since we don’t have practice. The scheduling of our games has changed so much over the past week that we have 20 days until our next game. Thankfully, my roommate Bruno decided not to go home so we’ll be able to go to the beach or maybe even out one night (the two married roommates are headed to Vitoria and Minas, their home cities) here in Rio. I’m still going to be lifting and getting in the gym to keep myself in shape. I’ll probably workout with the U19 team to get some run in and keep my conditioning up. I’m not too worried about that but need to stay focused.
Since my last blog, we’ve had two games in the past two weeks. I spoke of how we had a big game coming up against Macae whom we lost to by 4 in my first game here in Rio. I felt going into the game we definitely weren’t at 100% last time as I had literally just gotten off the plane and we were missing two players due to injury. Well we lost to Macae again. This time we simply played poorly and shot the ball terrible. Individually, I felt like I played fine but I shot 2 for 12 from the field which was disappointing to say the least. It was an extremely frustrating game to play in though not because of my own shooting woes but because I felt like guys on our team didn’t care/weren’t playing hard. There isn’t much I can do to communicate that though to people during the game because clearly I don’t speak the language too good and they simply would’ve just thought I was pissed we were losing and not because of their effort. I’ve moved on from that game though and we’ll see Macae again in the playoffs come the end of November.
The 2nd game we played was this past Wednesday at home against Riacheulo. Heading into this game I thought I was going to be put in the starting lineup after my coach talked about making a lineup change and placed me with the 1st unit but I was mistaken. No matter I came off the bench to score 18 points, 3 ast, 2 reb and 2 stls on 5 for 8 shooting. I played 33 minutes as well so I’m not going to complain. I prefer to start but I’m getting plenty of playing time so I’m fine for now. During the game, we got off to a terrible start again which has become a signature for our team and we ended up being down four points at the half, 45-41. That changed quickly in the 2nd half as we ended up winning 102-68 if I remember correctly.
Something other than basketball that I did last week was go see a Brazilian movie. I could’ve seen Eat, Pray, Love or Grown Ups but thought I’d mix it up and see Tropa de Elite 2. Within the first two minutes of the movie, I was already regretting my decision. There were no subtitles so I pretty much didn’t understand 95% of what was said. I did understand all the cuss words they said but that was about it. The concept of the movie wasn’t that bad though. It was about good and bad cops making money through illegal activities in the Favelas in Rio de Janeiro. It also involved corrupt politicians which was interesting. Even though the concept was legit, it’s safe to say I won’t be seeing another Portuguese speaking movie while I’m here.
Our next game will be on November 17th at home against Flamengo but we will be the away team (our gym is the biggest/nicest of all the Rio teams so we host most games whether they are home or away). I’m glad we got some time off so I can rest and let my body heal up a little bit. That’s about all I got for now, nothing too exciting has gone down the past two weeks but hopefully during my “vacation”, I’ll be able to do some sight-seeing. I miss everyone back home and you guys can expect an update in about a week or so. Bon Noite.
TJ Benson