You might remember me complaining in an earlier post that I was disappointed that I missed Utah Jazz star Mehmet Okur's visit to Bahçeşehir College last year. Well, today I was in for a surprise: Kerem Tunçeri, the starting point guard on the Turkish National Team, dropped by for a question-answer seminar with our students. Okur didn't play in the FIBA international basketball tournament because of injury (as has been the case for much of this year's NBA season, too), so Tunçeri is probably more of a celebrity in this country. The students were pumped up to see him - one burst into tears when he wasn't chosen to ask a question after the first 5 minutes, then burst into tears again when Tunçeri didn't have time to give signatures to the students outside of our basketball team (one clever student got him to sign his basketball when no one was looking).
Tunçeri is most famous for his game-winning basket (I like this video better but I don't know if it works in the States) in the final seconds against Serbia in the semifinals of the 2010 FIBA world basketball tournament, allowing Turkey to advance to the finals and play against the United States (thanks to Kevin Durant, that was the end of Turkey's run).
Two of my 5th grade girls were so smitten that they couldn't focus in our lesson - one was devastated that he's married, and a boy from the basketball team was taunting her by saying how Tunçeri patted his head during the photo shoot with our basketball team.
How can I even try to have a lesson after such an exciting day?
On another note, I fixed the email subscription problem. Now if you enter your email in the email subscription box on the left, you should be alerted every time I post something new, and NOTHING ELSE! Finally!
(P.S. When a lot of people look at that video, they insist that Tunçeri stepped out of bounds and the basket shouldn't count. Well, folks, that's what happens when Serbia plays such awful defense while Turkey has home court advantage.)
(P.P.S. I'm taller than Tunçeri. That's so weird!)
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The youtube video looked great. So exciting! I wish our super athletes would go into the schools and inspire students.
ReplyDeleteI think they do, but it's mostly a pretense for publicity stunts.
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