LAS VEGAS — Back home in Turkey, where as a teen he grew too tall to continue playing his first love, one-time youth soccer player Mehmet Okur decided to seek fame, fortune and NBA championships in a foreign land.
Once in America, however, the transition game proved to be quite a challenge.
It wasn't so much the food. A big, juicy steak and some hot fajitas fill him just fine. Nor was it the religion, as Okur suggests he feels completely comfortable as a Muslim now living in a land of Mormons. Rather, it was the language that threw the Utah Jazz center for a loop — and, nearly five years later, still confounds him.
"I wasn't speak any words. So, it was tough," Okur, who regularly wrestles with the nuances of English grammar, said of his 2002 arrival in Detroit. "Especially first couple months. But my teammates and friends out there, they took care of me.
"Some words still tough to me, tough to say," he added, "but I try to work hard on that."
Okur, who tonight plays in his first NBA All-Star Game, learned largely by listening to those around him — and by going to the movies.
But Bruce Willis sounds nothing like Jerry Sloan, so even by the time Okur signed a six-year, $50 million free-agency contract to join the Jazz in 2004 — after two mostly reserve-role seasons with the Pistons, including one (2003-04) in which Detroit won an NBA title — he still was struggling to decipher what he was being told.
Yet it wasn't language so much as it was meaning and message that Okur didn't quite understand when those in Utah told him he needed to show up for his first Sloan-run training camp in tip-top condition.
"First time I got here with Jazz, everybody told me the first day, 'Are you in shape?' Everybody kept telling me, kept telling me, 'Are you in shape, are you in shape?' " he said. "I said, 'I am in shape.' I mean I played (with Turkey's) national team, and I came here with 100 percent."
The 6-foot-11 Okur wasn't exactly a round mound, but he wasn't a lean, mean machine, either. He had more chins than Sloan has ounces of patience — not a one — and it didn't take long to realize the folly of excess body fat.
"As soon as the practice start," he said, "I was like, 'Ought-oh! That's not good."'
Still, a stubborn Okur insistently believed he was in good-enough condition to impress even a coach with drill sergeant-demand.
"I thought I was in shape; he thought I wasn't," the 27-year-old Okur said. "So, we couldn't get along together at the beginning."
Okur started only 25 of 82 games in what he called "a long season" — the Jazz went 26-56 in '04-05 — and wondered with a significant degree of worry what the next five would hold.
But he devoted much of the summer of '05 to reshaping his body and preparing it for Sloan training camp No. 2.
The Jazz coach, who was impressed with what he saw from the get-go of that second camp, rewarded Okur with a starting job at the start of the '05-06 season and has not taken it away from him since.
Okur, in turn, has not missed a game during his three seasons with the Jazz.
In fact, he has played in 232-straight NBA games — a streak of endurance, ranking among the league's top five for active players, that he attributes in large part to his conditioning.
Beyond durability, he has displayed a remarkable amount of consistency. It's something that has helped Okur to earn not only Sloan's trust and respect, but also that of teammates — especially when it comes to his penchant for long-distance shooting.
"He's not afraid to shoot the ball," Sloan said. "Everybody on the team knows that, and they're not afraid to throw it to him."
That's not exactly a traditional NBA center's role, but Okur's European-influenced game has elevated him into elite status in just his fifth season removed from the relative obscure ranks of Turkish basketball.
"You can argue he's played as good as any center in the West," Jazz point guard Deron Williams said after NBA commissioner David Stern named Okur as an injury replacement for the Western Conference All-Star Team.
That's quite a jump for Okur, whose career-high 18.2 points-per-game average this season is 11-plus better than when he was rookie.
But it's also precisely what the Jazz had in mind when they signed Okur away from the financially in-a-pickle Pistons, who rather than retaining youth opted to keep together a core that at the time included both aging power forward Rasheed Wallace and now-Chicago Bulls center Ben Wallace.
"We asked him to go from being a very supporting cast (member) on a terrific Detroit team that won a championship," Jazz basketball operations senior vice president Kevin O'Connor said, "to stepping into a lead role in his third year in the league — really, his second, because he didn't get to play much at all (as an NBA rookie) when he was making a transition from Europe."
Though it didn't happen as soon as the Jazz might have hoped, Okur — just a second-round draft pick of the Pistons, No. 38 overall, back in 2001 — credits one man for the fact it finally has come to pass.
He's a man whose language many often do not comprehend, but one Okur now seems to get more — go figure — than most Americans.
"He hates losing. He's such a good teacher. He likes to teach day-in and day-out. So, I've learned a lot of things from him," Okur said of Sloan, whose homespun southern Illinois farmspeak and dry but wry sense of humor is frequently lost on many. "He did great job on me. He teached me a lot of great things out there. Everything he's saying out there, I got it. It's all good.
"Last couple years, he believed in me. ... It's been up-and-down for me, but right now I feel good," he added. "Finally, I got used to it with the system, organization, my teammates, coaches, everything. They gave me an opportunity to show what I got out there, what I can do for them. I'm so glad I made a good choice to sign with the Jazz."
It wasn't so much the food. A big, juicy steak and some hot fajitas fill him just fine. Nor was it the religion, as Okur suggests he feels completely comfortable as a Muslim now living in a land of Mormons. Rather, it was the language that threw the Utah Jazz center for a loop — and, nearly five years later, still confounds him.
NBA ALL-STAR GAME
Today, 6:30 p.m.
Thomas &
Mack Center
Las Vegas
TV: TNT