Kenny Izzo’s dream of playing professional basketball lead him to places the ordinary persuer would not be willing to visit. The 23-year old 2007 Hoya grad and senior member of the last Georgetown foray into the NCAA’s Final Four,has traveled through the world of international basketball for five months. It took him to three different countries, eventually landing him in Hungary, where the league is not at the same level as those in Spain, Germany or Italy (where former Hoya teammate Brandon Bowman now plays). But it paid fairly well, and provided an opportunity to move up to a league where American players often make six-figures—in American dollars.
The dream started last August, three months after graduation. Izzo knew he wanted to play basketball and contacted agents all over the international basketball community to help him find an ad-ridden jersey to fill. A different agent in every corner of the globe sold Izzo as a big forward who played for four years at a powerhouse basketball university. The pitch was enough to catch the eye of a team in Campeche, Mexico.
Izzo and his girlfriend, former Georgetown middle-distance runner Hilary Bontz, Googled Campeche to figure out whether or not it would be livable for a couple of city-slickers. (They must have been intrigued by its billing as “The Hidden Treasure of the Yucatan Peninsula.”) The fact that American players take the majority of the shots in Mexican basketball leagues, combined with the knowledge that the top players can make close to $10,000 a week, probably didn’t hurt things either. Campeche didn’t provide the opportunities of European ball, and the play was sloppy—consisting mostly of the opposing teams’ best players squaring off for an extended one-on-one battle as the other eight players got paid to watch the game from the floor, according to Izzo.
The contract situations in Mexico are just as messy as the play on the court: players come and go through teams’ revolving doors, and the concern shown by Izzo’s team, the Bucaneros, after he broke his foot was not an outpouring of care, to say the least. They showed their appreciation in the form of a plane ticket back to his native Chicago.
A quick healer, Izzo flew to the Emerald Isle a month later and immediately landed in the starting lineup of Ballina, Ireland. Western People, the local newspaper for Mayo, Ireland, was ecstatic to have Izzo.
“Although he did play a secondary role in the team, it was to Jeff Green, who recently was the 5th NBA draft pick of no less than the Boston Celtics,” wrote the paper.
As Izzo recuperated from his foot injury and started to acclimate to the hectic Irish style of basketball—where Gaelic footballers bowl their way to the rim on every possession with no one dumb enough to get in the way of their barreling broad shoulders—he was contacted by his agent in Hungary.
In Homodvarshely, the basketball was fine: team play, no one getting tackled trying to protect the rim. But just about every other aspect of Hungarian life didn’t mesh with Izzo’s idea of a living comfortably. Not many Hungarians in his area, right outside of Svegeb, spoke English. People walked around in fear of the government, despite the end of communism in 1989. The hotel in which he and his girlfriend stayed was run down. No TV. No books. No chance the kid from the Windy City, who went to school in Washington D.C., could last there very long, he told himself.
Though the Hungarian season lasts through May, Izzo left in November. Had he stayed any longer, he would have been locked in for the entire season, and if he and Bontz had decided they could not handle the Hungarian winter, they would have owed the team his monthly salary for every month he missed. So they caught the next train to Budapest, did some sight seeing in London and Dublin and bounced back stateside.
The desk over which he now hovers daily reads: Associate Consultant Ken Izzo. He works in Greenwich, Conn. for Mars Consulting and lives in New York City with Bontz, where he catches up on shows like “The Real Housewives of New York City” and “Flavor of Love III”.
He’ll occasionally speak with old roommate Alex Buzbee about his time with the Redskins, but that’s his only real connection to professional sports nowadays, though he doesn’t rule out playing in Europe again, if he hears from the right agent.
He recently watched his old team, the Hoyas, play in the Big East Tournament where he caught the eyes of Georgetown faithful, who promptly started a “KEN-NY IZ-ZO” chant.
Izzo still enjoys being a teammate: he plays corporate league basketball “religiously” for one of the worst teams in the city and will be on the sidelines for his company’s softball league this spring. A shoulder injury keeps him from swinging, but he’ll be around “for moral support,” he insisted.
Next up for the Final Four veteran/international journeyman/Associate Consultant? Author.
“I’ve got something in the works right now,” Izzo said. “I’m hoping to have something done by the first quarter of 2009. The secret sauce and the special spice that’s going to come with this is going to have such an impact that, for totally selfish reasons, I don’t think I can give you much of a preview on it as of right now.” The likely subject of his book will be accounts from inside the huddle and the locker room of the team that brought Georgetown back to college basketball’s promised land. Though he would not figure as the main character in such a work, his most recent international odyssey might provide for his debut as a protagonist. Either way, Hungarians should not hold their collective breath for a translated copy.
my name is jess and kennys family is so close to mine we r like family he is awsome at basketball i love it to he is the coooooooooolist person i know