Basketball, Italian-Style
With no calls from the NBA, former Terrier Joey Beard got his break in Europe
By Tim Warren
“It wasn’t the NBA, but I was able to see the world,” says Joey Beard (SED’98) of his years playing basketball in Europe. Photo by Legabasket
Not too long ago, a friend sent Joey Beard a Sports Illustrated clipping about the top boys high school basketball players of 1993. Part of the magazine’s “Where Are They Now?” series, the article said that some players, notably Jerry Stackhouse and Rasheed Wallace, had gone on to become NBA all-stars.
Then there was the once highly touted Beard (SED’98), who had transferred from Duke to Boston University and ended up playing in Europe. The implication was clear: Stackhouse and Wallace had succeeded; Beard had not.
The six-foot-ten-inch former all-star has a different opinion. “Some people say that it’s unfortunate the way things turned out,” the easygoing and chatty Beard says over dinner one late January night at a neighborhood restaurant in Treviso, Italy, just outside Venice. “I say, why? I’ve made a lot of money playing basketball. It wasn’t the NBA, but I was able to see the world, establish a lot of relationships. I’ve learned different cultures, and I’ve learned to speak different languages.”
Beard’s Benetton Treviso team is the ninth European team he has played on in as many years, much of that time in Italy, where he is known as a hardworking, dependable big man. At thirty-two, Beard is now a backup, but he was an all-star one season in Germany, and when he played in Rimini, Italy, he hit three triple doubles (double figures in points, rebounds, and steals) in four games.
“I think I’ve been able to play so long here because I’m a team-oriented guy who will rebound, block some shots, and make some steals,” he says. “A lot of Americans think they’ll come over here and average twenty-five points and ten rebounds, then go straight to the NBA. Very few do.”
At BU, Beard “was an extremely athletic post player,” says Dennis Wolff, the University’s men’s basketball head coach. “His success doesn’t surprise me at all. Joey was totally into the team doing well, and he is also 100 percent one of the best people you could ever meet.”
Beard averaged 11.7 points and 8.2 rebounds during his college career, and when he left BU, he says, “I recognized I wasn’t going to be an NBA player. But I wanted to at least give Europe a try.”
He went first to Roanne, a second-division French team. He recalls being terribly lonely and a little surprised to find that few people spoke English. “I really thought about going home,” he says, “but friends and family members told me to at least give it a year.” He learned French and made friends, and the basketball part got better as well: he averaged nineteen points a game and his career took off.
In some ways, adjusting to European-style basketball was the easy part. Like nearly every American player in Europe, Beard tells stories of being arbitrarily cut, being cheated out of money, and dealing with fans for whom the word “rabid” does scant justice.
More recently, he has had another taste of the vagaries of Italian basketball. Treviso, one of the top teams in Europe, lent him to Reggia Emilia, a teamnear the bottom of the standings. Before his first home game there, two representatives of the team’s fan club told players that they were playing so badly that the fans would no longer sing or cheer for them.
“You stay in this country long enough, there’s no telling what you’ll see,” Beard says with a laugh in May. “Well, we won six out of the next seven, and now they love us again.”
Beard may play one more year in Italy, then return to the States. He and his wife, Liz Clay Beard, whom he met at BU when she was on the women’s tennis team, are expecting their first child in July. “I really appreciate the opportunity to play over here, but I miss the States too much and miss my family,” he says. “And I’ve got a lot of great memories.”