Emekefa Okafar excercising his mind

Hello sports fans! This just in: A Wall Street Journal report reveals the shocking news that a lot of foreigners are playing in the National Basketball Association these days and apparently, in these foreign places that these athletes come from, they, unlike their American counterparts, are taught to read.

The Cleveland Cavaliers say Zydrunas Ilgauskas, a Lithuanian center who is obsessed with military history, often reads right up until tip-off. Orlando Magic center Adonal Foyle, who was raised on an island in the Grenadines with no electricity, says he’s the only player he knows who stocks up on hardcovers before every road trip. Mr. Foyle started a book club recently with some nonbasketball friends and acquaintances and hosts discussions during the off-season at his home in Orinda, Calif.

New Orleans Hornets center Emeka Okafor, whose parents both hail from Nigeria, is one of the league’s most accomplished fans of literature. He has finished six books this season, including “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy, “Interpreter of Maladies” by Jhumpa Lahiri and Junot Diaz‘s “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.” He says the reading binge is meant to make up for all the time he spent last year watching DVDs. “I had to get my book game back up,” he says.

The Journal notes that as the number of foreign players grows, they are changing the sensibility in the locker room, “While many of their American-born counterparts fill their down time with laptops, phones, DVD players, videogames and iPods, these NBA imports like to kick it old school. They don’t just read books, they often read the sorts of weighty tomes you may not associate with professional athletes.”

In addition to Okafor, Foyle, and Ilgauskas, there’s the Milwaukee Bucks center Australian Andrew Bogut, who says he’s such a bookworm he can’t bring himself to use a Kindle. “I get more of a thrill out of going through the actual book like you’re supposed to,” he told the Journal.

Historically, the NBA has been home to many great readers. The Journal points to: “New York Knicks star Bill Bradley, who attended Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship for two years before joining the league (he went on to become a three-term U.S. senator). Chris Dudley, another reader, spent 16 years in the league after graduating from Yale with degrees in political science and economics. Los Angeles Lakers coach Phil Jackson, who studied philosophy and psychology at the University of North Dakota before playing 13 years in the NBA, is an ardent reader, too. UCLA alum Kareem Abdul-Jabbar recalls plowing through the complete Sherlock Holmes collection on his first NBA road trip.”

The rise of electronic devices is being credited for cutting down on US athletes reading. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar told the Journal that by the time he started as an assistant coach with the Lakers in 2005, “most of the league’s players had traded their books for ‘two phones and an Xbox.'”

Coaches do still give their players books to read, but the books are most often inspirational or motivational in nature. Though a notable exception seems to be Coach Jackson of the Lakers, who, according to the Journal, “has doled out carefully selected books to his players before their longest road trip, which range from works by Friedrich Nietzsche to 2666 by Chilean writer Roberto Bolano.

Utah’s Mr. Kirilenko, who reads everything from Tolstoy and Bulgakov, doesn’t bother talking with his US colleagues about his reading. “Sometimes teammates try to make fun of him,” according to the Journal, “but he doesn’t respond. ‘You learn to ignore it.’

Maybe he should try to get traded to the Lakers?

In any event, it’s enough to prompt Moby to observe that the NBA has the same initials as the National Book Award — NBA. Coincidence? We don’t think so.