Korean Basketball League

Ulsan is not a very large city, but one thing they do have is a professional basketball team, the Mobis Phoebus. We just realized this yesterday (after being here over two months!), and here's how. First off, KBL (Korean Basketball League - the Korean equivalent of the NBA) games are on TV all the time, but they are never in English, so we have never heard or seen the word Ulsan associated with the KBL. Also, since Ulsan is such a small city, we never really thought about it having a KBL franchise.

On numerous occasions we have seen large buses painted with team names and logos outside of our hotel, but weren't sure what sport they represented. While these buses were outside, we also noticed that there were some of the tallest Koreans we have ever seen milling around the hotel (as a complete tangent, its funny to go down to breakfast when these teams are eating, because they empty the buffet of pretty much all food). We aren't geniuses, but we put two and two together and figured they were probably basketball players. I asked Jeff if he thought they were professional players, but since we were convinced Ulsan wouldn't have a team we just decided they were either University players or some sort of lower league team (like the CBA in the US).

Before continuing, there's one thing you should know about the KBL. There are very strict rules about having non-Koreans on a team. Each team is allowed a few foreigners, and only two non-Koreans may be on the court at a time. In practice this has meant that each team has picked up a few African American players. Jeff and I figured out these rules quickly when watching the games as there would be 6 Koreans and then 4 much taller African Americans on the court.

Last night, we took the elevator downstairs to get dinner and barely fit in with the 7 or 8 other basketball players in the elevator. The last guy to get on the elevator was an African American wearing all Memphis Grizzlies gear. At that point I decided I would do some research to try and find out if in fact these were professional players. A few internet searches later I found our mystery man in the Grizzlies gear and discovered that the Ulsan Mobis Phoebus were actually a professional KBL team. In case you are curious, our mystery man was Kimani Ffriend, who played his college ball at Nebraska from 1999-2001 and was drafted by the Grizzlies in 2006 (not sure where he was in the five years in between). Apparently that didn't work out long, because now he is over here in Korea playing for the Incheon Etland Black Slamers.