Dhe man who suddenly comes into the dressing room is angry. And Andrey Vatutin, the president of CSKA Moscow, can get really angry when his club loses an important game. That evening in May 2018 in the Serbian capital of Belgrade, his basketball team lost the most important game of the season: the semi-finals of the Euroleague, the European club competition that is the biggest on the continent and the reason Vatutin’s club has so many millions of dollars in the Squad invested. In the dressing room, Vatutin then yells at the responsible coach, Dimitrios Itoudis. That’s how they do it in Moscow.
In the middle of the speech, a man stands up: Othello Hunter from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, USA, center, 2.03 meters tall. He is playing his first season in Russia. And at that moment he’s doing what Moscow doesn’t do: contradicting the president.
It’s Wednesday in Munich and Othello Hunter, 36 years old, is now sitting in a Bayern Munich training hall as he tells this story. He had to disagree with the president because he thinks Dimitrios Itoudis is a fantastic coach. He believed his team was good enough. And when Othello Hunter says he thinks his team was good enough, that also means he thinks he was good enough.
“You have to believe in yourself”
Incidentally, in the dressing room in Belgrade, despite the objections, Hunter was not yelled at by Andrey Vatutin. The president probably knew his player was right. The coach was allowed to continue, as was the majority of the team. The next season they won the Euroleague.
This Friday (8:30 p.m. at MagentaSport) Hunter plays with FC Bayern, which he joined in summer 2021, in the Euroleague against Alba Berlin. He is the only player on his side to have won the competition and this is unlikely to change this season, when his club are likely to miss the play-offs in the top eight. But he also sees that as part of his mission in Munich. He wants to teach a club that hasn’t won the big games in Europe how to win a bit.
But what’s the secret of winning, Mr. Hunter?
“You have to believe in yourself,” he says. “No matter how bad the situation is. No matter how bad people talk about you. You always have to want to prove the opposite.”
Only 23 games in the NBA
He was a student at Ohio State University when he first tried to prove himself wrong. He played there on the college team led by Greg Oden and Mike Conley that almost won the finals in 2007 – and yet it was debatable whether he, who had played more violin than basketball until he was 16, was good was enough. In the NBA, the longing league of all Americans, the answer was clear: No, he wasn’t. Hunter was allowed to play in 23 games for the Atlanta Hawks. That’s it for the NBA.
He, who always thought he was good enough, suffered his first major defeat.
In March 2010, Hunter went abroad to prove otherwise. He played in Greece, in Italy, in China, in the Ukraine, in Spain, again in China, again in Italy – and at the latest when the top club Olympiacos Piraeus signed him in the summer of 2014, it was clear that the Euroleague was now obviously believed that Othello Hunter is a player to win with. That’s how it was then. In Piraeus. In Madrid. In Moscow. And in Tel Aviv. There he witnessed how the missiles and then the virus changed his life. He told his agent he’d had enough. But he told him that an Italian coach had called about him. And so Othello Hunter listened to what Andrea Trinchieri had to say.
A phone call that changed everything
“It wasn’t even five minutes,” Hunter says, “then I told him I wanted to play for him.”
On the Wednesday in the training hall as Hunter does his exercises, Andrea Trinchieri, the Bayern basketball coach, talks to reporters about his oldest player. He could now say how fast he can still sprint on defense, how high he can still jump on offense, how he does all the little things. But he says: “When I think of Othello, I think of someone who plays with full commitment, full of hardness.”
Later, when Hunter hears this, he says: “When a 36-year-old dives, the others have no excuses!”
But there is one quality of his game that is new since he has been playing under Trinchieri: the three-point shot. In his first eight Euroleague seasons, Hunter attempted 15 three-pointers and sunk one. This season: 24 out of 55. A small sensation.
Now that Hunter is so sure of his shot from long range, he could still play for at least a year, right?
“I don’t want to say anything about it yet,” he says. He still has something important to do: the German championship. In his first season in Munich, he failed at Alba Berlin, the club that has dominated the championship since 2020. He says he hasn’t forgotten the day Berlin won the decisive game in Munich: the feeling, the sights, even the smell. In the training hall he bangs on the table and says: “I need that one.” He needs the championship. And if you know what your club wants, you have to say: FC Bayern needs them too.
