Swift Progress
By JORDAN IKEDA
RAFU STAFF WRITER
Saturday, January 31, 2009
7-foot center Robert Swift opens up about his team, his uncles and his NBA future.
Photos by JORDAN IKEDA/Rafu Shimpo
From left, former UCLA guard Russell Westbrook, Robert Swift,
and reserve power forward Chris Wilcox anticipate the rebound
during warmups.
Swift, an Oklahoma City Thunder reserve center, practices with the Thunder’s big man coach, 15-year NBA veteran Mark Bryant, before they faced the Los Angeles Clippers Jan. 23 at Staples Center.
Most everyone in the Japanese American community knows Wat Misaka. If you don’t, check out his documentary, “Transcending.”
The 5-7 Nisei with the slick hair and the short shorts, played three games for the New York Knicks only a few years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki were decimated by atomic bombs and JAs were living interned. The 24-year-old Misaka was not only the first Japanese American to don an NBA uniform, but the first person of color.
Fast-forward to 2004 and another 24- year-old guard was trying to be another first for the NBA. Yuta Tabuse, “the Michael Jordan of Japan,” with his spiky coif and baggy pants managed to get his listed 5-9 frame into four games with the Phoenix Suns, making him the first native Japanese player in the Association.
Interesting that nearly 60 years after Misaka’s sneakers stopped squeaking across the hardwood of Madison Square Garden that the progress for players of Japanese ethnicity in the NBA had amounted to two inches and one game.
Of course, over the past few years, Asian basketball in the NBA has really taken off thanks to Yao Ming and to a lesser extent Wang Zhizhi, Yi Jianlian, and Sun Yue. The exceedingly long and skillful Chinese pro game has taken leaps and bounds in a little over a decade.
But, in comparison, Japanese pro hoops just hasn’t developed at the same rate. Japan simply doesn’t have a billion people to pull 7-footers from.
And besides, they’re more on the cutting edge of infiltrating pro baseball and soccer (football). Basketball’s like the country’s tenth favorite sport.
Stateside, the Japanese American community has developed a bevy of college players thanks in part to the vastly popular J-leagues, but that next step, the development to NBA talent, has been hindered by the very concept the leagues were established on.
Which takes us back to 2004.
While Tabuse was being hailed by the press as the Ichiro of American professional basketball, another player of partial Japanese descent was making history in his own way, quiet and unassuming, and right in Ichiro’s backyard no less.
Robert Swift, whose father is half Japanese (Okinawan), was the first Asian as well as first Caucasian player to be drafted straight out of high school and was taken with the twelfth overall pick in the 2004 NBA draft by the Seattle Sonics.
As a reference point to how high in the draft that pick is, well, a certain Mr. Bryant who plays for a certain Purple and Gold went 13th in the ‘96 draft. So, twelfth, is a little better than pretty damn good for a kid from Bakersfield who didn’t start playing roundball until high school.
“I started late,” the Sonsei told the Rafu Shimpo before the Los Angeles Clippers faced the Oklahoma City Thunder at Staples Center Friday, Jan. 23. “My friends were really into it, they said, ‘You’re tall, we need you, come play.’ So I started going with them. When I got into high school, I started taking it serious and started having fun with it.”
Five years ago, the scouting report on the gangly, pasty white kid with the shaved head that hid his flame-red hair was a mixed bag. First off, he was young and like most high schoolers not named Lebron, needed a lot of work in the weight room. From a purely basketball standpoint, he was raw. There were also academic issues that scared some teams.
On the flipside, he had great hands and footwork, could pass well for a big, was quick and worked hard. In fact, there were scouts who believed he was the most underrated high school prospect in the country.
Now in his fourth NBA season playing (fifth overall), he is older and wiser—his now heavily tattooed body having endured more than its fair share of pain and development. And yet, with a little more than a full season of actual game time (87 games) under his belt, the truth concerning Swift the baller has yet to fully reveal itself.
His career, like most rookies, began with him riding pine for all but 72 minutes of his first season. In his second year, during a stretch of 20 consecutive starts, he began to show flashes of his potential the more positive scouts had raved about. He played a career-high 38 minutes against Phoenix in January, collected a career-high 13 rebounds against Atlanta in February and scored a career-best 17 points to go along with 4 swats against Denver in March.
With him in the starting lineup, the Sonics were 8-12.
But injury struck in the form of a broken nose that sidelined him for four games and effectively robbed him of his starting job. He finished the season playing 42 games and averaging 6.4 points and 5.6 rebounds in 21 minutes per contest.
Having added muscle in the off season and working hard and impressing the coach during training camp, Swift was rewarded the starting center position going into his third season. He seemed poised for a breakout campaign.
Instead, in the first minute of a preseason game against the Kings, Swift fell awkwardly, twisting his right knee.
He missed the rest of the year as well as the next recovering from a ruptured ACL.
“Even when I’m not playing basketball,” said Swift who speaks in a soft-spoken manner that reminds a little of Andy Griffith sans the heavy drawl, “I still get a chance to learn what I can by watching it. I still have access to the weight room. We’ve got a great strength coach on this team. He’s kept me motivated setting goals in the weight room when I can’t be out on the court.”
Entering the league at a very lanky 245 lbs, Swift, through hard work and dedication over the past three seasons, has bulked up considerably and now tips the scales at around 270.
Last year, despite the excitement surrounding the team who had just drafted Kevin Durant and Jeff Green, two players projected to be the cornerstones for the franchise for years to come, Swift struggled to re-acclimate after the log rehab. He sat out 41 games due to right knee tendonitis and ended up missing the final 29 games of the season after suffering a torn meniscus in his right knee. He appeared in only 8 games.
“Our big man coach, Mark Bryant, has really helped me out a lot this year,” Swift said when asked about how he was able to cope with consecutive injury-riddled seasons.
“Actually, the last couple of years. He’s worked with me. He understands. He played for 15 years. He always finds new ways to keep me going. I’ve got a great supporting cast and they make it easy for me.”
The 2008-09 season has brought a great deal of change for the franchise.
The Sonics’ ownership forced its way out of Seattle (with some help from NBA commissioner David Stern), moved to Oklahoma City and became the Thunder.
“It wasn’t really hard making the transition,” Swift said. “Oklahoma City is just like a big Bakersfield. I miss Seattle, but I love Oklahoma. It’s just two different environments. I enjoy being in both of them.”
This year, he’s had an opportunity to start and played well in his limited opportunities averaging 3.3 points and 4.5 rebounds on 52 percent shooting in only 15 minutes of game time. Those per 40-minute numbers look more like his breakout second season (9 ppg and 12 rpg), but he’s once again found himself watching from the sidelines.
Swift lost his starting job not because of his poor play, but more because a proven commodity was brought in midseason when the team signed Nenad Krstic from the Russian league. Ironically, Krstic who had been an up-and coming center in the NBA only two season before, had been overseas trying to regain his form after suffering a rupture to his ACL in his left knee.
Not only has Krstic’s signing limited Swifts present PT, it also clouds his future with the franchise. He’s a free agent at the end of this year, and with a spotty amount of playing time due to injuries, and now firmly stuck behind Krstic and starting center, Nick Collison, on the depth chart, there isn’t much opportunity to prove himself.
Despite this seemingly hard luck, Swift remains unassuming and positive.
“The beginning of the year I had some problems, but I worked through them,” he said. “I ended up coming back and starting for a little while. Then we changed the lineup a little bit. It helped us, and we started winning some games. But I have no idea how the rest of the year is going to go yet. So far, we’re looking pretty good. As far as free agency, I really have no plans yet. We still have the rest of the season to finish, so we’re going to go from there.”
One thing he is sure about, however, is his desire to travel to Japan, explore part of his heritage.
Swift, before opting for the draft, had toyed with the idea of attending USC and majoring in Japanese studies. He even speaks a little bit of Japanese.
“It’s a part of my history that I’ve always been interested in,” he said. “I learned as much as I could from my grandmother who lived in Okinawa before coming here. Never really got the chance to really get into it like I wanted to or start learning the language like I wanted to with her. That’s why I wanted to in college.”
Coming from a guy who is seven feet tall and three-fourths Caucasian, you’d expect his height to come from the white part of him.
Of course, some of it does, seeing as his mom is 6 feet tall.
But, much like Swift himself, who sports painted black nails, frazzy red hair, and arms littered with ink, his height is a bit of a conundrum.
The real height, the NBA-ready height, comes from his two uncles who live in Okinawa.
Both of them are full-blooded Japanese.
One is 6-5. The other is 6-7.
So, maybe there is hope for Japanese basketball after all.
Progress is progress, no matter how long it takes.
Six decades ago, the 24-year-old Misaka totaled seven career points.
Five years ago, a 24-year-old Tabuse managed seven career points as well.
As for Swift? He’s currently working on career point 383.
And he’s only 23.
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