O Iceland!

So, part of the inspiration for my moniker was a long-time emotional relationship to the only Icelandic (and first European drafted) player to linger in the NBA for a little while, Petur Gudmundsson. Interestingly, like Swen, he ended up at the Spurs near the end of his career, which seems to have always been friendly to the foreigners.

Anyway, aside from my having some Icelandic blood, he also haunts my memories of early basketball playing.

I went to an alternative school in Portland, Oregon, and despite our teachers' best attempts at teaching us competition-free New Games (various excruciating activities like !Holding a Giant Earth Up Together! and !Parachute Flapping!), my friends and I played intense football and basketball games during lunch. Most of my early fights and emotional victories revolved around those various hippy playing fields. For football, we were mostly on our own, free to mash each other into the grass, and mostly in the same age range. But there was only one basketball court, and it being a K-12 school, there was quite a mix for the hoops games, including teachers. I was a chunky kid, but slightly taller for my age, and could hold up my end enough to get into a few runs, but not as a genius scorer. Rebounds, defense, etc. There was this older guy, probably just a freshman in high school, but at the time he seemed like a very mature adult, with slight peach fuzz and long hair, and he good-naturedly taunted me by yelling out "Gudmundsson!" everytime I missed a shot. I have no idea how he came upon that taunt for me, except that Petur had recently been drafted by the Trail Blazers, and his clumsy ways were probably more apparent to us than most NBA fans. I'm sure he didn't know I was part Icelandic. In fact, I'm not sure I knew I was Icelandic.

Anyway, as we prepared to do this blog, Swen got me to thinking of other awkwardly named players, and I was reminded of ole Petur. I tried to find out what he was up to these days, and came up with this archival tidbit from 1986:

By the standards of his native Iceland, Petur Gudmundsson, a 7-foot-2-inch center for the Kansas City Sizzlers of the Continental Basketball Association, is a pretty fair basketball player. By the standards of the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service, he is nothing special.

Not special enough, anyway, to qualify for a special work permit given to aliens of ''distinguished merit and ability.'' In rejecting Gudmundsson's application for such a permit, the service indicated that playing in the C.B.A. was proof of his undistinguished merit. ''The C.B.A. is a good league,'' said Ron Sanders, the I.N.S. district director in Kansas City, ''but the players aren't of the same caliber as the N.B.A. And if he did have distinguished ability he wouldn't be in the C.B.A.''

So poor Petur was sent back home. But wait, was he? Searching a little further, I found a Linked In profile! Here's what he's up these days, up in Seattle:

I currently work in the commercial dispatch dept where we tend to trouble issues that come up at the fitness locations nationwide by dispatching contracted service techs to those locations. I also trouble shoot issues such as payment problems and monitor certifications of current contracted techs as well as interview potential new service techs on the phone.

So interesting to think of this guy who lived only as a taunt now working in a cubicle somewhere, answering tech calls. Perhaps I'll have the courage to get in touch with him some time, let him know I did my best to make those taunts into compliments.