Shipley’s steady Fiba hand
Burton Shipley has one toughest jobs in basketball.
One of nine members of the Federation Internationale de Basketball (Fiba) executive committee since 2014, the Kiwi has been tasked with managing the revamped Fiba Basketball World Cup.
The change has seen a shift from continental qualification tournaments to a full qualification system similar to football’s Fifa World Cup, with 18 months of regional qualifiers culminating in the 32-team finals in China in 2019.
His role as chairman of the coordination commission has basically entailed overseeing the entire process since China were announced as hosts in August 2015, as well as the qualifiers leading up to the finals.
He got the gig through his experience in working in business in China alongside his wife, former Prime Minister Jenny Shipley, knowledge which was in surprisingly short supply in basketball circles.
‘‘One of the things that was hard to visualise and hard to accept, from a New Zealand perspective, is how little knowledge of China there is in Europe, which is where the powerhouse of basketball is,’’ he said. of the
‘‘The guys [at Fiba] knew I’d been involved in China for a while, my wife and I have been trundling up and down to China for nearly 25 years.’’
The new system has brought about a lot of challenges. The first, and perhaps most pressing, has been the logistics of getting players too and from games.
Getting clubs to release players has been difficult for some countries - Finland copped the worst of this according to Shipley - while the travel involved in the Asia-Pacific region, where Shipley holds another key position as president of Fiba Oceania, has been troublesome.
That was highlighted by the Tall Blacks’ first international window in November.
Europe-based players Corey and Tai Webster, and Isaac Fotu, travelled for more than 24 hours to arrive just two days before their first World Cup qualifier against South Korea in Wellington on a Thursday night.
The team then flew 12 hours overnight on the Friday to play Hong Kong on the Sunday.
‘‘The biggest challenge with the format is the travel thing,’’ Shipley said.
‘‘Even to Lebanon (where the Tall Blacks will play in round two) is a long way. You’ve got 17 hours direct flight from Auckland into Dubai and then another four hours on the end of that.
‘‘We probably need to put some more thought into making sure we can have two games in roughly the same area. I think flying for three or four hours is OK, but 24, that’s a bit hard.’’
Shipley’s other big task is making sure everything on the ground in the eight host cities in China is ready by August 2019.
The scale of both the profile of the game in the country, and the tournament itself, was something Shipley said not many people have truly comprehended.
‘‘China had an independent survey done [during the bidding process] and they came up with a figure that 300 million people play basketball in China each week,’’ he said.
‘‘Someone said to me ‘ what if that’s wrong?’ and I said ‘well, even if it’s 50 per cent wrong, it’s still quite a few people’. Basketball is a big sport in China.
‘‘The logistics of trying to organise the tournament are fascinating. You need to realise all of the eight cities want to be the best. They all want to have an opening and a closing.
‘‘There are all sorts of politics going on . . . it’s United Nations stuff. From a people perspective it’s really interesting. From a business perspective, it’s huge.’’