About one minute into the first quarter, he easily blocks a layup under the basket, grabs the board and slings a quick outlet pass. A few possessions later, Sojourner scores from the low block after a shot fake. Then he hits a rainbow jumper from 17 feet. His versatility is on full display.
Sojourner’s man is Chris Ayer, a big 6-10 center who played his college ball at Loyola Marymount. Ayer is a good player, a solid journeyman pro, but at this point in the contest he is moving with all the agility of a concrete cinder block. On defense he looks reactive and stationary. Sojourner, conversely, is shooting like it’s practice. When Sojourner catches the ball on the right wing, 15 feet from the basket, and faces up, it’s not hard to predict what will happen next. The taller Ayer crowds Sojourner, hand in his face, but Sojourner jab-steps with his right foot, clears a few inches of space and lofts a parabolic jump shot that falls cleanly through the hoop. It is a beautiful strike, reminiscent of a Dirk Nowitzki fall-away. The once-raucous crowd goes silent; the Arrows by now have built a sizable lead.
Eventually the Kings recover and start scoring baskets. The game tightens up. As the third quarter moves along, Ayer, who had seemed so befuddled in the first half, remembers how to drop-step and finds his range. He has a surprisingly light touch, and his shots are falling. Tie game.
Early in the fourth, Sojourner drives baseline and scores on the reverse. He is energized and motivated. Another jab-step move and he drops in a baseline J. The Kings reply with a three-pointer. In the game’s final minute Ryukyu has taken the lead. The Arrows hoist a few last-second threes—Sojourner fires the last shot—but the Kings hold on for a 73-69 victory. The Ryukyu fans are jubilant.
In addition to Sojourner, a handful of foreigners are playing in this YouTubed game. Teams in the BJ-League (the common acronym for Basketball Japan) are allowed to fill their rosters with foreign-born players. (In Japan’s alternate pro league, the Japanese Basketball League, the rules permit only two foreigners and one naturalized Japanese citizen per club). Generally, Sojourner says, the Americans are former college ballplayers, many with DI experience at upper-tier schools (Indiana or Texas Tech, for instance), and are considerably better than their Japanese counterparts. The YouTube clips offer much evidence to support this assessment. With such an influx of American talent, the upshot is a high-quality basketball circuit with high-level players. “Night in and night out, you’re going against, at any given time, four foreigners and one Japanese on the court,” Sojourner says of the BJ-league.
A few notes on the atmosphere in Ryukyu: The court looks Western, with a square lane and a college-length three-point line. The paint, oddly enough, is red, white and blue. A large “Golden King” logo adorns the center of the floor, with a Viking crown of fiery horns. Whenever the visiting team shoots a free throw, the Ryukyu fans wave a huge yellow flag behind the backboard, their Viking-King logo printed boldly on the fabric. A troupe of shimmying female dancers, midriffs bare and pale, shows off its poor choreography between quarters—a mode of entertainment no doubt inspired by American basketball tradition.
The strangest thing, though, is the music. A bouncing, drumming beat, tinny and up-tempo, echoes through the speakers whenever Ryukyu has the ball. If the Arrows gain possession, the music stops and the crowd chants “Defense! Defense!” Sojourner says it’s something he didn’t really notice.
Sojourner’s roundabout journey to the Basketball Japan League began in New Hampshire, his hometown state, when he returned to the East Coast after one season at SLCC. While he was trying out for a local D-League team, a contact with ties to Japanese college basketball approached the tall forward with a proposition: Study at Hamamatsu University, southeast of Tokyo in the Shizouka Prefecture, and play ball for two seasons. His options limited, his career at a crossroads, Sojourner immediately made a decision. Soon he was on a plane bound for the Far East. “I’m a spur-of-the-moment kind of person,” he says.
Hamamatsu was a good school with a quality basketball program. Japanese college hoops, Sojourner learned, was uniquely structured. “It was interesting. They split the whole island in half, and (Hamamatsu is) in the western conference,” he says. From 1999 to 2001, Sojourner twice led Hamamatsu to the Japan University playoffs. He also went to class, taking general studies courses and learning Japanese.
