Basketball in Beirut

Former U.S. collegians will go anywhere and everywhere to play for money.

Some even go to Beirut.

Perhaps it's not the Spanish League or the Italian League, but it's a pay check, it's basketball, and the crowds seem to like it. So far, there haven't been any incidents like the one on a Hill Street Blues episode decades ago, when the policemen (led by the character Bobby Joe Hill, played by former UCLA star Michael Warren) played one of the gangs, it was a close game, and as the policemen's team's shot at the end of the game looked like it was going to go in, a gang member shot the ball, exploding it, the game and the gym in the process. Nothing like that's happened, but that's not to say that there aren't well-armed men with guns around and that the U.S. players don't have to be careful walking up to and talking with women in Lebanon. They do.

Good front-page human interest article from The Wall Street Journal.