Read the first part of Brent Petway’s career recollections as he wrote them himself for Eurohoops.
The happy-go-lucky side of the Moon
I had to fact-check myself because I don’t wanna put out anything false from jumbled memory and this first year was not the year Printezis was injured. I was playing anywhere from 18-24 minutes a game sharing minutes with him, which means I was really stressing hard if I was sharing minutes and still stressing the F… out. One main proponent of my stress, my man, coach Mamarinos.
Long-time Olympiacos guy, I think he meant well by pushing me because he was probably one of the guys who went to bat for me in the signing process. I know this because I met personally with him in a “secret” meeting before the summer, just me, him, and my no-good agent. When I said we had intense assistant coaches, I meant mainly him and Pappas. Seemingly I was Mamarinos’ project though because it didn’t matter where I was on the floor, I would hear “BRENT WTF” from him and that got very old very quick with my mindset already being that no one thinks I’m good enough to be here, so him “blaming” me for anything going wrong on the court was just reinforcing that shit in my head.
Again looking back on it, I think he actually meant well but it just wasn’t helping the way he intended. Me being the way I am, I never shouted back and got disrespectful in any way to him to let him know that shit was bothering me. I just internalized it and kept pushing. NEVER do that it’s bad for your mental health ladies and gentlemen, very bad.
Ok, now my back is getting better but I haven’t even shot one jump shot for a month. I couldn’t run so no cardio, so of course, it’s gonna take me at least 2-3 weeks to get back in shape and feeling normal again. Jamario Moon was signed while I was injured and he was the exact opposite of me personality-wise. He could make a mistake and forget it immediately even with the coaches screaming at him from the bench, and not care at all.
Funny story: Jamario is playing defense, a guy gets a back cut layup on him and he is still standing near the 3pt line. Coaches from the sideline scream “Jamario weak side defense!!!”
Jamario’s response was “I ain’t see him, coach.” I put a towel over my face to hide the fact that I was laughing so hard. Of course, you didn’t see him that’s why he scored, but that was Jamario, then he would come right down and hit a three or dunk on somebody two plays later. Having that level of confidence is something I never had. If you look at my career, years where I had coaches tell me “yo, we are with you, do your thing”, I was one of the most efficient all-around players. That happened in two places after high school. Bryan Gates and his staff in the G-league and Rethymno.
Bartzokas would let me hoop too, but it was the chirping from the assistants that would always make me think twice about shooting or trying to score too much. You see there are many players out there, that can do a lot more than what you see on TV or in the games but they are put in a box so that other players can shine because it’s not “their” team. So when you see a player coming to your team that maybe was averaging 16 or more and they get to your team and all of sudden their play struggles and they seem totally different, many times it’s more than just they are having a bad year or they are not a good player. Is the coach letting them play free, and do they mesh with the locker room politics?
Locker Room Politics
What is that you ask? People think it’s just twelve guys from the outside: the best scorers score the most, the best players play, and if you miss your open shots, you are a bum. No, the best teams are like this, where everyone understands their role, no one is jealous of another man/woman, and no one is afraid to let a guy get his shine.
In Rethymno, I was never the best scorer, or even best player, we had Zack Wright and Dionte Christmas my first year who were trading MVPs of the whole league from week to week. Most Americans in my position would get jealous that these other two guys were killing, scoring 20 every week but to me, I’m like “yo, we’re winning and I’m doing ok”. Why do I need to hate on these two because they are supremely gifted dudes? Really watching those two go back and forth every week was crazy and I’m seeing it close up.
I played with Coby Karl and Luke Jackson my second year in the G-league and when I say locker room politics these two were the antithesis of that. I was no threat to either of these two guys getting their NBA call-up but they definitely treated me as such. I was the defensive guy, doing all the dirty work, so they can go down on offense, jack up shots and get their numbers to look good on the stat sheet.
Future and present players, here is what happens and how you can find a snake in your locker room. Any game where I would come out in the first half and have a good scoring game going, somehow, the ball just stopped finding me in the second half. Who were the ball handlers? Hmm, let me think, Coby Karl and Luke Jackson. Luke Jackson always rubbed me the wrong way from the beginning, just his attitude and look was like he was above everyone, even the coaches in the G-league. The crazy thing is they treated him even more like a king for acting like that, while I was there working hard as hell watching this shit like man, this shit is backward.
He just had that frat boy look that you wanted to punch him in the mouth because everything he said was condescending, but I couldn’t do that because that would make me the unprofessional black thug. While I’m on Locker Room Politics now I’ll say this: Find one teammate or coach that says they thought I was unprofessional or a bad teammate. Ok, I say that to say this, all the locker rooms I have been in there are only two. maybe three guys that I absolutely do not like at all. Hate is too strong of a word but there are maybe three guys that I really wanted to fight while I was on the team with them: Luke Jackson, Dimitris Agravanis, and Jack Devecchio.
Agravanis was young but damn man, his mentality was unlike any I have ever seen before. He thought for sure he was better than me and that I don’t have a problem with it, because you should feel like that. But when you go as far as trying to injure me on the low in practice, now we have a problem. I’m not talking one or two times, I’m talking every day. I gotta watch my feet when he closes out on my shot, or watch out for elbows. I would joke with teammates that I’m sure this dude had voodoo dolls of me and Printezis in his room because every year one of us had something happening to us at all times, the shit was crazy.
Jack was the team captain in Sassari and I never had a more fake team guy in my life. If you are watching the games it looks like he is playing hard defense ya know being a glue guy, but I was a professional glue guy so I know what that shit really looks like, and from the inside Jack was fake and it’s nothing I hate more than fake tough guys or just fake people in general. Jack played at “3”. I played “4” (until they completely f***ed me and had me playing 5 at 210 lbs) so we had the rule to switch all screens. The easiest defense you can ever play. If we came together just switch.
We were pretty much the same size, Jack would yell switch and routinely stay with his man while I’m switching onto his man, leaving my guy free to walk the ball in the rim if he pleased. Then he would tell me “my bad”, but when the coach would ask what happen he was as quiet as a church mouse. This happened pretty much every game at least once. So I’m just out here looking like a dumbass and he is whispering “my bad”. Now if I don’t switch and his man scores he can say to the coach “well I said switch”, but if I do switch my guy is lining up three-pointers checking the wind with his fingers like he is at the damn Masters’ tournament on the 17th hole. There is more on the Sassari season that was a complete debacle but I’ll get to that.
2nd Year Olympiacos
This is where shit really starts going downhill for me mentally and basketball-wise. It started with me feeling really good and comfortable finally that I belonged. Had a great connection with Kostas Sloukas, it was two points guaranteed almost every game with an alley-oop from him. We were going like a train winning everywhere, Euroleague, Greek League, and then we have the Greek Cup draw and our opponent is, you guessed it, them damn Greens, the six stars.
You can’t write this shit in Hollywood, I still think the “draw” was peculiar, but ok, whatever! We play the game, we have a terrible collapse in the last two minutes because we started playing not to lose instead of playing to win the game. They win on a last-second dunk! Remember I said you can’t write this shit, you really can’t write this shit. The locker room is as dead as a doornail (old southern saying). We get back to SEF to go home and 500 Gate 7 fans are waiting to yell and attack us (another thing I don’t understand in Europe).
Just think this was the third game of the season, the THIRD GAME!!!! Somehow I snuck the hell off the bus, got right in my car, and got the f*** outta there. Other players were going to put their shoes back in the locker room so the fans got to give them a piece of their minds and I didn’t know that there was a short meeting in the locker where Bartzokas told the guys he might resign. I get to practice the next day and that’s exactly what happened.
I’m sitting in my locker thinking “wtf if they are forcing him to resign and he has put the great roster together, got damn my days are numbered.” I actually enjoyed playing for Bartzokas and then Milan Tomic took over and I enjoyed playing for him too, but for some reason, they didn’t want to let him keep the job while most of the players felt he was doing great. In comes, coach Sfairopolous. He was great with Xs and Os. Tactics-wise I give him 100% props but his players’ management was different. It was a military-like approach and with the group of guys, we had, he rubbed almost everybody the wrong way with the first impression. I know I was thinking “oh, damn this is gonna be rough.”
Now, this is the year Printezis started with an injury, so I felt a little added pressure to perform here was my chance right. I’m playing well but slowly start seeing Agravanis minutes creep up, which I had no problem with because the kid can play. I’ll never lie and say someone can’t play just because I don’t like their personality traits. And check this out, I don’t know what kind of relationship Sfairopoulos had with Agravanis off the court. as in like a father-to-son mentor-type thing, but there had to be something going on that I was not seeing. Despite this military general image coach had with everyone, Agravanis would blatantly disrespect everyone then start the next game, or play 25 minutes.
Meanwhile, I’m looking at myself, Tremmel Darden, and Oliver Lafayette. We don’t know from game to game how much time we will get if we get any at all, and these are two dudes who can flat out hoop. With my own eyes, I saw Agravanis doing pretty wild things in the locker rooms, disrespecting the club, and then starting the next game.
That right there was one of the biggest slaps in the face to me that I ever had in basketball. If that was Printezis doing it, you know I could see that he is a legend, if it was Spanoulis who did that, I could see him starting he is a legend, but come on man, a young player? A young player who played for Rethymno would never do that. This kid is doing that on Olympiacos, that right there let me know there was something else to this story, no way an organization would let that slide with no fine, no apology, nothing just move on like, nothing happened.
From there I thought about myself like “yo, I must not be good at all if a guy can come in, act like this and still play over me” not to mention I was the one hold shit down while Printezis was out and then slowly get phased out for doing everything coaches ask. The disrespect was real but I was in no position to grandstand and make that shit known, so what did I do? I internalized it all once again.
I’m living with all this pressure, all this disrespect, and it’s bottled up at this point by the end of the season I’m a ticking time bomb of emotions and if one more thing goes wrong it’s probably gonna go off. Cue my terrible agents to derail my career up even more. Sending me to the Graveyard that was Dinamo Sassari. Graveyard for me. I’m not saying it like the club is terrible, but it was no place for me to be the best I could be at all.
Throughout his pro career from 2007 to 2018, Petway played for such teams as Olympiacos Piraeus, Pinar Karsiyaka, Dinamo Sassari, Aris Thessaloniki, and Rethymno. He won the 2015 Greek League and made the EuroLeague championship game with Olympiacos and was particularly famous for his spectacular type of play.