Arch: Former Raider finds niche overseas

During one game in Turkey —just as he was about to shoot a free throw – rival fans trying to disrupt his concentration hurled a roll of toilet paper onto the court that unfurled with a long white train as it skittered past.

“I was like ‘What’s going on here? This never happens in America,” N’Gai Evans recalled with a grin.

Although it’s not quite the line Dorothy said to her little dog after they got blown into Oz – “Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore,” – Evans has found himself on something of an over-the-rainbow ride when it comes to basketball lately.

Since he graduated from Wright State two years ago, the 6-foot-2 guard has played for pro teams in Macedonia, Turkey and Slovakia.

Before his senior season with the Raiders, he toured China with an Athletes in Action team and this coming season his agent is weighing options for him from various teams in Europe.

Not bad for a kid who had no place to go – at least not on the NCAA Division I level – after his prep career ended at North Canton Hoover High School a few years back.

“My senior season was coming to an end and I didn’t have one Division I offer,” Evans said the other day as he was working one of the Wright State summer basketball camps at the Nutter Center’s McLin Gym. “I was all set to sign at (D-II) Bellarmine.”

The problem was his weight – or lack of it to be exact.

Although Evans claims he weighed 148 pounds when he got to WSU, Raiders coach Billy Donlon said “he really was 135 pounds.”

Either way he was woefully light to survive the rigors of D-I basketball. But then came an unexpected chain of events:

Hoover coach Randy Montgomery is friends with Moeller High coach Carl Kremer and told his Cincinnati counterpart about Evans’ plight. Kremer – who was sending Troy Tabler to WSU – contacted then Raiders coach Brad Brownell, who suddenly had a vacancy because guard Eric Stevenson had gotten homesick and returned to North Carolina.

“Our season was over, but they came and saw me in open gym and finally offered a scholarship,” Evans said.

The Raiders planned to redshirt him and assign him to the weight room, but then veteran guard John David Gardner was lost with an injury and they were forced to put him into the rotation.

“When I first got here I don’t even think the coaches were sure I could play,” Evans said. “My first couple of workouts here were really bad. Physically I wasn’t ready and for just a minute I questioned myself and thought, ‘Maybe I don’t belong here.’”

He had been nicknamed Lil’ Gai back home, but once here the name still fit even if his oversized uniform did not. Secretly, though, the snubs angered him. He had averaged 17.4 points a game as a high school senior on an 18-4 team and he came from a competitive hoops family.

His dad, N’Gai Sr.,had played junior college basketball and his younger brother, Nyles, who would go on to break the career scoring record at Hoover, will play at Akron this year following a successful junior college career in Florida.

“Those doubts everybody else had about me, I carried them like a chip on my shoulder,” he said. “They read me wrong. I was tough – wiry tough – and I knew I could play.”

And he soon proved it Donlon said: “Some guys shy away from their weaknesses, but N’Gai attacked them. He lived in the weight room, got bigger and became a great player for us.”

As a senior, Evans averaged 13.7 points a game, had shining moments — like his 26-point night when WSU upset national runner up Butler and he was carried off the Nutter Center court by celebrating Raiders fans — and was named to the Horizon League’s All Conference first team.

When his first pro offer came to play in Kavadarci, Macedoinia – a seventh century B.C. city in the middle of the nation’s wine country – he admits he had no idea where he was headed: “I had to go to Google and look it up and see what I was getting myself into.”

Early in the season with his Feni Indistrija team, he hurt his foot, came back to Ohio for a month to rehab, and then returned to a better-paying situation with a team in Istanbul., which he called “an unbelievable experience … I’d like to go back there.”

This past year he averaged 12.5 points a game for a team in Spisska Nova Ves, a town near the Paradise Mountains in central Slovakia. He missed two months in the middle of the season after he broke the fifth metatarsal on his left foot, but once he healed he returned and paired with former Marquette guard Maurice Acker to led Nova Ves into the Slovakian League playoffs.

“I’m going to try to play as long as possible, hopefully ‘til I’m 35,” said the 24-year-old Evans. “I want to travel and see as much of the world as I can before I have to come back here to everyday life.”

But no matter where the rainbow ride takes him he said he’ll always return to WSU: “This is my home away from home and to me it’s a special place. They’re the ONLY school that gave me a chance, so I can’t do nothing but show ‘em love.”

Wright State let him show people what he was really about and that message was one he delivered yet again in that game in Turkey when the rival crowd tried to TP his free-throw toss.

“Oh yeah, I made the shot,” he laughed. “No problem.”

About the Author