Dom Amore: Former UConn star Ryan Boatright heard the sirens as Israel war began, flown to safety with teammates
Ryan Boatright was on the phone, sharing experiences and memories on a Saturday morning with two of his former UConn teammates, Shabazz Napier and Tor Watts, when the screeching sirens that had awakened him at 6:30 a.m. filled the air again.
“Shabazz and Tor were on the call and they could hear the sirens,” Boatright said, during a FaceTime conversation Monday from Cyprus, where he has settled in safely. “And they were like, ‘what is going on there?'”
Whenever Israel’s Iron Dome missile-defense system activates, the sirens are heard, Boatright came to learn, even in Herzliya, home base for his current professional basketball team, a three-to-four-hour drive from where Hamas’ attacks across the border from Gaza began that morning of Oct. 7. Thousands have been killed, hundreds still held hostage as the war has continued to escalate and a humanitarian crisis grows.
For eight years Boatright, 31, who helped UConn win its fourth national championship in 2014, with Napier and Watts among his teammates, has lived the life of an itinerate international basketball player. He has moved not from town to town, but continent to continent to ply his trade in distant, and sometimes dangerous corners of the planet. He has played in the G League in America, in Italy, China, Croatia, Turkey, Spain, Slovenia, Russia, Lithuania, France, Russia again, and Israel, signing with Bnei-Herzliya on Aug. 31, the eve of war, as he could not have known.
“(Possible danger) didn’t deter me at all,” Boatright said. “I knew they had some problems, because it was the Middle East, I didn’t know the extent of it. But I knew so many people who’ve played there, and everybody always loved it, always had amazing things to say about Tel Aviv.”
Herzliya, a city of about 100,000, is on the central coast, north of Tel Aviv. With the outbreak of the war, Boatright’s team scrambled to get its six American players out of Israel. For three days, Boatright was close enough to see rockets in the air, as well as hear the warning sirens every few minutes until he got safe passage to Greece.
“I wasn’t scared,” Boatright said. “It was just an uneasy feeling because everything was happening so fast and you didn’t really know what was going on. … It started Saturday morning, didn’t get out until Tuesday. They were cancelling a lot of flights, a lot of flights were overbooked. Then they called Tuesday morning and said, ‘you’ve got 30 minutes to pack,’ and they told me I was going home, and they would expect us back once things quieted down. Then it was like, ‘we just need to get you out of Israel.’ I landed in Greece, called the team manager and he told me to go to the hotel with the rest of the guys, the other Americans, the league had booked it for the foreign players in Athens.”
After a few days there, plans changed again. Boatright and his teammates went to Cyprus, which will be the home base for Bnei-Herzliya as it plays in the FIBA Europe Cup.
Boatright will someday have quite a catalog of stories to tell about the places he has been and the things he has seen and the feelings they have generated. He was playing in Paris when Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, knowing it would be his next stop.
“Shabazz was in Russia,” Boatright said. “He was one of the first imports to leave, and I was talking to him about that.”
Ryan Boatright: Guided By Aurora’s Light
Boatright, who had played in Russia in 2020, rejoined BC Avtodor, based in Saratov, on the Volga River upstream from Volgograd in August 2022, despite the rising tension in U.S.-Russia relations. “(The war) didn’t affect your day-to-day,” Boatright said. “What was going on was far away. You knew what was going on, but you didn’t feel it.”
There was some uneasiness, however. Boatright was in Russia during much of the time Brittney Griner was imprisoned there, sentenced to nine years when a vape cartridge containing cannabis oil, illegal in Russia, was found in her luggage. She was eventually released in exchange for Viktor Bout, a Russian arms dealer serving a 25-year sentence in a federal prison in the United States.
Even now, Boatright is careful with his words about his time in Russia, 4 1/2 months in Saratov and three months with BC Parma, located in the Ural Mountain city of Perm. The thought of being detained in Russia “was always a thought in the back of your mind,” he said. There were complications, for example, in getting back home with the money he had earned.
“(Griner’s) was an unfortunate situation and they definitely took advantage,” Boatright said. “But as long as you were traveling with the team … I didn’t do much other than going to practice, going to eat. I spent a lot of time in the house playing (the video game) Call of Duty.”
Boatright, from Aurora, Ill., has played overseas as much as 10 months out of the year to keep his basketball career going, and he has been a productive point guard everywhere he has been. He had 16 points, five assists in his most recent game in the Europe Cup qualifiers, a win over Hungary-based Egis Kormend.
“One thing I would always tell younger guys now,” he said. “When they ask me, I’d be like, ‘man, do right with your money when you’re young. As long as you save your money and do the right things with it, you’re not forced to continue to play.’ I love the game, don’t get me wrong, I’m in my prime and can still play at the highest level, but you’re gone 10 months out of the year. It’s definitely tough. God willing, no injuries, I’m going to play as long as the money makes sense.”
In talking with Napier and Watts, or when he crosses paths with Niels Giffey or DeAndre Daniels somewhere in the world, UConn’s championship last season brought back memories of the title they won together.
“I was thinking about that the other day,” he said. “Jesus, it has really been 10 years. Seeing (the current players) get their rings, it doesn’t feel like it. It feels like it was just yesterday, we were doing that.”
With an eye on a post-playing career, coaching or in some other role in basketball, Boatright is working to finish his last few courses and earn his degree from UConn, as soon as next spring. But odds are against Boatright getting back to Connecticut when 2014 team is honored sometime in 2024. He’ll likely be too far away, not given enough of a break from his team’s schedule to make it back. This is the life of the overseas basketball player, and it could soon take Boatright back to Israel.
“It’s more of how is it there at that the time,” he said. “I don’t think they’ll be asking us to go there in the next two or three weeks. If the war has died down enough, I would consider it because I am under contract. It’s not like I can just say, ‘no.'”
