Leigh Ellis, the playground globetrotter

Passed from Andre “The Giant” to Hakeem “The Dream” Olajuwon, Leigh Ellis fell into the big pot of the NBA at the end of the 1980s. After wrestling, and randomly during a match, recorded on an old video cassette.

On these tapes, the 1987 All-Star Game. The young Australian then fell in love with the orange ball.

From a VHS to NBA TV

An inveterate player, with club matches in his city at the weekend but also in “men’s leagues” twice a week, he tries his hand at every possible opportunity. As soon as he has a few friends with hands and legs, basically!

Fond of basketball, the native of Melbourne is exported first to London, before landing in Toronto. It is in the city of the Raptors, very close to the border, that Leigh Ellis nevertheless approaches her American dream.

He is doing an internship in Canada’s big media company, The Scoreand immediately integrates the troop that was The Basketball Jones and will become The StartersThen No Dunks with Canadians Tas Melas and JE Skeets (presenting), Jason Doyle and Matt Osten (producing), and American Trey Kerby.

With an offbeat tone and a good-natured atmosphere, including several cult sequences such as “Very Solid Play”, the show goes from podcast (weekly) to NBA TV (daily). And, from Toronto to Atlanta.

“If someone had told me twenty years ago that I would be on TV talking about the NBA, I would have said: great, I’m going to do this for the rest of my life”, explains Leigh Ellis by video. “But in a way, once you’ve reached that goal, you want to do something else. After six years on TV, after being able to meet Steph Curry, Dirk Nowitzki and many other players, I wanted to try a new project. I had a lot of fun and talking about basketball was always easy. But after a while, I lost that energy, that authenticity. I didn’t want to keep talking about something without really being convinced of it, so I wanted to move on. It was time for me to turn the page. »

In 2019, the adventure ends on the official League channel. Leigh Ellis and her gang go the opposite way. They go back from TV to podcasting. Three years later, at the start of the school year (NBA) in October, good old “Lili” announced that he was leaving the group. On a whim… or almost!

“I had been doing podcasts or TV for eleven years. Eleven years is a long time in any profession. But I was starting to get tired of saying the same thing over and over again, of taking part in the same debates each season. (…) In addition, we worked 7 hours a day to produce a 22-minute show, which meant that I came home late at night and missed a lot of time with my children. At the same time, when I traveled, I always had good experiences finding pitches and improvising matches. Each time I had more messages to come to other cities and other countries. So I decided to go for it. In life, you have to know how to try things. And travel! I want to be able to create my own content. »

A crazy project: the 20th, 20th, 20th!

Suddenly, without hesitation but not without discussing it in advance with his wife and children, Leigh Ellis is launching a new challenge. No more sets and endless recording sessions, make way for wide open spaces and travels around the world!

His initial goal was: 20, 20, 20. Twenty playgrounds, in twenty cities in twenty different countries. Eight months later, between Zagreb, Istanbul, Ljubljana, London, Paris, Lisbon or even Lusaka in Zambia, the target is almost filled!

“I’m at fourteen and I have six left. But, honestly, I hope to continue beyond my twenties. As long as I continue to meet people who are interested in my project, I want to continue the adventure. Initially, I was aiming for twenty because I didn’t know if I was going to meet enough people and interested players. But, in eight months, I have already visited fourteen cities. And I still have a lot of destination proposals to put in place now! If only in France, I had messages from Marseilles, Bordeaux, Toulouse. I know that it’s not just Paris in France, and I really want to come back and go to the provinces. With the Olympic Games which will be in France next year, I will try to come back for sure! »

Passing through France very fleetingly, Leigh Ellis enjoyed her Parisian detour. A (too short) twelve-hour getaway that he intends to repeat in the future.

“The trip to Paris was great. It’s been hectic but that’s how it is when you travel. We are never sure of anything! In this case, in Pigalle Duperré, the gate was closed. We ended up finding someone who could look for the key. Then, as there was a risk of rain, we had planned to play under the metro [à Bir Hakeim]. I spent twelve hours in Paris in total. We are still working on the video editing, it should be out in the next two weeks. I can’t wait to see the end result! »

The playground, guarantor of authenticity

Like many French fans of the 1980s and 1990s, without the slightest match on (Australian) TV, the young Ellis fed as best he could with the magazines that arrived in Melbourne… six months later.

And then Michael Jordan’s Bulls changed everything in Australia (and elsewhere too). With the presence of Luc Longley who arrived in Chicago in 1994 (from Minnesota) and who automatically helped, after being drafted quite high (7th choice) in 1991. The NBA has inevitably gained in popularity.

Starting with the inevitable “trading cards”. Thus, Ellis did not hesitate in 1992 to spend twenty dollars (a large sum for the time) to buy six decks of Upper Deck cards (at three dollars per deck, the equivalent of twenty dollars today), “cards that I still have somewhere in Australia”.

Likewise, he feasted on the first video games, long before NBA 2K, NBA Live and even NBA Jam. In this case, the game “One against One” between Larry Bird and Doctor J, one stringing the pearls from afar while the other was dunking with all his might, until he could smash the panel Shaq style (or Darryl Dawkins at the time).

Now he’s the one who’s somehow helping to further expand basketball’s popularity with his world playground tour. With the idea of ​​linking and strengthening the solidarity of all these outdoor players.

“I do insist on playing outside because the image speaks for itself and shows where I am. The rooms end up all looking the same, it’s not as interesting. When you play in Pigalle or in front of the Eiffel Tower, people see right away that you are in Paris. It’s different, it’s picturesque and I want to show the different places I visit. It adds an element. Just like playing outside, with the wind, the ground which can slip, etc. »

Always on the lookout for simplicity and authenticity, Leigh Ellis does a lot of word of mouth. In an ultra-connected world, he is starting to amass quite a few fans and create a community that begs for more.

Under the spell of European basketball

To choose his future places of passage, the former TV columnist obviously does his own research to refine his choice, but he also relies on the wise advice of the locals. To live an experience as unique as possible every time.

“In general, I also do my own research upstream, but I also read the different ideas that are offered to me. For Paris, the Pigalle playground was the first result of research on the internet and it was obvious that we had to go there, for the visual aspect with all the colors and the place itself. But it’s not really a good field to play in, it’s narrow and weird. But the place is fantastic, it’s a piece of land that comes out of nowhere between two buildings, in the heart of Paris! To tell the truth, I wanted to test the Champ de Mars one, with the Eiffel Tower in the background, but it was still under renovation that day. »

Accustomed to the NBA meetings that he followed closely, whether it was the Las Vegas summer league, the NBA Finals or the All-Star Game (where we had also met him in Los Angeles in 2020), Leigh Ellis was also able to discover another type of basketball.

That of the Euroleague and European basketball in general. Certainly, he had already heard of it and he had been able to see some images of it in the past. But, once there, in the furnace of the Stark Arena, or in the fury of the Ülker Sports Arena, the fan of the orange ball took over for a ride…

“The NBA season is too long! I noticed it even more when I came to Europe to see big Euroleague derbies, in Belgrade and Istanbul in particular. The fans live every possession to the fullest! It’s another intensity than the NBA where there are wins at +30. The fans are bored, the commentators are bored and I even believe that the players are also bored! There are also teams that have no chance of playing for the title. With the new CBA, the League had the opportunity to rectify the situation and shorten, but they took the opposite path by adding more! Personally, I don’t miss the NBA too much. I still follow the results of course, but I saw more or less the same type of debates as in the past. I don’t feel like I missed anything…”

On the contrary, at 46 years old without looking like it, Leigh Ellis has managed to find a new way to marvel on a daily basis, far from the spotlights and the American-style show of the NBA.

Going back to basics: a ball, a basket, a field… and a group of friends!

Photo credit: Leigh Ellis

His major playground “around the world” project:

His report in Belgrade: