BU prepared Bailey for life abroad

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This article was published 11/10/2018 (2020 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Playing for the Brandon University Bobcats prepared Courtney Bailey to deal with a revolution and say “it was nothing.”

Bailey stared adversity dead in the eyes and beat it with the Bobcats men’s basketball team. He took the same mentality into three African revolutions and came out stronger, each time. The former Brandon point-guard, dubbed the “backbone of the back court” was inducted into the Dick and Verda McDonald Sports Wall of Fame on Saturday.

On Friday, he made the trip from Cairo, Egypt back to the school he spent five years at and won two national championships in 1987 and 1988.

“It hasn’t really sunk in,” Bailey said. “When it will sink in is when I’m on that plane ride, by myself, going back, and I’ll think about what I came for and all the speeches I’ve heard (Saturday) and seen all the people from the past who have had an impact on my life.”

Bailey’s path to Africa started with his move from Runnymeade Collegiate in Toronto to BU in 1983.

On-court success didn’t come quickly to Bailey. He saw minimal playing time as part of a star-studded Bobcat roster, headlined by Johnny Carson. The team lost in the national final that season.

“I had been a star in Toronto, and I came here and sat on the bench,” he said. “But we had high-calibre players.

“That experience made me want to work harder, because I wanted to keep the tradition going.”

Two seasons later, Brandon was placed on academic probation, making it ineligible to return to the national championships.

The team could still play its regular schedule, but the news spread across the country and opposing fans took notice.

Playing against the Lakehead University Thunderwolves in Thunder Bay, Ont., the Bobcats were peppered by coins from the crowd as spectators jeered, suggesting the athletes were receiving illegal compensation to play.

“I never got any compensation,” Bailey said. “Marvin (Russell) didn’t get any, Patrick (Jebbison) didn’t get any.

“It may have been one or two guys who had gotten some kind of compensation and then it got leaked, so everybody suffers for that.”

In hindsight, Bailey said that experience helped the team.

“We played harder,” he said. “It was us against the world.

“It doesn’t matter what we do, we can’t control what people say. But, we can control what happens on the court. Wherever we went the following year, people wanted to see us play. Everybody showed up, because the Bobcats were in town.”

The following year, 1986-87, Brandon saw a few more people show up. Bailey was a starter and team captain by then.

Head coach Jerry Hemmings took the team to the United States to play a handful of NCAA Division I schools.

“We got creamed,” Bailey said. “We were playing in front of 14,000 people. Just playing in that environment, it’s hostile. You are the enemy.

“To come out of that and come to Canadian basketball, with 1,200 to 1,500 people making noise, it was nothing.”

That would be the second-toughest environment Bailey faced in his life. The national title game later that season would not top the list.

“The national championship was easy,” he said. “We’ve been there, we’ve done that, we’ve seen it, we were prepared for that.”

Defending the title the following year wasn’t the toughest experience for Bailey either. Without Carson, the Bobcats still went undefeated in Bailey’s final season.

The pass-first point-guard played to make his teammates better, not looking for personal accolades, but still achieved a few. He received the Jim Casey trophy for sportsmanship in his fourth year, and was a second-team Great Plains Athletic Conference all-star and co-MVP of the Bobcats in his last.

After school, Bailey travelled overseas to begin his teaching career.

That’s when the real adversity started.

Call it poor timing, but Bailey had no way of knowing he would enter Zaire — now the Democratic Republic of Congo — right before a revolution.

When Bailey arrived in Zaire to teach in 1991, he stayed at his Zairian colleague’s house, along with another staff member.

While he was there, his colleague’s father called them with a two-way radio.

“Come back to the city, because something’s about to happen,” he said.

They hit the road, even though there were clouds so thick that it was tough to see more than a few car-lengths ahead.

The highways weren’t smooth to begin with, but were bumpier than usual.

“We rolled the window down and my buddy looked out,” Bailey said. “He just started vomiting. It was bodies.”

Civilians were shot and laid dead on the middle of the road. Survivors could get out of their vehicles and be next, or keep driving over them like speed bumps.

Bailey and his co-workers got stopped by about 20 armed soldiers who forced them to give them a ride in the back of their truck. Recognizing the most likely outcome of refusing, they obliged and followed whatever road they were asked to take.

Fortunately, the three men were allowed to leave unharmed.

“If I can get through this, I can get through anything,” Bailey said.

Considered a refugee in the country, Bailey was kicked out and fled to Dallas, Texas to find a more comfortable teaching job.

He was soon approached by a school in Ivory Coast looking for an athletic director. At this point, Bailey knew his comfort zone was not a place he wanted to stay.

Bailey stayed at that school for eight years, building a sports program and teaching social studies and language arts.

Then, as luck would have it, a civil war and revolution broke out. He said this one paled in comparison.

“There was a lot of tear gas, a lot of deaths, but not as many,” he said. “You hear the gunshots, but you don’t see them. It was nothing.

“Still I decided, you know what, it’s time to go.”

Bailey made stops in Tanzania and Cambodia before trying to take his life in a completely new direction in 2007.

An opportunity came up to work at a school in Thailand that was situated on a golf course.

“My golf game was getting really good,” he said. “I was down to a scratch handicap and I thought ‘OK, I’m going to go pro when I’m 50.’

“I got the job. Then this school from China approached me and said ‘we’re looking for someone to come and build our sports program, and we have the best sports facilities in the world.’ They truly did.”

Bailey spent four years in the athletics department of the Beijing school that the United States track and field and the Australian national basketball teams trained in at the 2008 Olympics.

His comfort zone would be stretched one more time in 2011.

Cairo American College — a private school that children of United States diplomats attend — offered him a principal job that the school had struggled to find person willing to take.

Egypt was experiencing a revolution.

“I’d been through revolutions,” Bailey said, casually. “They knew I’d been through that stuff and I could deal with it.

“When I think of a revolution, I think of people getting killed over something political. Egypt wasn’t like that. It was nothing.”

While the Egyptian revolution was more of a protest, fighting for better education and rights for lower-income people, it still resulted in more than a thousand deaths.

Bailey was unphased by the challenge, and is still at the school today.

“It’s about creating a safe learning environment where kids want to come to school, every day.”

While running the school, Bailey is currently working his dissertation for a Ph.D. in educational leadership, with plans to be the head of an international school in either Indonesia or Cambodia.

Wherever he has gone to teach and wherever he will go, his message remains the same.

“Do something for someone who will not be able to repay you. Make a difference in someone’s life, because you’re super fortunate.”

Bailey was inducted along with Linda Forsyth (nee Edwards), Earnest Bell, Bob Caldwell, Lynda Chorley (nee Kidd), Bruce Gullett, Euan Roberts, Marie Rohleder and Brian Pallister. The 1979-80 men’s basketball team and 1980-81 women’s basketball teams were also enshrined.

“It’s just incredible, and I can’t thank the university enough,” Bailey said.

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