MIAMI – In one area of the Florida Marlins’ clubhouse, Mike Redmond, Andy Fox and Brian Banks are slinging playful jabs back and forth.
Luis Castillo appears from the eating area around the corner, thermos full of espresso in-hand, ready to pour Alex Gonzalez, Ugueth Urbina and Ozzie Guillen a thimble-sized cup.
At the opposite end, Dontrelle Willis parks himself in front of Juan Pierre’s locker, two stalls down from Derrek Lee, to spend a few idle minutes chatting.
As the players spill onto the field for pre-game stretch, a similar phenomenon occurs.
Whites here, blacks there, Latinos down the way.
“It’s a lot like the high school groups you hung out with,” infielder Mike Mordecai said.
“Everybody had three or four buddies. You always saw them together.”
In baseball, and to a growing extent, the NHL and NBA, locker rooms are studies in sociocultural coexistence, often resembling a little city complete with demarcated communities.
Those lines are growing more pronounced as foreign players flood three of the four major sports.
The influx has left athletes and coaches wading through issues ranging from harmonious cohabitation to effective communication.
Doesn’t sound like a recipe for team unity, but for seven or more months, this amalgam of cultures, religious beliefs and different tastes in music, food and hobbies, in most cases works.
“When I got here (junior league in Spokane), I actually had a choice to live with a Russian family or with an American, and I decided to go with an American family,” Florida Panthers forward Valeri Bure said.
“I knew I wanted to live in North America, wanted to learn English.
“For me, I feel right at home with any nationality.
“It doesn’t matter who I’m with, I feel great. So I don’t look for the Russians when I go into a team and try to just be friends with them.
“I think it’s important for all players to get along with everybody, no matter where they’re from.”
Major league clubhouses and NHL locker rooms can be microcosms of the societies where the team plays.
Including their injured team members, the Marlins have 18 whites, five blacks and 10 Latinos.
Among the latter group are native Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Venezuelans and Dominicans.
“If anything, we represent South Florida pretty good,” said third baseman Mike Lowell, a Puerto Rican with Cuban roots who was raised an American.
“Our team is a great mix of personalities and that only helps. Chemistry is very underrated in baseball because it’s so many games and (the season) is so long.”
Lowell’s generation isn’t the first to bring color to the clubhouse.
Marlins hitting coach Bill Robinson was part of Pittsburgh Pirates teams in the late 1970s with such defined segments that each area of the clubhouse or “neighborhood” had a name.
“We had Beverly Hills with the Bert Blylevens and the Jim Rookers, the affluent guys,” Robinson said.
“You had myself and Grant Jackson. When I grew up, it wasn’t in the black section. It was mixed, right on the borderline.
“Over in the corner, you had the ghetto. You had Willie Stargell, Bill Madlock and Dave Parker. In their lockers, you could find tires, fenders and everything else.
“In the other corner, you had Spanish Harlem.
“The guys lockered sometimes in our clubhouse the way they lived. … It was set up on your ethnic backgrounds and maybe the way you talked and things like that.
“With Stargell and Parker and Madlock, nobody wanted to move into that neighborhood.
“They did their own thing, but it’s funny how we all kind of migrated over to that corner. It was great.”
In the majors, 27.8 percent of the 827 players on opening day rosters (including those on disabled lists) were born outside the 50 states.
Almost 33 percent of NHL players last season were not native North Americans.
The NBA locker room also is growing more diverse.
Five of the first 16 selections of the 2002 NBA Draft were foreign-based players, including top pick Yao Ming of China.
In all, 14 were chosen representing 11 countries.
This season, the number of international players drafted rose to 20.
Sports are no different than any other business or sector of society.
The tightest bonds are formed between those with the same interests, backgrounds and language.
“Obviously, you’re going to see the different groups of white guys, Hispanics and blacks,” Guillen said.
“That’s not because they’re racists. It’s just different cultures, different ways of living and things to talk about.
“The Latin guys want to talk about their country in their language. Blacks want to talk about hip-hop.
“That’s not divisionary, but everyone has their little group.
“They can all be your friends, but you have your preferred guys. Even among the Latinos, we’re all friends but there are some that hang out more than others.
“You always see (Ramon) Castro with (Michael) Tejera and (Armando) Almanza. You see Ivan (Rodriguez) with Urbina.
“You see me with Castillo and Gonzalez. We’re all together, but each guy has their people they feel better with.”
The same is true in hockey, where cliques form around the same criteria.
Just about every team has its North American, Russian and Eastern European contingents.
Age may also factor into how groups come together as veteran players are more apt to spend off-ice time with their contemporaries.
Before the 1999-2000 season, former Panthers coach Terry Murray made a concerted effort to promote team unity.
He implemented a rule where players and coaches could speak only English on the ice, bench and in the dressing room.
The notion never took hold, although some players like forward Olli Jokinen don’t think it’s a bad idea.
“The past few years it seems like the Scandinavian guys hang out together, and Russian guys hang out together,” he said.
“There are a lot of small groups now.
“That’s a good thing to do sometimes, but you can’t do it too often because it’s not good for the team.
“We need to start building one group.
“I know you feel comfortable with people of your own country, but we have to build a team here.”
Panthers coach Mike Keenan isn’t a proponent of English-only mandates.
He doesn’t consider language and communication issues a detriment to developing cohesiveness.
Many NHL-bound Europeans speak some English before they get here.
Keenan has found ways to work with those slower to command the language. “It was just trial and error at times,” he said.
“If it was a problem, we always seemed to have a translator, another player, who could help us get around the issue. “I never found it to be a big problem.”
It’s less of a problem in the majors today, even though the language issue came to the forefront during the Sammy Sosa corked-bat incident.
The Associated Press quoted Sosa, a native of the Dominican Republic, using incorrect verb tenses that prompted the Players Association to recommend that their members speak to AP reporters in their native tongues.
The Dominican-born Sosa is a rare case in that he doesn’t let his heavy accent deter him from doing interviews.
A few decades ago, language issues would keep foreign players from interacting with reporters and even with American teammates.
Some teams hire full-time translators for Japanese and Korean players, which doesn’t sit well with some native Latinos, who watch their compatriots struggle through interviews.
That debate reached a boiling point last season when the Yankees took away Orlando “El Duque” Hernandez’s translator.
“Now you bring a guy from Japan, and you’ll have a translator in the dugout,” Guillen said earlier in the season.
“That’s not fair. You should treat everybody the same.”
Most organizations have acclimation programs in the minors to help players make the transition.
Castro, a first-round pick of the Houston Astros in 1994, took English classes.
He would sit through a movie with an instructor, who would later quiz him on the plot to determine how much he absorbed.
“Now you see the Latin player mixing more with the American player,” said Guillen, who spent 16 seasons in the majors as a media darling in spite of his accent.
“The English is better, they study it and try to learn it more. … More than anything it was the English.
“Players wouldn’t want to interact with Americans because they were a little embarrassed.”
Lowell added: “Not that they don’t talk to the other guys, but I think sometimes the Latin guys feel like if they speak English, they don’t want to sound ignorant when they’re smart.
“That’s why guys like Sammy Sosa are so unique.
“He doesn’t care that he mispronounces a word, but that’s a hard thing to overcome.”(c) 2003, South Florida Sun-Sentinel. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.

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