This was published 14 years ago
Heralded in a golden age of basketball
Mike Wrublewski, 1946-2009
THE GENESIS of basketball's golden age in Sydney can be traced to the pair of lederhosen in which newly arrived Jewish refugee Helen Wrublewski sent her son off to Rose Bay Public School every day. Speaking no English and looking out of place in his leather shorts, the nine-year-old was bound to have problems, but Mike Wrublewski silenced his critics and never let them bother him again.
The former Bondi pharmacist and basketball entrepreneur, who died in Bellevue Hill on Saturday at 63, was never short of critics. He could be, as Rodney "The Voice" Overby, who broadcast Sydney Kings' games, declared at Wrublewski's farewell party on August 8, a loud-mouthed pain in the arse. Many who were on the receiving end - and some who were just sitting near him at basketball games - would agree.
Mike Wrublewski
But while stories of his temper and inability to say anything other than exactly what he thought are legion, so are the lives he changed for the better.
Wrublewski was not afraid to take on anyone, even the Israeli army. As head of the Australian delegation to the 1985 Maccabiah Games in Israel, he watched horrified as three heavily armed soldiers hauled off his young rugby captain for apparently evading military service. He burst, roaring, into the interrogation room, thumped the table, grabbed the player and his passport and stormed out. To everyone's surprise but Mike's, it worked.
The son of Holocaust survivors hated injustice and would help those in need. His father taught him that it was better to give than to be the one having to ask.
Helen and Sam Wrublewski, from Poland, met after both had survived Auschwitz and their son, Michael, was born in a displaced persons' camp in Frankfurt. They lived for a time in Israel but Helen did not like it and they came to Australia in 1955.
After his victory over humiliation at Rose Bay Public, Mike attended Randwick Boys High and completed a pharmacy degree at Sydney University. He became a chemist and married Cynthia Burns, another pharmacist, but made his public impact by fighting to have basketball established as a professional game in Australia. With the formation of the Sydney Kings in 1988, he led a group who became Australia's first private owners of a sporting team.
Everything in his life was about being a participant, rather than a spectator. He wanted everyone to love sport as much as he did. As a coach, players often felt his pressure a challenge. As owner of the Kings, he charged into the dressing room to demand his team return their salaries after blowing a big lead, only to be pinned up against a wall by a player, Curt Forrester. ''I learnt my lesson,'' he said later.
His women's basketball team, the Flames, were a passion. He met his second wife, Shauna Wilson, during the launch of a basketball shoe, when she represented the Tap Brothers, the entertainers. When she suggested he use tap dancers as entertainment at Kings games, he responded: "You are my ideal of the perfect Flame." They were married two years later.
Wilson loved horses, so Wrublewski learnt to ride. He had a forgiving horse and only two speeds: walk and gallop. He couldn't stand what went between - and that seemed to be his view of life.
When his wife wanted to camp overnight in a paddock with the horses, he complained there was no room service and bought a cottage, with paddocks, on the Hawkesbury. He spent much of his weekends mowing the grass in a tractor. Helen Wrublewski, an elegant woman despite her early love of lederhosen, despaired: "What's a nice Jewish boy like you doing all this work? Can't you pay someone to do it for you?"
A Jew who respected Judaism and its traditions, and was committed to his community, he was not, however, religious. After being given a copy of the novel The Da Vinci Code, he spent his last 10 years researching the origins of the human race.
He formed his own theory of creation, much of it involving the Anunnaki, mythical creatures said to have come from another planet. Believers claim the Anunnaki created a hybrid race, humans, originally to be slave animals, by mixing their genes with Homo erectus. Wrublewski would talk for hours on the subject.
The tenet he lived by was his "circle of life". Every piece of paper in his office had the same circular doodle. "He said it was good to have lots of little problems because when you find a solution to a little problem this creates change,'' his son, Adam, said. ''And change creates new problems. This is the circle. What you don't want to have is one big problem, because that's hard to fix."
Wrublewski succumbed to pancreatic cancer. He is survived by his wife, Shauna Wilson, and their daughters, Sasha and Zali; his sons, Adam and David, and their mother, Cynthia.
Amanda Wilson