A former Eastern Bloc nation has helped North Philly native Maurice Whitfield realize his dream of basketball stardom.

Decin's Sports Hall is ugly -- the special functionalist-kitsch ugly that dates a Czech building to communist times. The facade is a cross-hatch of fiberglass sheets colored a dull rust red. The windows are covered by heavy curtains or dingy blinds, lest sunlight penetrate the fluorescent glare of the brown-paneled interior. In one corner there’s an auto-parts store.

This is the home of BK SCE Decin, the professional basketball team of this town of about 53,000 near the Czech-German border, and on this overcast April afternoon, it is being invaded.

The interlopers are piling off a bus, several dozen strong, about 45 minutes before game time, sporting the colors of visiting BK ECM Nymburk. Near the end of the parade is a skinny girl in a red-and-white jersey bearing the number 11 and the name "Whitfield" stitched across the shoulders.

As the Decin boosters trickle into the 850-seat arena, the Nymburkers are already lining the standing-room area reserved for visiting fans. The players are running through shooting drills. Up in standing room a drum starts beating and a chant goes up: "Mau-rice!"" Boom boom boom! "Mau-rice!" Boom boom boom!

That would be Maurice Lamar Whitfield, late of North Taney Street and Murrell Dobbins Tech High. Also late of Norfolk, Va., Billings, Mont., and Rijeka, Croatia, among other places, and lately the most popular American in eastern Central Bohemia.

One of seven Americans playing in the Národní basketballovy liga, or National Basketball League, Whitfield is Nymburk's starting point guard and, to many minds, the best point guard in the Czech Republic. This season he led the NBL in assists (seven per game), and his playmaking is a large part of why teammate Ashante Johnson, of San Diego, won the scoring title and the MVP award. Their team is a contender for the championship that Whitfield just missed last year, when he played for another NBL squad. He is a favorite of Nymburk's raucous fans, and has even been approached by Czech basketball officials about joining the national team.

And he is making a living doing what he loves. If doing it in tiny gyms in Central Europe rather than before screaming thousands at the First Union Center bothers the 30-year-old North Philly native, he doesn't show it.

"I wouldn't change anything," Whitfield says of an itinerant career that has taken him from the Greenleaf Whittier playground on Clearfield Street to Latin America and across the Atlantic. "I'm just happy I had the opportunity, and I'll try to take advantage of it."

There's no hint of resignation or dream deferred in his voice. European basketball is full of Americans from high-profile NCAA programs, not long out of school, hoping for a monster season or sensational scouting-camp performance to punch their ticket back to the States. Whitfield, who came to organized basketball relatively late and honed his game on the fringes of college hoops, long ago set his sights on simply playing ball.

"I had NBA dreams, but it was no big thing for me," he says. "I'm happy getting paid to do what I love to do. I can make a living and support my family, do some of the things I always wanted to do. I'm thankful for that."

Off-court, Whitfield is affable, relaxed, apparently at peace with life abroad and his place in the basketball universe. On-court he is effusive, goofing with teammates during pre-game drills, bounding to the hardwood during player introductions, beaming when Nymburk's high-powered offense gets in gear. Whitfield can score (17.5 points a game this season), but he's most effective running the offense, creating plays for others. Everywhere he's gone, his team has gotten better.

"He's the leader, one of the guys the team can't be without," says Martin Ides, Nymburk's 7-foot-2 center, a Czech who played Division I college ball at Davidson in North Carolina.

"Usually what happens, when American guys come here, they try to score all the points, get all the rebounds, get all the stats," Ides says. "Maurice gets the stats, but I would never say he tries to play that way. He tries to get the other guys involved. … You can hear him say all he wants to do is win the championship."

"They say North Philly ballplayers are very, very tough. I think I got my toughness from my North Philly playground days."

Whitfield is sitting in his flat, wearing blue sweats and a long-sleeved T-shirt with a picture of a smiling young man in a baseball cap. His arms are draped over the back of a floral-print sofa, his eyes occasionally straying to the hip-hop videos playing soundlessly on TV. The man on the shirt is his brother Brian, "Buck" to just about everybody, who was killed in Philadelphia last fall at the age of 26.

Buck was the one who urged Whitfield to play in Europe a few years back, when his basketball career had stalled and he was working for social services in Virginia Beach. "The days I told him I'm gonna quit, he was always the one who said, 'Aw, don't quit. You're gonna make it. Trust me, you're gonna be OK.' He always believed in me, and to this day, every day I go out there I think about him. … I'm just so, so sorry he ain't here to see it." He turns briefly and rubs his eyes with thumb and forefinger.

The brothers grew up on Taney -- "a corner house, three bad boys and one little girl." Their father moved out when Whitfield was very young. (He met his dad again in the late '90s, he says, and they got close before his father died last year.) His mother worked for the school system, teaching computer skills. He counts 11 siblings, nine brothers and two sisters, "from both parents, and other marriages." He never refers to any as half-this or step-that: "It's all twisted up in there, but we're all one big family."

Attending Murrell Dobbins Tech, Whitfield initially focused on football and baseball. In summer, though, "it was too hot for football, and baseball, you couldn't always get 18 guys." Old enough to play pickup with the adults in the neighborhood, he got incentive.

"I wanted to be better than the older guys, so I'd practice more. And then I became pretty good, and [got] picked in the top three when everyone was picking teams. When you're a younger guy and the older guys are picking you, that's a big accomplishment where I'm from."

At the urging of his brother Marvin Stinson, a star at Murrell Dobbins ("one of the best two-guards in the country in ’91 -- you got to mention him or he'll kill me"), Whitfield went out for basketball his junior year but got cut. He made the team as a senior, and started every game.

Still, he was keenly aware of his prospects. Major college programs and NBA scouts don't pay much attention to players with just a year of prep ball, even if they attended Hank Gathers' alma mater. Whitfield spent the summer after graduation working on his game. He didn't expect ever to play pro.

"Basketball was going to pay for my college education," he says. "That was all I wanted it to do. I was thinking, if I can get a scholarship I can get a degree, and with my degree I can work, and I would be set."

In 1993 he and Stinson enrolled at Gloucester County Community College in Sewell, N.J. Led by the brothers in the backcourt, Gloucester went unbeaten and won a national junior-college championship. That earned Whitfield his scholarship, to Norfolk State University. Again paired with Stinson, he helped Norfolk State to a Colonial Intercollegiate Athletic Association title his junior year and made first-team all-conference as a senior. And he completed his degree, in criminal justice. But by then his plans had taken a turn.

"I was playing against these guys, some I was better than, some I wasn’t better than, and I was thinking, if I work hard I can be better than this guy. And I was seeing these guys going overseas. That’s when I finally started thinking I might get a chance to play professional -- maybe not in the NBA, but a lower division or overseas."

At the end of his junior year, he says, "I basically said that was gonna be the option. There was no maybe. There wasn't anything going to stop me from doing it. I had my mind set on it."

Nymburk's Sports Hall is lovely, a century-old building of graceful art nouveau balustrades. The 500-seat basketball arena, a recent addition, is as bright and airy as Decin's is gloomy and cramped, with large windows and teal trim.

A gritty town of 14,300 about 30 miles east of Prague, Nymburk has a 70-year basketball history, most of it in the Czech league's second division. It joined the top rank after winning the second-tier title in 2000 (the first-division cellar dweller drops down each year). After a poor inaugural season, management quickly built a contender, stockpiling quality Czech players the second year, then reloading with Whitfield and Johnson, a former reserve with NCAA powerhouse Kansas.

Going into the season finale April 5 in Decin, Nymburk had a chance to tie for first, but a 96-90 loss dropped the team to third. Eight days later, it is opening the playoffs at home, again playing Decin, which finished sixth.

The Nymburk gym's colorful decor is about as glamorous as Czech basketball gets. The country is not a basketball backwater -- there's a Czech player in the NBA, 76ers draftee Jiri Welsch (now with Golden State), and several at Division I schools -- but neither is it the bright lights. For most Americans, it is not the first stop on the international hoop circuit. Facilities are small and usually aging. Teams travel by rented bus. The sports pages are dominated by ice hockey and soccer; in most places, basketball is an afterthought. But in smaller cities like Nymburk, it is often the only game in town, and the locals have taken to their team with zest.

"I love our fans," Whitfield says. "They come to the games, they travel to [road] games, they beat their drums, scream your name. They love their basketball team."

As the players limber up, fan-club members take up their designated section in the stands, sporting red-and-white caps, scarves and jerseys, drinking and cheering with gusto. They explode when the home team is introduced. A bearish, bearded fan passes around a bottle of Fernet, a popular Czech spirit.

There's more Czech spirit on the court: The native players have dyed their hair bright red for the playoffs. The Americans demurred, although Whitfield has switched to a red headband from his usual white, in solidarity. (Asked about it a few days later, he laughs. "There was something about first you have to dye it blond then dye it red, and that was a little bit too much.")

Decin also has two Americans, power forward Rah-Shun Roberts and point guard Michael Garrett. Both teams play a faster, more high-flying game than is typical of Czech ball, in which set plays and deadly shooting predominate. The 6-foot-1 Whitfield's quickness and tactical acumen often get him the better of bigger, slower players under the basket.

The advantage is evident today. From the opening tip he attacks the basket, beating Garrett off the dribble and dishing to hot-handed teammates Johnson and Pavel Kubálek, or driving in for lay-ups and drawing fouls. This time, Decin has no answer. Nymburk coasts to a 95-70 victory.

But the easy win comes with a potentially devastating loss. Thirty seconds into the fourth quarter, driving the lane yet again, Whitfield is hit hard by a defender. He crumples to the floor, grabbing his right leg. Less than two minutes later, Johnson also takes a rough hit and is helped off.

Heading off court at the final whistle, Whitfield limps heavily, shoes off and right ankle taped, but he smiles up at the fan club before accepting a ride into the locker room on Ides' back. Afterward, Nymburk coach Jiri Ruzicka says his stars are OK: "They will be ready for the next match."

Whitfield too plays down the injury, a mild sprain, and says he hopes to be ready when the best-of-five series continues three days later in Decin. As he talks, a man walking his dog calls out in stilted English: "You OK?" "Yeah," Whitfield answers. "A.J.?" "A.J.'s good." The man strolls off, and Whitfield gets in his Honda and heads home.

For four years after college, Whitfield lived the life of a basketball gypsy. His first job came courtesy of a Dominican-American New York cop who'd seen him at a scouting combine.

"He was saying, "You’re a very good player, would you like to come on one of my teams in the Dominican Republic?’" Whitfield says. "I’m like, one of your teams? "Yeah, I know a couple of guys who have teams. You should go out there and have some fun, get some tapes’" -- highlight reels, the currency of international basketball.

He played one season there and another in Bolivia, "but that wasn't paying a lot of money." He returned to the States in 1999 and signed with the Billings RimRockers of the International Basketball Association, a developmental league designed to feed players up the U.S. basketball food chain, but asked for his release within a month. "They paid, but it wasn't worth it. They shuttled so many guys in and out, in and out. You could be there, do good one week, have a bad game you'd be gone." (A wise choice, it turned out: The RimRockers folded a few months later.)

Whitfield returned east, traveling to scouting camps when he could but mostly working his job in Virginia Beach. At 27, an age when most basketball careers are reaching their peak, his was on indefinite hold.

Then he got his "big break" -- a call from a Croatian he'd met at a camp in Chicago, inviting him over to the Adriatic seaport of Rijeka for a tryout. He took a leave of absence from work -- "I didn't tell 'em it was for basketball" -- and finally secured a European contract.

Croatia, like all of the former Yugoslavia, is a basketball hotbed. Playing against some of the best competition in Europe, Whitfield averaged 14 points a game and led the league in steals. Rijeka, picked to finish low in the standings, tied for second.

But again, the pay was low, and erratic. Whitfield signed with an agent, who arranged a deal in the Czech Republic, where the basketball isn't as good but the money is "much, much better." He played a season with Mlékárna Kunín, in the Moravian town of Novey Jicin, then was lured to Nymburk.

Whitfield's nomadic existence may seem exotic, but his routine is mundane. The team puts him up in a spacious apartment in Podûbrady, a picturesque town a few miles from Nymburk. The flat is comfortable but noticeably short on personal touches; playing for his sixth team in five years, Whitfield travels light. He has made a few acquaintances -- a Czech basketball fanatic he met at the local Internet café, English-speaking students at the nearby university -- but he doesn't get out much. Two practices a day and two games a week leave little time for anything but eating, sleeping, the occasional movie and playing video games. ("Got to have a PlayStation," he says. "That's the key to survival in Europe.")

Coming here can be daunting for U.S. players. The language is notoriously difficult, and outside of major cities like Prague and Brno, social and cultural life is limited. But Whitfield seems immune to the isolation many players feel abroad. He is in constant phone contact with his family in North and West Philly (where he lived as a teenager with an older brother), and he seems determined to bring as much of it here as possible: Fred Warrick, a Philadelphia cousin, signed with Mlékárna Kunín while visiting Whitfield last year (and recently set the NBL single-game scoring record of 49 points), and Stinson tried out for another Czech team. Another brother, Alvin Horne, played here until earlier this year. Whitfield and Johnson have become fast friends in their season together.

Martin Ides credits Whitfield with working hard to get to know his Czech teammates as well. "A lot of Americans, when they come over to Europe, they do their own thing and don't really bond with the other guys," he says. "Maurice definitely tries his best. He really tries to get to know the other guys and kind of bond with them a little bit and make it more like a team environment."

For his part, Whitfield says his teammates "treat me like family," and his Podûbrady neighbors are unfailingly friendly. Czech society is homogeneous and not known for racial enlightenment -- a recent bestseller purports to explain why Roma, or Gypsies, are dumb and Jews successful -- but Whitfield, one of the very few black people here, says he hasn't gotten a second look. ("I'm not saying it's not [there], but I haven't encountered it," he says. "Plus, when I'm walking around I'm with a guy that's 7-1 and a guy that's 6-9, so I don't have any problems.") In a two-hour interview, the only complaints he voices about Czech life are the NBL's inconsistent officiating and his team's mid-season coaching switch. (Whitfield says he gets along with RÛÏiãka, a veteran Czech basketball hand hired after the team went through a rough patch, but disagrees with the coach's conservative approach.)

"The adjustment [to Europe] for me was kind of easy," he says. "When I was home I didn't party and run. I just played basketball, hung with my brothers and friends, talked about basketball, played the PlayStation. That's what I do here. … It's basically the same. I'm just eight hours away by flight."

After watching his team thrash Decin in game one, Ruzicka looked ahead to the rest of the series. "Home matches we cannot lose," the coach said through a translator. The interpreter paused for a moment, then amended: "Must not lose."

Either way, Ruzicka was right. Nymburk almost literally can't be beat on its own floor, going 15-1 at home during the regular season, winning by an average of 18 points. And they must not lose at home if they expect to get far in the playoffs -- on the road, they went only 7-9.

Game two made it 7-10. With Whitfield nursing his swollen ankle on the sidelines, Decin evened the series. Four days later he is back on court, his right ankle taped. He favors it slightly as he works his teammates with the usual pre-game banter and high fives.

The injury seems to have cost Whitfield his usual step on Decin's Garrett, who beats him off the dribble the first few times down the floor. He also picks up two quick fouls on plays that, at full speed, might have been steals or stops. At the end of a ragged first quarter, Nymburk leads 20-19.

Sitting in his apartment a couple of days earlier, Whitfield talked about his early-season frustration trying to knit his aggressive style to the more patient Czech game, built around set plays leading to open jumpers. With the increasing movement of players across borders, the gap is narrowing, and fast breaks and pressure defense are increasingly common on Czech courts. But the core approaches remain distinct, and they don't always mesh comfortably.

"Everyone spots up," he'd said. "Everyone'll stand at the three-point line, where in the States everyone looks to penetrate. If they can't penetrate, they'll shoot. Everyone here looks to shoot; if they can't shoot, then they'll penetrate -- maybe.

"At times I would get upset because we were losing. But then there were times when we'd be on the same page and click. … It just takes some adjustment time. I think we're adjusted now."

Indeed. Nymburk opens the second quarter with a quick three and suddenly, as if someone's thrown a switch, the home team is unstoppable. Suddenly Whitfield doesn't look hobbled, two-guard Toma Grepl can't miss from beyond the arc, Johnson is slamming home rim-rattling dunks. The swarming defense is creating opportunities; the offense cashes in with runaway layups. Decin seems dumbfounded.

Midway through the quarter Whitfield sits with his third foul, but by then Nymburk is up more than 20. The lead stretches past 30 in the third, and the starters get most of the final quarter off. By the end of the 98-73 win, the fan club -- having run out of players to salute -- is giddily chanting the name of the team's real-estate-developer sponsor, ECM.

The first American basketball players came to then-Czechoslovakia in 1991, two years after the fall of communism opened up all sorts of international markets. All told, 46 Americans have played here, according to the Czech Basketball Federation (CBF). But only one has ever applied for citizenship.

Whitfield says the move has no long-term implications. He plans to return home when his playing career ends. ("The final day it's over, the next day I'll be back in the States.") He isn't even sure he'll play in the Czech Republic next season. It's simply a mechanism to get him on the national team, which has foundered in international competition since the days of state-subsidized sport under the communist regime.

"Czechoslovakia used to be one of the top basketball countries in Europe, for many decades. We started to lose that position in the late ’80s, early ’90s," says Jiri Zednícek, a member of the national team in the 1960s and ’70s and former head of the CBF. The country last qualified for the eight-team final round of the European Championships in 1991 -- not coincidentally, the last time it played as Czechoslovakia, with access to talent from what are now two countries -- and hasn't made the Olympics since 1980. Czech observers rate the current quality of play in the middle of the European pack; on an American scale, Whitfield's cousin and Kunín player Warrick compares it to low Division I or high Division II college ball.

Michal Jezdík, the coach of the Czech national team as well as the NBL's Sparta Praha, says Whitfield can fill one of the team's most pressing needs, for backcourt players skilled enough for the quicker, more demanding international game.

Jezdík says a lawyer is putting together the citizenship paperwork, and expects a decision three to four months after the application is filed. The coach hopes to have Whitfield suited up next summer, when the national team begins qualifying matches for the 2005 European Championship.

Whitfield says he isn’t giving much thought to the matter right now; he’s focused -- "obsessed" -- with bringing an NBL title to Nymburk. But if he’s granted citizenship, he says, he’s ready to do his part for the Czech cause.

"They say I can help them," he says. "Maybe if the national team is playing well it will get [Czech basketball] more respect, as when JiÞi [Welsch] made the NBA. That would be my way of repaying them for giving me this opportunity to play basketball here. I could repay them by helping them get to the next level."

For three and a half quarters in Decin on April 23, it looked as if the next level of the NBL playoffs would have to wait. Nymburk again seemed to have left its best game at home. With four minutes to go, Decin led by 11 and a deciding game five seemed inevitable.

But Rah-Shun Roberts, Decin’s biggest threat, fouled out, and "a sense of urgency just kicked in," Whitfield explains by phone the next day. Diving for loose balls, hitting shots they’d been missing all afternoon, Nymburk came back for a two-point win and a date in the semifinals with second-seeded BVV Brno.

The win was important not just because it clinched the series, but because of how it clinched the series. "Down like that the whole game -- that builds character," Whitfield says. "Now we know we can blow a team out and we can also win close games." More important, it bodes well for a team that has struggled away from the comfy teal gym and the home-crowd roar. Unlike the Decin series, Nymburk can’t win the next round without winning at least one game on the road. The same goes for a potential meeting in the finals with defending champ Opava.

Beyond that, real home awaits: two months in Philly, hanging with family and friends, watching the summer-league action (he doesn’t play outdoors himself anymore -- bad for the knees), and, he hopes, enjoying a title celebration for the 76ers. "I’d like to go home to a parade," he says, then smiles. "First have my own parade, then go home -- win a championship here."

And does he ever picture himself, in the odd fleeting moment, in Sixers red, white and blue?

The smile widens. "My NBA dreams are for Warrick and Johnson," he says. "I would love to, but if I don’t, I have no regrets. I’m having a great time."