In the last few weeks, Nets' draft choice Christian Drejer has helped remake the reputation of Virtus Bologna, long a basketball powerhouse that in recent years has fallen on hard times. Drejer himself is in the business of personal resurrection, trying to get beyond his misadventure at the University of Florida two years ago and his disastrous season at Barcelona last year.
And so, the Bolognese basketball writers have embraced Drejer, using language not often found on US sports pages to describe him--poetic paeans to the same man Spanish basketball writers once called "El Enigma" and who Danish basketball writers often refer to as "Prince Christian", as in the Hamlet of the Hardwoods.
Here is a sampling, derived from [very] rough, machine translations of articles found at jarring.it, the Bologna sports site:
"Majestic Drejer...he writes down 29 points in 29 minutes, all beautiful and important, dragging Virtus away also from its latent weaknesses, those defects that risk compromising them."
--and--
"To be temporal and spiritual at the same time. He enters for teammate [Carl] English and inflames the arena: penetrations slicing down the middle, two three pointers, then turning if on a bubble to score again on a dunk. He finishes with a [international basketball] ranking of 35 in 29 minutes, most beautiful...omnipotent."
--and--
"This is also the virtue of Christian, the angelic face and the deadly hand..."
--and, finally--
"Mamma mia, Christian Drejer!"