Tark’s granddaughter keeps busy during break from international basketball

She’s back from the Dead Sea, and so on Tuesday and Wednesday, Dannielle Diamant will be helping out at a basketball camp at the Tarkanian Basketball Academy being administered by Alexis Hornbuckle, one of her rivals under the overseas backboards.

It costs $75 for the two-day camp. Middle and high school kids can be expected to learn a little something about basketball because Hornbuckle has played on two NCAA championship teams and two WNBA championship teams. Her coaches at Tennessee and with the Detroit Shock were Pat Summitt, who is a legend, and Bill Laimbeer, who has legendary elbows.

Diamant’s grandfather is the late Jerry Tarkanian, the man for whom the camp site is named. Dannielle’s grandpa knew a little about basketball, too.

It was Tuesday when I caught up with Tark’s basketball playing granddaughter.

“You lookin’ for a real tall girl?” said the friendly bartender at the Four Kegs on Jones when I walked in from the sunlight.

He caught me off guard. Oh, yeah, Tark’s granddaughter, who stands 6 feet 4 inches tall. She was in the restaurant in back, said the friendly bartender.

Dannielle Diamant was a star at Bishop Gorman, and after that she was a star at Northwestern in the Big 10. She signed with a team in Hungary, Uni Gyor, out of college, because women who play pro ball overseas generally make more money than women who play pro ball in the WNBA.

That was the fall of 2013 when her grandfather finally would be inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. So Diamant had it written into her contract that she be allowed to leave the team for a few days so she could go to Massachusetts and watch her grandpa be honored.

And that’s where this story takes a tragic turn.

When she was away, the bus in which the Uni Gyor team was traveling was struck by a car that had crossed the highway centerline. The bus crashed in the Hungarian countryside.

The coach and general manager were killed. The left leg of Natasha Kovacevic of Serbia was amputated below the knee. Sam MacKay, of the University of Dayton, suffered two cracked neck vertebrae, ending her career.

The rest of the players were bruised physically or psychologically. They eventually got over the physical bruises.

Diamant didn’t stay around for the Hall of Fame ceremony. She got on the next plane out of Boston bound for Budapest to be with her teammates and to go to funerals.

“For a while, the assistant coach and I were the only ones working out,” she said Tuesday, reliving her harrowing start as a pro.

Yes, she said, she now knows what it is to experience survivor’s remorse, and to ever so gradually move on from it.

“I could tell you exactly what happened from hearing everybody talking about it,” she said of the terrible bus crash. “But I wasn’t there. As bad as I was feeling, they were feeling so much worse.”

As might be expected, Uni Gyor had a terrible season.

Diamant, 24, left Hungary to play in Israel — she has dual Israeli citizenship, thanks to her father, Zafi, being from there. (Her mother, Jodie, is Tark’s daughter.)

At Maccabi Ashdod, she mostly played as a backup behind a bunch of WNBA post players. She said she didn’t mind being a role player, but overseas, they expect the American imports — even the ones with dual Israeli citizenship — to be big scorers. So she soon expects to be signing with a new team over there.

She said she loved Israel, loved the Middle East, loved seeing the Dead Sea while vacationing with teammates. It was actually the second time she had been there. This time she saw it from the Jordanian side.

Israel and Jordan have had uneasy diplomatic relations since 1994. Just to be on the safe side, Dannielle and her teammates told people they were from Canada.

When her grandfather died in February, she left the team to attend his service. When she returned, a couple of people gave her newspaper clippings telling of Tark’s passing. They were written in Hebrew.

She placed the holy card from the service on the mirror in her apartment.

Her roommate, Tiffany Jackson, the former NCAA freshman of the year at Texas, was stunned. She had no idea that Tark was her roomie’s grandfather.

Dannielle Diamant’s grandpa sometimes would joke about women’s basketball, but that was before his granddaughter started playing.

“He came to my practices; he came to as many as my games as he could — and I loved it,” said the tall girl in the back of the Four Kegs before ordering a salad to go.

Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ron Kantowski can be reached at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0352. Follow him on Twitter: @ronkantowski.