<div class="quote_poster">Quote:</div><div class="quote_post">Before this week, the most ferocious thing 76ers forward Kyle Korver might have expected to see was Shaquille O'Neal devouring an NBA opponent who dared encroach into his defensive zone. No more. Not after Korver witnessed a lion consume a wildebeest as he traveled on safari in South Africa this week. Welcome to Kyle Korver's new world. Or, more precisely, welcome to a newly minted globetrotter's view of a world much wider than he ever imagined. "This is the stuff you see on TV, but you don't really know what it is until you experience it," Korver said by telephone from Johannesburg yesterday. "I mean, I've led a pretty sheltered life. I've never traveled at all." Curiosity and a good cause have led Korver to make up for lost time. The 25-year-old Creighton University product, like Sixers teammate Samuel Dalembert, is wholeheartedly entrenched in the NBA's and the International Basketball Federation's Basketball Without Borders program. Last year, the outreach and humanitarian initiative took a host of present and former players, coaches and team personnel, Korver included, to China. For Korver, that was his first trip abroad. Now he is on the African continent, in an exotic world unlike any he had ever imagined. "It was the most peaceful, beautiful place I've ever seen in my whole life," said Korver, speaking of his journey to a game preserve in the heart of South Africa about 31/2 hours north of Johannesburg. "It was unbelievable." Make no mistake, though. As delighted as Korver was to see giraffes and elephants and to feast on African delicacies, he and his peers are not on vacation. They are promoting their league and its efforts to combat everything from the global HIV/AIDS epidemic to poverty and hunger. And, said former NBA great Bob Lanier: "They were not enticed by pay but are enticed by their passion." Lanier, formally called the NBA's community ambassador, said passions flow when some of the world's most privileged professional athletes are confronted with "circumstances which I nor them have ever seen before." "You hear about it, but you cannot describe the millions of people who are in the shanties, the dirt fields, living without running water," Lanier said. While Lanier sees thousands of people as he participates in his fourth tour of Africa, Korver cannot help but fixate on the one face that stood out among the many children he met in Chinese orphanages.</div> Source
