Bill Drozdiak could always fill it up — in basketball and on foreign affairs

After basketball was over, Drozdiak’s career was in journalism as a foreign correspondent and expert on international affairs (courtesy Bill Drozdiak)

Once upon a time, Bill Drozdiak was a sweet-shooting guard for the Oregon Ducks.

In a later life, Drozdiak — by then known more formally as “William” — became a celebrated journalist who served important roles with Time Magazine and the Washington Post covering foreign affairs.

Last week, Drozdiak received the “Chevalier” award from France’s Legion of Honour — the highest French order of merit — for his work at a ceremony at the Washington, D.C., home of Philippe Etienne, French ambassador to the United States. The award was approved by French president Emmanuel Macron, the subject of Drozdiak’s latest book.

On that day, Drozdiak had lunch with Etienne and U.S. senator Ron Wyden, with whom he has had a relationship since their high school days in Northern California.

“The ambassador wanted to talk about trade,” Wyden told me. “But Droz and I were catching up. We talked about how you never know how life plays out. Both of us wanted to play in the NBA. Bill got a hell of a lot closer than me.”

I spoke with Drozdiak on the day before he received his award of distinction, which was established by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1802 and has been retained since by French governments and regimes.

“It’s a wonderful honor,” Drozdiak said. “For me, it’s the culmination of a 50-year love affair with France. My first career was playing pro ball in Europe.”

As a high schooler in Corvallis, I remember watching the 6-5 Drozdiak playing for Steve Belko’s Ducks, an outside complement to 6-9 Stan Love, the All-Pac-8 center who played in the NBA but later became more well-known as Kevin Love’s father.

As an adult, I would see the byline “William Drozdiak” in Time or the Washington Post and think, “Must be the same guy.” But I never knew the full story until now.

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At 72, Drozdiak seems to be in a good spot in life. He has been married to wife Renilde — a retired Belgian diplomat — for 41 years. They have three children and three grandchildren. They live in D.C., where Drozdiak stays close to the international political scene. His latest book, “The Last President of Europe: Emmanuel Macron’s Race to Revive France and Save the World,” was published in April 2020. Drozdiak — who speaks fluent French and German — serves as a senior advisor for Europe and Eurasia at McCarty Associates, an international strategic consultancy firm based in Washington.

Basketball was at the center of the universe for Drozdiak growing up at Del Mar High in the South Bay. A talented 6-4 forward named Ron Wyden played for nearby Palo Alto High. They would join together in an All-Star game after their senior seasons in 1967.

“I still have a picture of our team,” Wyden says. “Droz and I were roommates. The game was played at Foothill College. We stayed at Santa Clara for 10 days. It was every young hooper’s dream. Play basketball all day, eat 20,000 calories of food a day and sit on the little beds and tell stories all night. We had a great time.”

In 1967, Drozdiak and U.S. Senator Ron Wyden played on the same high school all-star team in the Bay Area. Wyden is front row, left. Drozdiak is front row, right. (courtesy Ron Wyden)

Wyden played one season at Cal-Santa Barbara before he transferred to Stanford to focus on academics and a budding political career.

“I was a decent high school player, scrappy and hungry,” Wyden says. “Bill was always much better than me. In a frame on my office wall (in D.C.), I do have one basketball memento: A scholarship offer from Gonzaga. I wanted to prove a Jewish kid could play with the Jesuits.”

Oregon was Drozdiak’s college of choice for several reasons.

“I wanted to get out of the Bay Area,” he says. “I was like a lot of kids who want to get away from the clutches of their parents. (Eugene) was close enough to home. I liked the feel of the campus. I had some academic interest. The basketball team was good. I liked the guys that I met there as teammates. All in all, it was a wonderful experience.”

After playing for the UO Frosh in 1967-68, Drozdiak was a three-year starter for Belko’s varsity, playing alongside the likes of Love, Larry Holliday, Billy Gaskins and Rusty Blair. The Ducks went 13-13 overall and 5-9 in Pac-8 play during Drozdiak’s sophomore year, then 17-9 and 8-6 in each of his last two seasons. As a junior, he averaged 14.9 points, second only to Love’s 20.8. As a senior, Drozdiak scored 13 points a game as Love (24.6 points, 11.3 rebounds) proved himself as one of the loop’s top players.

Belko was fired after Drozdiak’s senior campaign, the last of his 15 seasons at the UO helm, giving way to a man named Dick Harter. Belko would go on to become commissioner of the Big Sky Conference.

“Belko was a very emotional guy, like coaches often were in those days,” Drozdiak recalls. “He had his good and bad sides. He wasn’t very good on strategy, but he put together a decent offense that took advantage of our strengths. What I regret most is that there was no 3-point shot in those days (it wasn’t instituted in the college game until 1986). A lot of my game was outside shooting.”

Says Wyden: “Had the 3-point line had been observed in our day, Droz would have been in the NBA. He was that good of an outside shot.”

Drozdiak and Love were roommates as freshmen during the 1967-68 school year, just as social unrest was hitting college campuses throughout the land.

“Interesting times back then,” says Love, now retired and living in Lake Oswego. “We had basketball, but we also had all the music and the (Vietnam) War. It was different.

“It was the ‘summer of love,’ and Bill was celibate. You can imagine the difficulties in that,” Love says with a laugh. “He put a picture of his girlfriend on the ceiling so he could look up at it. It was a time when a lot of people were experimenting, you might say. Bill wasn’t one of them.

“Really, he was a great guy. Came from a great family. He was a great teammate, and he could really play basketball. He was a terrific shooter. A 6-5 guard who could shoot like that? It was rare for that time.”

Drozdiak was interested in basketball, but he also paid attention to what was happening not just in this country, but in the world around him. He never worked for the school newspaper, the Daily Emerald, but he was an avid reader, and he found he liked to write.

“I took some courses in writing,” Drozdiak says. “I had an affinity to write. The secret to being a good writer is to read a lot. I had some great teachers. I remember taking a Shakespeare course, where I learned a lot about writing. I was in the Honors College, so I was doing extra work there. And some of the political science professors encouraged me to do writing.”

During the summer of 1969, Drozdiak worked as a congressional intern in Washington. The next summer — between his junior and senior years at Oregon — he went camping through the Soviet Union with three friends he had met the previous summer, all Rhode Scholar students at Oxford.

“It was the era of detente, and (Soviet leader Leonid) Brezhnev and (Richard) Nixon had agreed to approve visas for more young people from both countries to allow them to travel,” Drozdiak says. “We had some friends who had done this earlier. The four of us pooled our resources and bought a van. Before we left, we sold the van and wound up paying next to nothing for three months of adventure.”

During the trip, Drozdiak and his friends camped in Ukraine.

“That’s where my ancestors are from,” he says. “In western Ukraine, there are a lot of Drozdiaks. It’s a rather common name there.”

Drozdiak wrote a couple of long pieces about his experiences that summer that were published by periodicals.

“That planted the seed of the desire to become a foreign correspondent,” he says. “I found I liked to travel. I also liked that newspapers and publications would pay you to write your impressions on your travels.”

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Golden State chose Drozdiak in the 10th round of the 1971 draft. He was cut in training camp.

“But my agent found me a job playing in Europe,” he says. “One of first tournaments was in France. It was a magical experience. One of the great chefs in France (Pierre Troisgros) sponsored one of the teams and hosted us for dinner, and I got interested in French cuisine.”

During seven years playing pro ball in Europe, he played in Italy, Spain and France, but mostly in Belgium.

Bill Drozdiak (12) enjoyed a seven-year career playing pro ball in Europe after his time at Oregon (courtesy Bill Drozdiak)

 “There was a huge disparity between (the talent of the) Americans who played and the Europeans. I was enjoying good food, wine, beautiful women. … it was a great time. Who doesn’t want that when you’re in your early 20s?”

It was during his time in Belgium that he met Renilde. While playing ball, Drozdiak was doing graduate studies.

“We met at a post-graduate institute,” he says. “After graduation from a masters program, she went into the diplomatic corps. Her first assignment was (as Belgian ambassador) in Spain. I continued to play ball. We dated on and off for a number of years before we decided to get married.”

Meanwhile, Drozdiak had entered the writing field as a free-lancer, specializing in NATO and international issues. After he finished his masters program, he became a European stringer for Time and the Washington Post in 1977. Within a few months, Drozdiak was called on to report on a major story in The Netherlands, with a group of South-Moluccans taking 105 schoolchildren and five teachers hostage. It ended with a military intervention.

“I was on the front page (of the Post) every day for three weeks,” Drozdiak says. “That’s how I came to attention of (Post executive editor) Ben Bradlee.”

Drozdiak soon joined the staff of Time, living in Washington while covering the state department for almost two years. Then he was assigned to report from the Middle East, where he stayed for almost three years, covering the region from its bureaus in Cairo and Beirut.

“One great story after another,” Drozdiak says. “The near collapse of the Saudi dynasty … the assassination of Anwar Sadat … the Iranian revolution. I got back (to the States) just in time for the birth of our first child. Then I stayed up all night the next night to write a cover story for Time.”

In 1982, Drozdiak was hired by The Washington Post to work under foreign editor Jim Hoagland, who sent him to Germany, “my first big European assignment,” he says. “It was an exciting period.”

Drozdiak served as the Post’s central European correspondent from 1983-86, then returned to Washington to be the newspaper’s foreign editor. He supervised its Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the Middle East and the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

By this time, the Drozdiaks had two more children. In 1990, “I’d had enough of being an editor and assigned myself to Paris,” he says.

The Drozdiaks lived there for six years, Renilde working as economic counselor at the Belgian Embassy. Drozdiak reported on the Iran-Iraq War, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the events leading up to German reunification. As the Post’s chief European correspondent in Brussels through 2001, he conducted interviews with leading statesmen and covered major political, economic and security issues across Europe.

Since then, Drozdiak has lived in Washington. He served as founding executive director of the Transatlantic Center in Brussels, created in 2001 by the German Marshall Fund to serve as the hub of its operations in Europe and as an independent, non-partisan think tank for U.S.-European relations. He was a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, an American research group, and wrote “Fractured Continent: Europe’s Crises and the Fate of the West,” which was selected by the Financial Times as one of the best political books of 2017.

The latest book, “The Last President of Europe: Emmanuel Macron’s Race to Revive France and Save the World,” was the result of a half-dozen hours of conversation with the French president. In the book, Drozdiak offers perspective on the challenges Macron faces as “the last staunch defender of Europe.”

“Macron was elected as a 39-year-old whiz kid without ever having been elected to office before,” Drozdiak says. “I thought it would be interesting to follow his progress. I speak French, and he was pleased that he could speak in his native tongue with an American journalist. He offered his opinions on many people and many things. I found him to be one of the most thoughtful, reflective and interesting people I’ve spent time with.”

Drozdiak, Wyden says, “really is a star journalist. His analysis of the European scene, his book about Macron, have national implications. If we’re going to sort out where things go in the years ahead in Europe and Russia and Ukraine, we’re going to have to have people who have fresh, innovative approaches. A lot of what Bill is writing about contributes to that.”

Wyden is one of 20 members of the U.S. Senate Select Intelligence Committee.

“I met with Macron one time, for about 10 minutes,” he says. “He wouldn’t know who I am. I said to Droz, ‘Next time Macron comes here, let’s grab a coffee or a sandwich and have the two of you lay out how we rebuild the policies that are going to make the world a safer place for all of us.’ ”

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The Russia-Ukraine war “is something that resonates with me,” says Drozdiak, who made a number of trips to Moscow as a journalist and has family heritage in Ukraine.

“The relationship with Russia is key to the security order of Europe,” he says. “(Vladimir) Putin is guilty of war crimes and genocide. The big surprise is the bravery and courage of the Ukrainian people and president Zelensky in standing up to the Russia war machine. Their sheer motivation and bravery has enabled them to push back against this massive machine.

“The Russian soldiers are clearly demoralized in what they’re doing. I just hope Ukraine is getting enough supplies and weapons from the U.S. and its Western allies to sustain the resistence. I don’t know how long they can hold out, but it looks like the war will drag on for at least several months.”

Drozdiak expresses concern about the “overly optimistic tinge” of some reporting by the Post and New York Times, suggesting that Ukraine is doing well in the conflict.

“The enormity of the devastation (in Ukraine) is such that even if the war ended tomorrow, it would take years to return to some semblance of normality,” he says. “The trauma that a lot of the civilians have taken in having their homes bombed, losing loved ones, the mental and physical trauma — it is extremely difficult for Ukraine to put a normal society back together. And the Russians are such brutal soldiers, they don’t seem to be deterred by anything. They don’t follow the rules of war, committing what everybody else considers war crimes. They will stop at nothing in terms of brutality and rape and theft.

“I just hope the strength of the resistance prevails and that the Ukrainians get enough weaponry. They’ve put together a remarkably strong army. I hope the sanctions against Russia work, and that eventually the conscience of the people there awakens. Putin shows no sign of backing down, because if he does, he could be overthrown.”

Drozdiak says there have been “several blunders” by the United States in Eastern Europe, beginning with George Bush’s promise to make Ukraine and Georgia members of NATO in 2008.

“Then he did nothing about it,” Drozdiak says. “Four months later, Putin declared war on Georgia.”

In 2014, Russia annexed Crimea in eastern Ukraine.

“We refused to send weapons,” Drozdiak says. “We didn’t want to get embroiled in any kind of conflict, even to the extent of sending weapons. That was a big mistake. I voted for (Barack) Obama and worked for his campaign as a foreign policy advisor, but he made a huge error in Ukraine, and also in not crossing a ‘red line’ in using chemical weapons in Syria and not acting on it. (A year later, Syrian president Bashar Assad fired rockets filled with sarin gas into towns around Damascus, killing an estimated 1,400 civilians.) It sent a message of weakness by the U.S., that we will not do anything to stand up to aggressions.”

Zelensky said recently the war will end “only through diplomacy.”

“I hope he’s right,” Drozdiak says. “There’s going to have to be some kind of compromise. The Russians are locking down some parts of eastern Ukraine. They would resist giving up Crimea.

“The parts of eastern Ukraine that Russia has occupied are devastated and obsolete infrastructure and are no longer an important part of the country. Zelensky is much more worried about crime and Odessa and access to ports.”

Drozdiak believes getting the Russians out of Odessa will be difficult.

“There may be room for compromise, where Ukraine takes back control of Crimea but offers port rights to Russia for its ships to land there,” he says. “That won’t happen for another six months unless there is a dramatic turnaround. If Russia continues to lose ground and more soldiers and Putin pushes back, he might be tempted to use low-grade nuclear weapons. Then we’re in a whole new ballgame. How does the West respond to that? It’s a serious risk.”

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Droziak’s next writing project may have nothing to do with politics. He is contemplating a book on basketball as the global sport, based on his time spent in Europe.

Says Drozdiak: “Of the top five players in the NBA, four (he cites Luka Doncic, Nikola Jokic, Giannis Antetokoumnpo and Joel Embiid) are not from the U.S. Ninety players in the NBA are from Europe. The American players put a premium on brute strength; the European players have better shooting form and excellent outside shooters.”

Drozdiak offers a unique perspective on the subject. He lived it, though in a much different era than today. Like David Halberstam, who wrote “Breaks of the Game” on the Trail Blazers of the late ‘70s, Drozdiak could offer expertise from a global view outside of sport. That would be worth the read.

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