101 Greats of European Basketball

The King of Israel
Life was unfair to the sporting career of Oded
Kattash. Due to serious knee injuries, he
had to retire at age 26. Despite such a short
career, he had great accomplishments. He
left his imprint forever not only on Israeli
basketball but also in Europe. He was the
best scorer at the 1997 EuroBasket in Barcelona and a
European club champion with Panathinaikos in 2000.
Kattash, who was born on October 10, 1974, in the
Tel Aviv suburb of Ramat Gan, started his career with
Maccabi Tel Aviv. At the 1991 U16 European Championship
in Greece, where some important players of the future
– like Andrea Meneghin of Italy, Ibrahim Kutluay of
Turkey, Fragiskos Alvertis of Greece and Jose Antunez
of Spain – started to shine, Oded Kattash and his 11.6
points per game were not the highlight of the Israeli
team. But his 25 points against Bulgaria and 21 against
Czechoslovakia caught the eye of many. Gur Shelef was
the top scorer on that Israel team, with 15.7 points,
but Kattash showed enough talent to foretell a bright
future. The following year, at the 1992 U18 European
Championship in Hungary, his numbers dipped (8.7
ppg.) but he stood out against Spain with 20 points.
Kattash debuted at the senior level while on loan from
Maccabi Tel Aviv to Maccabi Ramat Gan. At the U22
World Cup in Spain in 1993, he left no doubts. The young
shooting guard, who could easily play point guard, ended
up as the fourth-best scorer of the tourney with 16.7
points per game. He was behind the untouchable Moon
Kyung-Eun of Korea (29.4 ppg.), Rogerio Klafke of Brazil
(19.8) and Oscar Racca of Argentina (18.9), but in front
of Marcelo Nicola of Argentina (16.6), Yann Bonato of
France (16.3) and Gregor Fucka of Italy (15.3).
Kattash played the following season, 1994-95, again
on loan, this time at Hapoel Galil Elyon, and proved himself
as one of the Israeli League’s top young players. In
1995, Kattash was back to Maccabi and his real rise to
glory began. Those were tough years for the popular
Tel Aviv team, as it was far from reaching the final stages
in the EuroLeague. Little by little, however, Kattash
started earning the fans’ admiration.
Too good for Maccabi
My friend Yarone Arbel, a direct witness of the
growth of Kattash, remembers those years:
“When Mickey Berkowitz was the hero of Yad Eliyahu,
the fans had a song for him. In Jewish tradition, there’s a
very famous song for King David. The fans changed the
lyrics from David to Mickey and sang to him that he was
The King of Israel. Nobody else had that honor until Oded
showed up. Oded was the new king. He was the face of
a team that wasn’t very good. Those were dark years
for Maccabi. The mid-1990s is a period when Maccabi
never managed to make the Final Four and didn’t even
make the quarterfinals. Year after year, they lost in the
eighth-finals. They were years when Yad Eliyahu wasn’t
sold out every night, except the die-hard fans who always
showed up and loved that team because of Oded
and [Doron] Sheffer and [Nadav] Henefeld. But Kattash
was … the king,” Arbel remembered. “Maccabi didn’t
have the money to fight the elite of Europe. In those
years, the Greeks and Italians and Turks were spending
huge money that Maccabi didn’t have. Maccabi president
Shimon Mizrahi said after one home loss on TV that Maccabi
can’t fight with those teams in the current situation.
It was clear: Oded was ‘too good’ for Maccabi.”
Oded Kattash
101 greats of european basketball
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