FIBA Basketball
When Rony Seikaly was a young teenager in Athens, long before he grew into a 6-foot-11 all-American basketball player at Syracuse and a productive N.B.A. center, he built a small disco at home.“I took a garage and turned it into my own little club,” said Seikaly, now 45. “I would save up money and I bought the record player, then a second record player, then a mixer. I built the whole disco myself, all the electricity, and I built all these kinds of colored lights and colored bulbs, and I’d make, like, a light show. I did that all myself.”
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When Rony Seikaly was a young teenager in Athens, long before he grew into a 6-foot-11 all-American basketball player at Syracuse and a productive N.B.A. center, he built a small disco at home.
“I took a garage and turned it into my own little club,” said Seikaly, now 45. “I would save up money and I bought the record player, then a second record player, then a mixer. I built the whole disco myself, all the electricity, and I built all these kinds of colored lights and colored bulbs, and I’d make, like, a light show. I did that all myself.”
His interest in playing D.J. at the center of a party only grew, like his legs and his fame. Now Seikaly, more than a decade since his last game, has re-emerged as an up-and-coming D.J., playing a growing number of gigs at trendy clubs in places like Miami, New York, Las Vegas, Paris, and Ibiza, Spain. He is starting to record his own music, too, and released a compilation of music this year.
“I’m not doing this to be a celebrity,” Seikaly said. “I’m not doing this to become famous. I’m doing this just to share the love, and to share the music.”
Last Saturday night — Sunday morning, actually, at 1:25 — a huge domed nightclub called LIV was filled with a pounding beat and beautiful people. Through the thumping of a party just getting under way, a voice introduced “Mr. Rony Seikaly.” And in the D.J. booth, Seikaly went to work.
There were four CD players, not two record players. There was a mixer, festooned in colored lights and covered in small dials. While a song throbbed through the club’s sound system, Seikaly listened to another in his headphones. He touched a dial, then another, then another, like a man adjusting the temperature of his bath water. He blended one song into the other, sometimes overlapping them for a minute or more, fine-tuning their beats into an electronic symphony.
Seikaly, a human metronome, bobbed his long, lean frame to the beat. The building vibrated as if it had a pulse. Topless models painted in Day-Glo colors slithered on a small stage across the vast room. Laser lights and strobes shot through downdrafts of machine-made fog. Hundreds of bodies pitched and swayed, stirring the dance floor into a dark and restless sea.
“I call it capturing the moment,” Seikaly had explained at his house in Miami Beach the night before. Born in Lebanon and raised largely in Greece, he has a hint of an indistinguishable accent.
He explained how the night “morphs” at a club like LIV, in the Fontainebleau hotel. The first hour, he said, people get their bearings, “see who’s who, where’s where.” Loosened by drinks and music, if not the nocturnal sense that dawn is coming fast, they begin to move toward the night’s peak.
“The most important thing is to capture that moment where all of a sudden everybody is in a great mood, everybody starts dancing, and all of a sudden you feel it click between you and the crowd,” Seikaly said. “And as soon as that click happens, it’s not something that anybody else can feel except that person playing the music. As soon as you feel that connection to the crowd, then you know you’ve got them. And then you can take them on any journey you want.”
More than 25 years ago, Seikaly arrived in the sporting consciousness as a big, dark-haired freshman who helped Syracuse beat Georgetown and its star center, Patrick Ewing. As a junior in 1987, Seikaly led Syracuse to the national title game, which Indiana won on a late basket by Keith Smart. Seikaly’s No. 4 jersey is retired.
He was the first N.B.A. draft pick of the Miami Heat, chosen ninth over all in 1988. He spent the first 6 of his 11 N.B.A. seasons with the Heat, the best coming in 1992-93, when he averaged 17.1 points and 11.8 rebounds. For his career, which took him to Golden State, Orlando and New Jersey, Seikaly averaged 14.7 points and 9.5 rebounds. And his nickname, thanks to his low-post moves, was the Spin Doctor. It had nothing to do with being a D.J.
Most teammates knew little about Seikaly’s love of music. If anything, they teased him for his “Euro” tastes and his penchant for disco and pop. It was part of a well-rounded musical education that included trumpet lessons as a child. Seikaly’s parents filled the house with classical music on Sundays, and Seikaly’s wide-ranging preferences in the late 1970s included Kiss, Genesis and Barry White.
“Into the ’80s, believe it or not, we listened to a lot of Julio Iglesias,” Seikaly said. “More Latin, more love ballads. That was in. If your parents were cool, they’d listen to Julio Iglesias. As genres changed, I changed with it, until I found my niche, which is house music.”
House music is a nebulous descendant of disco, with ever-extending derivatives. It is, generally, electronic music dominated by strong, steady percussion. Vocals, often background chants or soulful wails, rarely prompt singalongs. Adherents of house music prefer the “know-it-when-you-hear-it” definition. Those who frequent dance clubs that do not play hip-hop or dabble in standards from previous decades — no Village People here — certainly have heard it.
“It’s music that you’re going to walk into a club and you’re not going to be saying, ‘Oh my God, we’ve got to get out of here,’ ” Seikaly said. “I play that music that you walk in and say: ‘O.K., I can put up with this. I may not like it, but it’s not offensive.’ ”
He laughed at the sound of that.
“It’s happy,” he said. “It keeps you there.”
Seikaly plays and creates what he called happy underground music. As a D.J., he takes pride in uncovering little-known tracks on the Web and avoiding dance-club anthems. And his original songs are electronically built atop steady, synthesized drums.
“When my mom tells me, ‘Son, your music sounds kind of all the same,’ I say, ‘That’s exactly what I thought about your classical music,’ ” Seikaly said.
Seikaly, who married and had a daughter with the model Elsa Benitez (the two divorced in 2006), has invested much of his time and money into the club scene in Miami Beach. He has had ownership stakes in a number of trendy hot spots, like Mynt, Bar None and Mokai. (He has no stake, however, in LIV.) On countless nights, he and close friends would retreat to his mansion’s “playroom” — a high-tech incarnation of the home disco he built as a child. (He has another such room, in a house he built in the 1990s in Beirut, where his parents live.)
The room feels like a mellow garage-size lounge, with dim lighting and a mirrored Buddha high on a shelf. The dark walls are lined with low couches. What looks like a bar holds CD players and a mixer, not drinks. The room is equipped with a hard-to-spot, club-level sound system.
Friends always wanted to bring more friends. Finally, in 2008, Seikaly agreed to D.J. for an expanded audience at Mokai, which he no longer owns.
“It turned out to be an amazing night,” Seikaly said.
Now he keeps a steady schedule at clubs around the world. He is scheduled to play at Lavo in Manhattan on Saturday; in Marrakesh, Morocco, later this month; and back in Miami Beach on New Year’s Eve.
He is focused on making his own music, too. Erick Morillo, one of the best-known house-music D.J.’s and founder of Subliminal Records, produced Seikaly’s first CD, “House Calls.”
“It’s a passion,” Seikaly said of his music career. “It’s a hobby. It’s a hobby on steroids because it’s no longer a hobby. You’ve crossed a line when you’re starting to make it into a business.”
The next night — morning, really — Seikaly was at work in that same D.J. booth, a 20-foot-long bar a few feet above one end of a dance floor increasingly crammed with bodies. He wore jeans and a long-sleeve T-shirt with the sleeves pushed above the elbows. His body bobbed and his fingers fondled the dials. In front of him, hundreds danced. Every once in a while, he pumped his fist to the beat and smiled.
Seikaly was working the crowd again.