He should know some basics, especially since Italy as a whole is a pretty exclusive country.
In what sense?
As in the example I provided in the next sentence. From what I've heard, the Italians are proud people. In their soccer league they consist of a lot of Italians, compared to Spanish and English leagues who are very diverse and they try to get people other countries as long as they have the talent. Please, correct me if I am wrong, but I think in the Italian League they have a rule that you can only have an X amount of international players in a team. If you play with a mostly Italian players, you should get some very basic Italian, such as where is the bathroom, how much something cost, what you want to do tonight, pass me the ball, that kind of stuff.
I frankly have no idea if Italians are more or less proud than other people. From my experience as someone who speaks very little Italian, it's easier to find English speakers among Italians than in countries like France or Spain, for example (though more difficult than in, say, Scandinavia). I think this is mostly due to sociological/historical reasons than due to national pride.
What you say about soccer was the exact opposite 15 or 20 years ago, when the Italian League was filled with foreign players and imports were a rarity in English football. Check this article, for example:
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-12378451.htmlThings changed mostly due to economic factors: Serie A is now less powerful from a financial perspective than Premier League and La Liga. I don't think there are any kind of quotas in the Italian League besides the ones imposed in the UEFA competitions (the 6+4 rule). The difference you see is about money, not national pride whatsoever.
That said, Jennings was playing basketball, not soccer, and there things are completely different. Even though almost every European league has quotas to foreign players - in many cases only applicable to non-European players: the goal is to enforce a limitation to the number of American players, otherwise many teams would fill their rosters with Americans leaving no space to the national talent - you'd be hard pressed to find a top basketball team in Europe (or even a not so top one) where English isn't the language used in the gym 99% of the time - during practices, time-outs, in the locker-room, etc. For example, in Jennings team the coach was Croatian, the developmental coach was Serbian, one of the assistants was Spaniard, Jennings had 3 American teammates, plus Brezec and Becirovic who aren't Italians either. It'd be unthinkable for all these people to try to communicate in Italian (or in German if they were playing in Germany, etc). English is, for obvious reasons, "the language of basketball". A pick-and-roll is a pick-and-roll everywhere, I'm not even sure how to translate it to my native language. Finding an Italian pro-basketball player who doesn't speak English nowadays would be close to impossible. Maybe you can find some exceptions to this in some Balkan countries, especially those from former Yugoslavia, but that's all. Certainly not in the Italian League, the most "Americanized" of the European Leagues, from the style of play to the coaching influences. So, no, there were no professional reasons for Jennings to learn the Italian languages - in his job the language used was exclusively the English one.
