SANTO DOMINGO — Point Guard Walter Hodge was born on September 21, 1986 in the Puerto Rican municipality of Guaynabo.
Hodge wore the Virgin Islands’ jersey and when he showed off his tattoos during a FIBA photo session.
The tattoos represent the places that he has been in the past, a kind of road map of the world on his skin — all the places that he has been in this big, wide world due to his career in basketball.
“It’s something I’ve always liked,” Hodge said. “It’s art. The first tattoo I had done was my daughter’s name, when I was 19, and then I had the faces of my two sons tattooed. As time went by, I tried to tattoo everything that has happened and has had an impact on me. Everything has sense and a purpose.”
They say that those who cannot remember the past — are doomed to repeat it. That is not a problem for Hodge.
“Since I was little, I dreamed of traveling the world with basketball,” Hodge said. “Thank God I’m able to do so. That’s why I’m planning on inking my right thigh. When I was a child, I used to make paper planes. Now I’ve tattooed one on one of my fingers. I’ll tattoo on my right thigh all of the places I’ve played in, such as something related to the city or country I’ve been in.”
About the teams the 6-foot-tall shooting point guard will play this month in places as different as Nassau (the Bahamas) and the Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic), he said:
“It’s a young group. The most important thing is that we’re going to make them play hard. We’ll give it our best shot. We want to control the defense as well as the offense, because the only thing that we can’t control is their scoring. We’ll give it all and we have nothing to lose.”
