Basketball On The Internet.

WHAT you see is what you get with Andrew Gaze - part basketball royalty, part dufus, part deep-thinker, part curiosity.

Watch an episode of After The Bounce on Fox Footy and you can believe he is a caricature on a show where over-the-top is never enough.

Even there though, if you had never seen him before - as, no doubt, a lot of AFL-exclusive fans had not - he is easy to embrace as a likeable, old-fashioned, fair dinkum, larrikin Aussie good bloke.

But Andrew Gaze is so much more, his elevation next month as only the third Australian inducted into FIBA's Hall of Fame - it can double as a reunion dinner with his father Lindsay - is a fitting further tick in a box of achievements no-one else in this country will ever even approximate, let alone match.

There's no point in once again listing all of his extraordinary records, milestones and personal coups - for those and the news story about Drewey's FIBA accolade, hit this link http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/sport/andrew-gaze-to-be-inducted-into-basketball8217s-hall-of-fame/story-fnez46xc-1226651982046 - because they only show why there is Andrew, then daylight to the next-best Australian basketball player.

What they don't tell you is that at one of the (myriad) peaks in his career - when the 1989 NCAA Final (and semi final) was broadcast live on Australian free-to-air television just because he was playing in it - he was still happy to sit down for an "interview" where he would be poked fun at by Magda Szubanski's alter ego, air-headed Pixie Anne Wheatley, for TV comedy show Fast Forward.

The facts and figures of Andrew's amazing career don't tell you how he hit the 3-pointer at The Glasshouse in 1988 to force overtime for the Boomers against the eventual Seoul Olympic Gold Medallist Soviet Union.

Or that, interviewed post-game he said he just wanted to eat a Whopper, which so impressed the burger franchise, Hungry Jack's came on board as the NBL's naming-rights sponsor.

Seriously, you can't make stuff like this up because no-one would believe you.

That's because the achievements don't tell you when he is at the Royal Melbourne Children's Hospital, visiting and inspiring young Adelaide heart-transplant girl Claire Kerr, so that after she has had a successful transplant, she not only plays basketball again, but makes it back to under-18 Division 1 in a team which plays finals in SA.

Now studying to be a nurse herself, Claire turns 21 next month, a couple of days before Andrew is properly immortalised by the sport's global governing body and enshrined in its Hall of Fame.

Life is grand for the unathletic looking lanky guy with the broad smile whose biography tells the delightful story of how his Greek teammates celebrated the win which helped his team avoid relegation with a particularly un-Australian flick-the-willy game in the team shower.

Dancing With the Stars showed us he has two left feet, rubbing a potent heat balm into his aching knee during an NBA warm-up with Washington Bullets - then needing a quick nervous loo visit which subsequently left him with the "Johnny Cash" (Burning Ring of Fire) - show us he is self-deprecatingly human.

He has his NBA Championship ring with the San Antonio Spurs in perspective, considering he was wearing a suit on the bench as they won that 1999 crown.

But only months later at the McDonalds World Club Championship in Milan, Spurs teammates such as Steve Kerr, Avery Johnson, Tim Duncan and David Robinson could not speak highly enough of what Drewey had contributed to the heart and atmosphere of that franchise.

It then becomes somewhat fitting Robinson will be inducted with Gaze next month.

Drewey didn't miss games, he didn't miss trainings, his love and passion for the sport paramount.

Don't let the Sunday night TV buffoonery fool you. Gaze is now sitting on the Basketball Australia board and was on the panel which selected Andrej Lemanis as the new Boomers' coach.

He is very much a man of substance and influence after being a player who attained incomparable success and scaled the heights of achievement.

He joins father Lindsay and Al Ramsay as Australians recognised by FIBA and, frankly, it could not happen soon enough.