Coleman Collins: Playing Basketball Overseas Admist War

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IceManLikeGervin
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Coleman Collins: Playing Basketball Overseas Admist War

Post by IceManLikeGervin » Thu Sep 04, 2014 4:33 pm

Click link for full ESPN article: http://espn.go.com/olympics/basketball/ ... rn-ukraine

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Sometime in February, on the night before a game, team management called an emergency meeting. As I cleaned the dirty snow from my shoes and shuffled into the building, I passed by the Russian news reports on the televisions in the janitorial staff's office, and exhausted the limits of my rudimentary Russian skills to decipher their propaganda. "Something-something terrorism, something-something Americanski-Europeaski something," said the reporter. The janitors muttered in assent. There were images of tires burning and smoke rising. The protests in Kiev had turned violent, the main square was burning, and for the first time since the crisis began people had been killed in broad daylight.

Though the league's governing body had successfully ignored politics up until then, it was suddenly faced with the terrible optics of playing basketball games while civilians were being shot in the streets by government security services. It was decided that the next day would be a national day of mourning in remembrance of the people who were killed. Our next game would need to be postponed for a few weeks, but all of the weekend games would be played as scheduled. "Don't worry," the club's vice president said. "This will give them enough time to clear these troublemakers from the streets, and the season will proceed normally."

The next day, more than 80 people were killed.

Six months earlier, I had come to play basketball in Mariupol, a coastal city in the Donetsk region of southeast Ukraine. It is not a beautiful city and probably never was, but it has a hard charm under its surface, like an old Waffle House waitress or retired tire salesman. Think 1970s Pittsburgh. A constant, sickly chemical smell emanates from the steel factories, which serve as the city's largest employers. When the factories are working, thick clouds of smoke and steam billow into the air and envelop the city, and you can stand on the shore without being able to smell the sea. It seemed unbearable at first, but somehow my apartment was located near a small chocolate or candy factory, and my block was a refuge, sweetness cutting through the stench like a violin playing scales in a noisy subway station. Later, when a chocolate oligarch was elected as the next president, I was reminded of this small pleasure.

Thick and unpleasant as it was, you wrapped the smell around yourself like a security blanket. The smell let you know that the workers would have jobs in the morning, that the checks would come on time. Clean air meant unemployment. The main sponsor of the basketball team was Azovstal, a subsidiary of a larger network of steel companies. Our games were scheduled at times convenient for the steelworkers' schedules. The team, called Azovmash, was one of the strongest in Europe. We had the best domestic players in the league, four of whom -- Kyryl Natyazhko, Maksym Pustozvonov, Dymtro Zabirchenko and Ihor Zaytsev -- compete for the Ukrainian national team. We played in the Ukrainian league, and in a bigger, sort of pan-Soviet league sponsored by a Russian bank. There were long bus rides and unpleasant experiences with unsmiling customs officials in Belarus and Kazakhstan. I saw Moscow's Red Square lit up at night. I found myself getting stitches on a creaky clinic table in the former Stalingrad after an errant elbow to the face during a game.

As an outsider, when you first come to Mariupol or other cities like it in the east, you won't realize that the residents are speaking Russian instead of Ukrainian. It all looks the same to you. The letters are imposing and full of right angles, the sounds harsh; friendly loops and lilting voices are scarce. It's easy to confuse.

When the crisis first began in the fall, American observers tended to gloss over the fact that that a large portion of the political divisions could be roughly explained by (A) where a person was from (East/West) or (B) what language that person spoke in their home. People in the East have not forgotten that those in the West collaborated with the Nazis in what they call "The Great Patriotic War." The Westerners will always remember the vast famines that were inflicted upon them by the Soviet Union 1.

Accordingly, the fight to remove (Eastern, Russian-speaking, terrible Ukrainian-speaking) President Viktor Yanukovych from office would never have come from Mariupol, or the other Easterners who had overwhelmingly voted for him. It would come from the west of Ukraine, and I happened to be there the day it started. The official reason was that Yanukovych had been expected to sign an association agreement with the European Union, had promised to do so repeatedly, then backed out at the last minute after threats from Russia. Western Ukraine was heavily in favor of the agreement, while the East was almost totally against it.

I had no idea about any of this when I arrived that August. In a time of crisis, living in a foreign country where you don't speak the language is like being a small child whose parents' marriage is falling apart. You don't understand the issues, no one cares about your opinion -- everything looks normal, sure, but mommy and daddy don't laugh anymore and the house seems colder. Although you can't understand the news broadcasts or read the newspapers, you notice the intense conversations of others in coffee shop corners. Televisions that once went unheeded in the background now have four or five people watching at all times; the canned goods are out of stock at the grocery store. You can feel the tension. END

IceManLikeGervin
Posts:36744
Joined:Wed Apr 04, 2012 4:42 pm

Thabo Sefolosha & American Police

Post by IceManLikeGervin » Fri Dec 18, 2015 12:06 am

ESPN http://espn.go.com/espn/feature/story/_ ... hts-symbol


Click link for full ESPN article & video: http://espn.go.com/nba/story/_/id/14381 ... lking-tall
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Since graduating from Virginia Tech, Coleman Collins has played professional basketball in Europe and the D-League, after a brief stint with the Phoenix Suns. He's also a semi-regular TrueHoop contributor.

One night in June, I'm in Lisbon with friends celebrating a 30th birthday in style. Our evening is just beginning and we're enjoying ourselves, strolling down the street with beers in our hands. We're all black men, and we're all wearing hoodies. We jaywalk across an empty street as two cops watch us. I feel a strange calm, and then after a moment of reflection I realize that it's strange because I am unafraid; it feels bizarre not to fear the police. I look in their direction and raise my beer in a mock toast. They nod. And I think to myself: I could get used to this. I could stay here forever and smile at police officers on Sunday mornings or ask them for directions when I'm lost and my phone battery's dead. It might be a nice life. But then I'm reminded of what happened to Thabo [Sefolosha], and I snap out of it. This is not my home. I'm an American. I have to think like an American. I'll always need to go back there, and when I go back, I have to survive. Don't forget the rules.

Consider: Our bodies are temporary and maddeningly fragile. Basketball bodies in particular. We are constantly reminded that our bodies are not long for this earth. Though you can experience the joy of building your body up, to see the results of your work, one wrong move suggests that what you've constructed is ultimately breakable. A sprained ankle, a pulled hamstring. The life of an athlete, once the pageantry and money are stripped away, differs from other lives in a singular way: the relationship with the body. You sense your mortality intimately; you feel subtle signs of decay. It takes longer to warm up, you can't jump like you used to, a leg won't bend, a finger won't quite straighten. We come to expect to see our bodies taken from us, bit by bit. We offer ourselves to our occupation.

My body has never just been my body. It has been a tool or a vessel, an offering, an instrument, someone's idea of a threat, someone's idea of a weapon.

It's a funny thing to use your body for your work. The world is full of hazards: You could put the wrong food in your body, slice a finger cutting carrots, sprain an ankle slipping on icy stairs. Your body is an instrument that is always with you -- exposed, like an unprotected violin being carried down a busy street.

I once saw Elgin Baylor shuffle across a casino parking lot in Las Vegas, and it reminded me of my father. An old ballplayer walking is like a scuffed-up cannon on a park lawn. There was a power there, an old explosiveness, now obsolete. My father walked like an old ballplayer, like a man who had run and jumped in Chuck Taylors. By age 50 you could hear him before you could see him, his toes cracking on the stairs, knees cracking on the stairs, everything cracking, popping. To walk like an old ballplayer is to walk with pain and be seen ignoring it, I think. Basketball bodies claim space insistently. They differ from other athletes in that they demand the vertical as well as the horizontal; at any moment they might jump.

A ballplayer's legs are his livelihood. All the lower extremities, knees, ankles, feet. And once they go, you go. It's usually the knees first, but a broken foot or leg can completely derail a career. Think Grant Hill, Greg Oden, Bill Walton. Million-dollar injuries, bones worth millions.

I broke a bone playing basketball once, years ago, as a freshman playing at Virginia Tech. As I planted my left foot for a dunk, the side of my shoe ripped open, my foot slid out of the side of the shoe and my fifth metatarsal broke. I was and still am proud that I made the dunk. After the game, we had a quick consultation and a trip to the hospital, and a screw was inserted into the side of my foot. After a while the screw began to bother me -- something about the angle at which it was inserted. A cyst had formed, and I needed another surgery to take it out. As it healed, I was given a walking boot to take the pressure off. I couldn't move very fast, and I was still in pain.

A broken bone is a violent thing. It's a stabbing, a knife under the skin, a collision, an ending, a cutting, a ripping, a tearing. Then as it heals, it's the feeling of that knife wrapped in silk, then cotton, then foam, and then you don't feel much pain except on cold or rainy days.

So my friend Myke and I are walking, slowly, down an empty street in New Orleans a few weeks after my second foot surgery. I'm still struggling with the walking boot, but it has been a late night, a good night, when a police car creeps slowly up the block with its lights off. It doesn't immediately occur to me that the police could be looking for us, so we continue walking, talking about the night we've had, just black and happy for a moment or two. Without warning the car turns its lights on, speeds up, pulls up on the curb and blocks our path. Two officers spring from the car, guns drawn, cursing at us to raise our hands. Hands up. We "fit a description." "Two black men" have robbed someone in the vicinity. Hands on the car. Legs spread. I am scared and silent, and now the street that was only empty of people feels empty of witnesses, too. Other hands -- foreign hands -- move up one part of my body and down the other and reach the cast on my leg. It dawns on me that this constitutes an alibi. I sputter: "I can't rob anybody with a broken foot. I can barely walk. How could I run away?" They radio for the description again. The suspects are 5-9 and 5-10. Myke is 6-foot-4. I'm 6-foot-9. This was easily ignored before but now seems to rule us out. They holster their guns and continue to curse at us anyway. They get back into their car and speed away.

As time passes, I have always thought that that one broken bone saved me from breaking more. I consider myself a lucky man. Anything could have happened. Bones shatter mysteriously in the backs of police vans. There is death everywhere. All the time I see videos of loud and ignominious deaths, videos filled with humiliation. I watch a tennis player tackled while standing outside a luxury hotel, a little girl body-slammed by a grown man. I see men suffocated to death, shot while trying to run or crawl away. I watch videos of men, women and children with the knowledge that they are no longer alive.

On a late night in April, Thabo Sefolosha is standing outside a nightclub in New York. He is Swiss and a visitor to this country and perhaps unfamiliar with its customs. He is black but lacks the inheritance of centuries of wariness. He has dangerous expectations. A police officer curses at him; he doesn't expect to be cursed at. He talks back. He acts as though his mere presence is not, in fact, illegal. He assumes that he has the right to get a little angry. He assumes he can speak to other men in the same manner that they speak to him. He takes his time walking away and, in doing so, lays claim to public space. He is encircled -- he tells them to relax, as if he's speaking to men of reason. He feels a kick to his leg before he's thrown to the ground, a violin smashed on a street corner. They take from him his right to give his body to his work; they steal his sacrifice.

This incident is videotaped. Because he is attacked but not murdered I have the stomach to watch it more than once. I see him taken to the ground over and over again. I get angrier and angrier in the privacy of my home -- I rarely let people see me get mad.

In this country, where my people come from, public anger is and has always been a luxury good. Anger is seen as a petition in certain hands and a pistol in others, and responded to accordingly.

Sometimes I like to imagine what I'd say if I thought it was safe for me to show anger in public, if I could slip in and out of anger like cashmere socks or calfskin loafers. Maybe I would yell about the Constitution. Maybe: This is an outrage! or You can't do this to me! or Let me speak to the manager! or I can have you fired! I've heard people say that before. I might have spoken sharply at the policemen who stopped me in Louisiana and Georgia and Indiana and Virginia. I might have pushed back and asserted my rights, rather than scurry home.

I suppose my silence has served me well. I was not murdered in Louisiana or Georgia or Indiana or Virginia. My bones have never been broken by anyone else. I have been pushed against the sides of police cars but have never seen the inside. But still there are times when I feel like I've left something behind. Maybe I lost something when I smiled at the three squad cars that surrounded me for driving a car with a "suspiciously large trunk" and out-of-state license plates. Perhaps I was born with this loss; perhaps it is my birthright. Perhaps it is unavoidable, an ancillary cost of citizenship.

I am still a young man in many ways, only now nearing 30, but my body is much older. My knees crack when I stand. I get my ankles taped -- the left one clicks when it's rotated right, the right one clicks when it's turned left. The athletic trainer says, "You sprained these before, didn't you?" My left foot still aches on certain December mornings. I am lucky to have gotten something in return for this pain. I have given of myself willingly. I hope that I stay lucky. I would like to grow into an old man with old bones who used to play basketball. I think I would like to die old and in a bed, and quietly. END

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