Ryazan State University Pirates

I started practicing with the university's basketball team last week and much to my surprise, comported myself pretty well on the court. The players are a year or two younger than me all about my height, with the exception of Sanya, the center. Half the players are named Sergei and the other half are named Aleksander. It’s made life a little easier. The practices are kind of informal; we start with running, a couple jumping/shooting/defense exercises and then a scrimmage. In the games I play a Reggie Evans-esque role: lots of boards, a couple points, a couple fouls. No Goosing.

Everyone’s been really helpful explaining the exercises if I don’t understand but in general it’s not too hard because basketball is a lot of nouns and not much grammar. I asked the coach if the team has a mascot or a nickname and apparently they don’t; however, after the second practice I went back to the locker room to find that my watch and socks (!) were gone. I’m more perplexed than mad because someone went through my gym bag where I had left my wallet, passport, etc, and decided that, in addition to a watch, men’s hosiery would make the plunder complete. I’m not going to let it discourage me (although I will leave my stuff in the office) but I have decided to give the Ryazan University team a nickname.

PS. I know it was a Sergei.

Proud to be an American

Before I came to Russia I received the same round of briefings as the last time. In general, these orientation events are designed to scare you a little bit or as time fillers. They tell you about what the political climate is like in Russia, how you can expect people to react to your nationality and, should they react badly, how to make everyday items into weapons. With respect to the second topic, I have encountered very little anti-American sentiment directed at me personally except at a truck stop somewhere between Yaroslavl and Moscow. With all this in mind, I was completely unprepared for my reception at the history class I'm auditing, a lecture on Medieval Russia. I walked in, sat down in the back right corner and heads started to turn. Clearly, I was out of place. After about 5 minutes of this the professor walked in, introduced me as his American Colleague and the entire class (about 70 people) broke out into spontaneous applause! Pretty easy crowd. Turns out they were just fans of my work.

Teaching Rushmore:

Three times a week I have movie classes with three different groups. Although I was encouraged to play films that portray American or British values (To Kill a Mockingbird, Twelve Angry Men, My Fair Lady), I decided to balk at tradition and show something a little more contemporary. My students are in the third year where the topics for the semester are Theatre and Education. What could be better than a movie about a 15 year-old who writes plays?

Most of the kids like it, mostly for the drama with Ms. Cross and Max (my classes are about 90% female). They get most of the jokes and are, I hope, learning grammar and vocabulary. Some moments they just don't understand, in particular the conflict between Max and Dirk and Magnus. The lynchpin to this (for those of you who have not seen the movie) is that Max claims that Dirk's mom has given him a hand-job. A lot of the movie won't make sense if you don't know that word. This brings me to class today, where I felt a little like a dad with his 9 year-old son, trying to explain what a hand-job is without being too specific and while trying to avoid gestures. "It's something you do with your hand in a bed or a car, really anywhere. And it's a man, or in this case a boy, and a woman and they're touching.... Let's just say that Max said something bad about Dirk's mom." I suppose that this was enough. Maybe some of the girls really did understand and will let the others know in hushed whispers. Otherwise, I guess they'll never be able to get jobs making overdub scripts for porn.

The Meeting About Basketball

The Ryazanskii Prospekt is a triple entendre. It's literally a street in Moscow, figuratively my prospect of living, teaching and studying in Ryazan for a year and the never-to-be-written novella about a basketball player from Ryazan (Think The Scout but with Harrison Ford as the Albert Brooks type character. Who else could do the Russian accent?).

I've been here two weeks. It's good. Got some good, non-offensive stories. Sometime I'll go back a little bit if things are boring. Yesterday I had expressed an interest in playing basketball while in Ryazan. My host University, Ryazan State University, has been really great about providing everything I want, so I shouldn't have been surprised when I was told later that day that I had a meeting with the Dean of Physcultura at 10 the next morning.

I went with my advisor, the head of the linguistics department, who is very small (5'3" at best), a distinguished, cultured, older scholar. The Dean of Sports turned out to be a hulking man (6'7", maybe 280 pounds, two of which were made up by his moustache). Think of a Southern defensive lineman turned AD with an almost incomprehensibly masculine voice. I love the contrast.

I suspect they were under the impression that I had played college ball or even high school ball, an impression of which I firmly disabused them. We talked about the position I played (small forward) and when I can play, what it will be like, etc. And as every story should have a punchline this one does, too. The Dean told me he had a friend who had played in the NBA, for the Portland Trailblazers. I was hoping it was Terry Porter but at heart I knew who it was. The Dean turned around the signed, framed photograph on his desk to reveal number 11, Sabas himself, Arvydas Sabonis.