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.