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Courting A Big Red
Sports Illustrated | June 13, 1988
Courting a big red. (Trail Blazers try to sign Soviet star
Arvydas Sabonis)
Rick Reilly.
Full Text: COPYRIGHT Time Inc. 1988
WHEN IT COMES TO THE NBA playoffs, the Portland Trail Blazers have
rolled over more often than a Suzuki Samurai. In the last 10 seasons,
they've been given the bum's rush in the first round of the playoffs
seven times. If the Blazers were a sitcom, they would finish
somewhere behind My Two Dads.
Ah, but that was before they saw what a little glasnost can do for
your front line.
You think glasnost ends with scientists and exchange students? Nyet
on your life. Portland is thinking globally. The Blazers are
entertaining their own high-level summit and his name is Arvydas
Sabonis.
Sabonis, 23 and about the size of Communism Peak, might soon be
visiting a city near you. The Soviet superczar is an honest 7 ft. 3
1/4 in. (the Blazers measured him in April), 279-pound Big Red
Machine. And, what with U.S.-Soviet relations at their chummiest
these days, it's looking more and more like Portland will have him in
time for next season. The Trail Blazers used their last pick of the
first round of the 1986 draft to choose Sabonis, and since then
they've asked con gressmen, diplomats and even Ted Turner's
broadcasting company to persuade the Soviet government to let the big
man become the first Soviet citizen to play in the NBA.
In mid-April the Soviets agreed to let Sabonis go to Portland to get
treatment for his injured right Achilles tendon. Last August, Sabonis
ruptured it for the second time in three months while running up a
flight of stairs to answer what must have been a very important phone
call. But eight months of rehab in his native Lithuania wasn't doing
much good -- he wasn't able to run or jump -- so the Soviets,
thinking of the Summer Olympics in Seoul, let him pack for Portland,
where he is the most famous Communist in residence since John Reed.
Sabonis brought along his microsurgeon, Dr. Kestutis Vitkus, who
serves as translator, constant companion and Nerf hoops opponent.
Together, says Sabonis, they've ''enjoyed many luxuries,'' courtesy
of the Trail Blazers, who are paying all their expenses. The luxuries
include a plush Jeep Eagle Premier, a high-rise apartment with king-
sized beds, a VCR and remote-control TV. ''He is constantly 'bock,
bock, bock' with that little box,'' laments the doctor. ''And I must
translate each small bit.'' His favorite movie so far is Top Gun. And,
of course, there are bananas. ''I brought them a bunch of bananas one
morning, and they went crazy,'' says Blazers publicist Tim Renn.
''They never get bananas in Lithuania, I guess. So now I bring them a
bunch every day. My grocer must think I've got a gorilla in my
apartment.''
Well, nearly. In little more than a month in Portland, Sabonis has
broken every Blazer lower-body strength record and approached every
upper-body record. And he has never lifted weights. He also looks
like a stud. Most 7-footers seem to have an excess of the dork
chromosome, with their too- long arms and Lurch eyebrows and pea-
heads. Not Marvelous Arvydas. You see him walking across an empty
parking lot, you figure him for 6 ft. 4 in., 190. Meet him close-up
and it's as if somebody put him through the 150% blow-up mode on the
office Xerox.
Not only that, but he has got happy feet. ''I am astonished by how
well he can dance,'' says Vitkus. ''He can dance like Michael
Jackson.'' And he can cut a lane as well as a rug. One NBA general
manager says Sabonis has ''four times the athletic talent'' of Utah's
7 ft. 4 in. obelisk, Mark Eaton.
There's more. His shooting touch is as smooth as Stolichnaya. He has
a sweeping Maurice Lucas- like hook and a soft jumper. Because of the
wider international lane, European big men generally stay out of it
and thus do more outside shooting than their American counterparts.
But Sabonis's range seems limitless. When the U.S.S.R. beat
Yugoslavia in the 1986 World Cup in Madrid, Sabonis bombed in one of
his team's three three-pointers in the final moments. One day in
Portland, after watching a TV commercial for the NBA that featured a
number of last-second miracle baskets, Sabonis spent 15 minutes
hollering in English, ''Three, two, one . . . '' and heaving up hooks
from long distance. He made an astonishing number of them. Of course,
whether he can bust jumpers wearing a Michael Cooper overcoat is
another question.
He wants the chance very badly. The first time he saw an NBA game on
TV, he had just awakened from a nap. ''When my friend woke me up,''
he says, ''it seemed that something was wrong with the TV,
technically. Everything looked like it was being broadcast at high
speed. Then I realized it wasn't sped up. It was hard for me to
believe how fast the game was being played.''
Sabonis has the right kind of temper for the NBA: short. It's not
unusual for him to get mortally hacked off three or four times a day
about some little thing or another. It shows up on the court. In a
light workout last week against Portland player personnel director
Bucky Buckwalter's son, Bryan, Sabonis got mad enough to dispense
with detente and give it the big Socialist Slam. ''He's got to learn
the NBA power game,'' says Portland assistant Jack Schalow, who is
spending the most time trying to teach it to him. ''But he's very
strong.''
If Sabonis can learn the basic NBA rules -- no hemorrhage, no foul --
he could become that most precious basketball commodity, a remember-
when, back-to-the-hoop, post-up center. Which is exactly why some
people in basketball are accusing the Blazers of treason. ''I see
Sabonis as being a fulfillment of Lenin's prophecy,'' John Thompson,
the U.S. Olympic basketball coach, told the Portland Oregonian. ''The
capitalists are selling ((the Communists)) the rope that they can
hang us with. I personally feel we're being used. . . . We are in
direct competition with them. To prepare Sabonis to play against us
just isn't right.''
This brought a pointed chuckle from NBA commissioner David Stern, who
said, ''Coach Thompson is a great coach, but I'm glad he's not our
secretary of state.''
The Blazers don't appreciate the xenophobia either. ''I worked
medical infantry in Vietnam,'' says Dr. Robert Cook, the team
physician and the man in charge of Sabonis's care. ''I treated
wounded Viet Cong. I would never withhold treatment from anybody for
any reason.''
Of course, everyone might be wasting wind if the Soviet government
doesn't let Sabonis come to stay. However, there are positive signs.
First, the Soviets could have sent Sabonis anywhere in the U.S. -- or
the world, for that matter -- to get treatment. Why Portland, unless
they wanted Sabonis to get comfortable there? Second, in May Sabonis
asked for and received a six-month extension on his visa. Third, FIBA,
the sport's international governing body, is expected to vote next
April to allow NBA players to compete in the 1992 Olympics, which
would mean that the Soviets could have Sabonis back whenever they
needed him for international competition. ''I have pretty good vibes
it could happen,'' says Blazer president Harry Glickman.
Money should not be an object, although neither the Trail Blazers nor
the Soviets have disclosed how, or how much, Sabonis would be paid.
To encourage Moscow, Larry Weinberg, who sold the team on May 31, was
hitting up the Soviets regularly, using Turner's Goodwill Games
producer Bob Wussler to put in good words with -- so it was rumored
-- Mikhail Gorbachev himself. Why would the owners of the Atlanta
Hawks want to help another NBA team? Because the Hawks own the draft
rights to two Soviets themselves. And Sabonis wouldn't hurt TBS's
cable ratings either. Welcome to the borscht belt, y'all.
Sabonis couldn't give a flying ruble about the politics. ''I'm a
sportsman,'' he says. All he wants to do in Portland is get his
tendon fixed up, play the game and have a little capitalist fun. In
fact, the Soviet press chastised him recently for too much
''frivolity'' after he and the good doctor took a two-day trip to
Chicago for a Lithuanian festival, where Sabonis was a big hit.
Sabonis has spawned more Russian fiction than Leo Tolstoy. Louisiana
State coach Dale Brown, who tried to get Sabonis to his school two
years ago, says he heard the KGB actually cut the big guy's tendon to
keep him from defecting to Baton Rouge. Then there were published
reports in Soviet papers that 1) Sabonis had become so depressed
about his injured tendon that he had become an alcoholic; 2) he had
become an alcoholic and cut his heel open on an empty liquor bottle;
and 3) he had killed himself. It turns out that Sabas, as he is known,
gets a chuckle out of going along with any rumor a reporter might
throw at him. So if one were to say to him, ''We hear you've been
writing haiku late at night while wearing women's clothing,'' he
would go along with it and laugh it up later. He just likes his fun.
He has already had two dates in Portland, gotten his Oregon driver's
license, been deep-sea fishing, gone shopping for fancy suits, taken
side trips to Olympia, Wash., and Los Angeles, and learned to play
the tape deck in his car at ear-shattering decibel levels. He turns
it down a little to listen to his English-lesson tapes, and he has
already got an English tutor. That's good, because the first few days
the Blazers coaches worked with him on drills, negotiating the
language gap was like crossing a muddy field in snowshoes. On the
first day Schalow was trying to get Sabonis to take a pass with his
back to the basket, make a little juke left, then go hard to the
basket the other way for a layin. But Sabonis kept pulling up for 12
-foot jumpers. ''Go to the hole, son!'' Schalow kept saying, but
Sabonis didn't understand and Viktus couldn't translate. When Sabonis
finally got the message, he took one step and jammed it in with
enough force to be felt in Tacoma. Since then the Blazers have given
the Soviets a 50-word list of common NBA nomenclature. ''Either he's
got to learn English or we've got to learn Lithuanian,'' says Schalow.
No help at all is Sabonis's Lithuanian trainer, Alexandras Kosauskas,
who doesn't speak English either and who was sent in last week,
perhaps in part as a frivolity-stopper and in part to learn what the
Blazers' doctors were doing right. For in one month under Cook,
Sabonis had made significant progress.
Cook has had some hard-luck feet before -- those of Bill Walton (who
sued Cook for malpractice, and later dropped the case) and Sam Bowie
(who has suffered two stress fractures in four seasons as a Blazer)
-- and now come the size-16's of the foreigner. Sabonis has thus far
improved his ankle flexibility by 15 degrees, but he has still got 25
degrees to go before he can even begin to think about playing
competitively. John Thompson may not have to see Sabonis wearing
Soviet red in the Olympics. Democracy may be safe after all.
''I think it'll be three to six months before he's ready,'' says
Cook. The Olympics begin Sept. 17. The Blazers open camp in early
October. In a perfect Blazer world, Bowie gets healthy, Sabonis gets
healthy, Sabonis gets the go-ahead from Moscow and Portland starts a
front line of 7 ft. 1 in. Bowie, 7-foot Kevin Duckworth and Sabonis.
Now that would be an Iron Curtain. Patriots like John Thompson would
get to see if Sabonis can hold his own against the best big men in
the American game. Like Patrick Ewing of Jamaica and Akeem Olajuwon
of Nigeria.
Much thanks to Craig Wilson and CFFI...
Much thanks to Craig Wilson and CFFI...
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