by Paul Shirley
“That’s strange, this doesn’t show a 10:15 flight to Cincinnati. And here’s my flight number, flight 1018. But it says, ‘Boarding.’ I’d better check that itinerary she sent…. Oh, [insert string of curse words here], I’m about to miss my [insert similar string of words here] flight.”
My flight was at 7:15. I am no genius, but I do know this: it takes longer than four minutes to drive from Detlor Acres in Grantville, Kansas, to the Kansas City airport. Like an hour and a half longer. In my efficiency the day before, I had not even looked at the itinerary e-mailed my way. I had filed the time given to me over the phone by my Spanish contact as incontrovertible fact and had put the itinerary in my backpack, for use at the airport.
The good news: I now have a pretty good idea what a heart attack must feel like. I very nearly passed out on my feet when I discovered that I was about to miss my flight. When I realized the depth of my stupidity, I immediately called the general manager from Joventut. She, of course, did not answer. Thinking quickly, I left her a well-reasoned, eloquent message: “Hi. It’s Paul Shirley…IamsostupidandI missedmyflightpleasecallmeandtellmewhattodookaythanksbye.” I next called Delta and made my case. Shockingly, Ms. Phone-Line Reservation Lady saved me. She managed to find a 9:55 Northwest flight through Detroit that would get me to New York in time to make my original connection. I rejoiced, and immediately regretted my call to the Joventut GM. She’d never needed to know of my idiocy. Or at least she didn’t need the early warning.
My father and I arrived at the airport with just enough time to spare. I waited in line at the Northwest counter (my new airline), glad that the day’s stress was behind me. When I got to the front of the line, the unhelpful fellow behind the counter got my boarding pass ready and then said, “How are you going to pay for this?” (Cut to: confused face on me.) I told him that the Delta phone lady had told me that my ticket would transfer just fine. “Well then, I need that ticket.” (Cut to: slightly panicked face.) “You were supposed to go to Delta and get the paper ticket before coming here.” (Cut to: really panicked face.) Theoretically, I had thirty minutes to get to a different concourse, grab the ticket, come back, check my bags, and board the flight to Detroit. I was told it would be faster to walk, so I set off. (It should be noted that whoever designed the Kansas City airport mistakenly thought it would be cute to leave the concourses disconnected.)
Midway into my trek through the ice, snow, and biting wind, as the shoes I was wearing—shoes I had not really worn before—tore into my Achilles, I was ready to give up on the entire trip. (My usual footwear had not made it into the box sent from Yakima.) But I had to find some warmth anyway, so I pressed on to the B concourse. When I got to the Delta counter, this nice gay guy laughed and laughed at the idea that I would get back in time for my Northwest flight. He found a seat on a Delta flight to Atlanta at 10:25 but could not access it. I thought about asking, “Why then, sir, do you have that computer? How is it helping?” But I doubted that such an outburst would help my cause, and held my tongue. He told me that he would work on “accessing it” and that I should go back and retrieve my bags from the Northwest counter. He also told me to hurry or I would miss the new Delta flight as well. I hiked back through the snow and found my bewildered father waiting with questions. He was a good sport about my own stupidity, and we made it onto an inter-concourse bus and found our way back to the Delta counter. Apparently, the man behind the counter found the icon labeled “Magic Seat Release” and so was able to find a spot for me. My bags were checked, I said good-bye to my father, and I got on an airplane, resolving to pay close attention to itineraries sent my way in the future.
When flying over oceans, first class is the way to go. Actually, I should write “business class.” My seatmate felt the need to correct me repeatedly on the issue. I know this: the only people in front of my section were the pilots. The food was exquisite and the legroom was extravagant. I love first, er, business class.
I arrived in Barcelona somewhat dazed. I would best liken the condition after an all-day travel schedule to the feeling one has when one wakes up from the anesthetic after surgery—that is, like one wants to shoot oneself. Personally, in both cases, I seem to be unable to remember that I ever previously felt normal…or even human.
I was met at the airport by several Spaniards, including the woman to whom I had spoken on the phone. Others in the contingent were carrying cameras and microphones. I was surprised; I had not known that my arrival was going to be newsworthy. No mention was made of the flight scheduling mixup. (I had actually forgotten; it seemed like it had been a week since I had left Kansas.) (Okay, a week is an exaggeration. Two days, perhaps.) From the airport, I was whisked off to a hospital for a physical. It was the most in-depth physical ever experienced by man. I was at the hospital for six and a half hours. If the doctors missed something, that something is undetectable by current diagnostic devices and procedures. My day consisted of the following, as best as I can recall (there is no accounting for the time I was asleep in the MRI machine; who knows what really happened then): blood work, physical measurements down to the respective widths of my arms and legs, elbows and knees, wrists and ankles, and the diameter of my head; a treadmill test complete with a tube that measured oxygen consumption (I endured a Spaniard punching a hole in my earlobe every three minutes while I was running, from which he drew blood to measure lactic acid buildup); a shower; an echocardiogram; an electrocardiogram (I honestly did not know the difference until then); MRIs on both knees; a hearing test; a vision test with the E’s pointing in different directions, kindergarten-style; X-rays on every part of my body (no lie—like forty X-rays, starting at my toes and working up from there); a general physical examination by a doctor who spoke next to no English; and, of course, a drug test. During this extravaganza, I ate two meals at the hospital and became dangerously close to falling asleep on my feet. But it was all worth it when I was pronounced healthy and sent on my way. (It wasn’t really worth it. It just seemed like a way out of the story.)
Next stop was the Joventut arena and offices. I was duly impressed by the fact that the offices were in the arena—in Greece my team’s offices were set up in a makeshift office building accessible only by some secret elevator. (In fact, I never did know how to get to the Greek team’s offices; I was always taken there as if I were a hostage who could not be allowed navigational knowledge. Minus the black hood, although that would have been awesome.) I signed a contract with Joventut after some rather tedious hassles with the federation known as USA Basketball. Apparently I was supposed to get clearance from the organization before signing a contract in another country. Another way for a middleman to filch $100 from athletes.
After we settled my eligibility, I was taken to my apartment. Not only was the bed made, but someone had actually stocked my kitchen with essentials—milk, bread, lunch meat, and the like. I was flabber-gasted. It was a welcome change from Greece, where I’d spent the first five weeks of my time in a hotel room with only the selections at the restaurant downstairs available to me. (I’d never known that lamb could be used in an omelet.)
I dropped off my bags and learned about the workings of my domicile and then the team officials in charge of apartment orientation took me back to the gym for practice. I was working on two hours of sleep over the previous thirty-six, but I managed to survive without embarrassing myself completely. Afterward, I drove “my” car back to the apartment to collapse.
Before I passed out, I noticed that my apartment has three bedrooms—with a fourth that contained only an ironing board—along with two bathrooms, a kitchen, dining area and living room, and a balcony, from which I can observe the Mediterranean Sea, which is all of three-quarters of a mile from my apartment. The view is absolutely spectacular.
I also noticed that my car is a Neon. Can’t win them all.
February 16
My washing machine and I had a little spat yesterday. I wanted it to (surprise) wash some clothes; it wanted to soak them
for approximately twelve hours. The instructions on the dials are in Spanish, but one would assume that a reasonably intelligent person such as myself would be able to figure out the implication of phrases like “algodon blanco normal” or “centrifugo intensivo.” I don’t think the language barrier is the problem. The problem is possessiveness on the part of my washing machine. Once the clothes start, they cannot be coaxed out until they are finished. That is, until Mr., er, Señor Washing Machine decides they’re finished. The washer is front-loading, with a round porthole of glass so I could see my clothes in all their immobility. I just couldn’t do anything about their static state. I punched buttons and twirled knobs. Still they rested, marinating in the vile combination of their own filth and some foreign detergent I had purchased. The machine, of course, would not allow me to open the door; to do so would have resulted in a minor flooding disaster in my kitchen. After a time, the machine randomly decided to accept the terms of my cease-fire and drained itself, allowing me to free my whites from its grasp. Unfortunately, they were never allowed the benefit of a spin cycle or a rinse. (Which is understandable—my clothes were in the machine for only half a day.) I was unfazed by the soap bubbles and dripping wetness and threw the clothes in the dryer for what turned out to be a 140-minute drying cycle. But, a day after I started, they smell okay and appear to be wearable. I need nothing more.
Unfortunately for me, while I was dealing with all of the clothes cleansing, someone broke into my apartment and replaced my legs with those of a fifty-five-year-old woman. The timing was unfortunate because the theft occurred the night before my first game with Joventut. During the game it truly felt like I was carrying around ten-kilogram weights in both shoes. I could barely move. (Okay, another exaggeration, I could move a little. More accurately, I could move, but only enough to be bad at most everything I tried.) I am not sure what the problem was. My team practices a lot more than I am used to in the CBA or NBA, but in those leagues we sometimes played four nights a week, so I cannot really point to overuse as the problem. Perhaps I am getting soft in my old age. Despite the condition of my legs, we managed to win. I contributed ten points, but only because our coach let me play through my blatant shoddiness.
At one point in the game, I participated in the following series of events: Receive the ball on the post, travel. Blow a defensive rotation on the other end. Receive the ball on the wing in an isolation play drawn up specifically for me and…travel. Next offensive possession, get fouled, and miss both free throws. Good times. As I mentioned, we did win, so I guess I should not be too worried. But in European basketball, one’s status is always a little tenuous, especially at the beginning of one’s stay. An American never really knows when he might have a Ricky Vaughn experience and find the proverbial pink slip in his locker.
After the game, I agreed to meet one of my teammates, a Croatian fellow named Nikola Radulovic, at a restaurant near our respective places of residence. He told me to go ahead, that he wasn’t going to eat and would be along in half an hour or so.
(Side note: Because of my lifestyle, I now think nothing of walking into a restaurant and asking for a table for one. I find it to be an interesting sociological experiment. The other patrons don’t quite know what to make of the solo act. “Hmm, what’s that really tall guy doing here all alone? He doesn’t look like a leper or anything. I wonder why he’s speaking a different language. Oh well, back to my flan.”) While in a relatively foul mood because of my earlier bastardization of the game of basketball, I managed to find the restaurant and placed an order. I ate; Nikola didn’t show. I ordered dessert, to stall for time—I thought I had misunderstood his broken English. Maybe he had actually said he would be along in an hour. My dessert was an ice-cream like substance covered with a chocolate shell—a shell that was of nearly the same Rockwell hardness as masonry. So, there I was, alone in a restaurant in a foreign country, futilely attacking some hateful dessert with all the weaponry available to me, waiting for a damned Croat, all the while observing the Spaniards around me as they made furtive glances my way. But since I couldn’t give up and leave the restaurant in a disdainful sprint, I took a deep breath and called the waitress over for help with my dessert. She said, “Es muy frio.” (It’s very cold.) I smiled and thought, “Really, you nitwit?” She presented no solution, so I waited. It finally melted a little, my Slavic teammate finally showed his face, and everyone was happy.
Sometime before worrying about my companionship for dinner, I was the target of a racist comment. At least I think I was. It happened while I was on the court before the game, warming up by myself. (Me, alone: common theme.) One of the opposition’s assistant coaches came over to say hello in semi-broken English. He asked me if I liked Spain and then said that last summer his team had considered signing me. They had even gone as far as taking a trip to Salt Lake City to watch me play in the NBA summer league there. I asked him why they had decided against the personnel move. He said, “In small town where we are, we must have black American. You know, dunking and exciting.” (Most will find this hard to believe, but I’m fairly athletic and tend to have some rather impressive dunks in Europe—more than many of the “dunking and exciting” black Americans around.) His comments neither angered nor surprised me—even though he was telling me that his team had blatantly discriminated against me because of my skin color. While his words were new, the sentiment is not. Usually American coaches say things like “We need to upgrade our athleticism” or “We need to find an athlete.” Both are part of a not-so-subtle code that white players all understand. We are viewed as physically inferior and so should be thankful that we are allowed to set foot on the court.
The coach’s soliloquy was brutal. In those few sentences, he made it clear that I would always struggle to find basketball employment because I am white. Nonetheless, I appreciated his honesty, even if that honesty was brought about only by his unfamiliarity with English. It is hard to be anything but blunt with only a few words at one’s disposal. Perhaps we should all speak in a foreign language. There might be more actual communication.
Actually, something of a language impasse exists in this part of Spain. (Impasse may be a bit strong. Hurdle, at least.) My Spanish is limited, but I did have two years of half-assed instruction in high school, so I know the numbers and how to ask where the bathroom is. Unfortunately, the average Joe (or José) in Barcelona does not speak Spanish primarily. He speaks Catalan. Barcelona is part of Catalonia, the northeastern segment of Spain that has a separate history than that of the rest of Spain. The people of Catalonia (Catalunya here) have a strong sense of their own identity, enough so that they speak an entirely different language among themselves. In fact, my sources tell me that a law passed a few years ago requires all public announcements, signs, et cetera to be posted in Catalan in order to promote the use of the language. And when I write language, I mean just that. Catalan is not a dialect—as I have been told about fifty thousand times already. It is a separate language—as different from Spanish as French, Italian, or Wookiee. The problem, where applied to my own interests, is this: if Juan Carlos the Spaniard walks up to me and begins talking, I assume that I might be able to understand a little of what he is saying—I had a whopping two years of Spanish, dammit. But since I don’t even know what language he is speaking, how am I to begin to decipher what he is saying? Do I not understand because we never made it past queso and leche in Spanish class, or do I not understand because he is speaking some tribal language? I suppose I will stick with “Se habla inglés?”
My linguistic development is also being hampered by the attitude of the Spanish people. In Greece, when I would break down and attempt to ask for something in Greek, the person to whom I was speaking seemed truly grateful that I was making an effort, albeit a poor one, at speaking their jive. Then he would—with a pitiful look in his eyes—correct my mangled version of the language and say something in English, usually along the lines of “Nice try. Now tell me what you want.” In Barcelona, when I le
ap into my best “Quiero un…” people look at me as though they would like to set me on fire. I usually stumble through a poor attempt at whatever request and receive as my response…silence. I generally return to the aforementioned, “Se habla inglés?” They respond, simply, “No.” The listener then experiences the pleasure of being subjected to español American-style. Which probably sounds a lot like English Ignorant Southerner–style. Because at this point, I am quite confident that, a lot of the time, when I try to say, “I will now walk to the store in order that I might purchase a pound of bananas,” it probably comes out as, “I be fixing to go to that there store to get me some of them bananas.” I would have no idea.
In my second outing with Joventut, we played a team from Belgium in the final game in the round of sixteen for the ULEB cup. (ULEB stands for…I have no idea. Some organization governing international basketball.) Much like my Greek team last year, Joventut plays in a secondary European competition, with Spanish league games on the weekend and ULEB cup games during the week. Because my team had lost by eight to the same Belgian team the week before, we needed to win by nine to move on to the next round of the playoffs. Before the game, I managed to pick out of the Spanish our coach was letting fly that I would be in the starting lineup. (Spanish is spoken almost exclusively around the team—most of the players hail from various parts of Spain.) I was a little surprised, but I performed relatively well. We thrashed our foes by sixteen; I scored eleven, and played a solid game all around.
After the game, we retired to the locker room, and my teammates immediately began undressing and showering. I asked someone if it was standard protocol for us to shower and then listen to the coach’s postgame talk, which seemed strange but reasonably acceptable. I was told that the coach would give no postgame talk; he only spoke to us after a game if he was really happy or extremely displeased. I shrugged at the new information and took my shower, but the situation felt very strange—like there had been no real wrap-up to the evening’s work. Years of basketball brainwashing have left me easily bewildered.
