Can I Keep My Jersey?

by Paul Shirley

  November 1

  After practice today, I was forced to fend off congratulations from reporters, of all people. I will be on the opening-day roster of the Phoenix Suns—certainly an existence worthy of best wishes. A few of the journalists who follow the day-to-day business of the Suns have taken a liking to me and my relatively stereotypical long-shot-does-good story. Because they have seen me dealing with the ups and downs of this life on the brink on almost a daily basis, I think they were genuinely happy to see me make the team. I had to temper their enthusiasm, however, because—as is usually the case in my basketball career—my triumph would be short-lived.

  When the Suns’ management invited me to training camp, they didn’t think I would make the team. Fortunately, I was able to change my odds by playing very well for the last month. About a week ago, I was told that everyone was extremely happy with the way things had gone, that the coaches loved having me on the floor and that the players enjoyed having me around. Along with this news was a caveat, as always. I was informed that the chances of my time in Phoenix being extended past the preseason were highly dependent on them succeeding in making some roster moves in order to save some money. My source told me that I still had a good chance to make the team absent any personnel moves. But a transaction or two would increase my chances.

  Last week, our third point guard, Howard Eisley, disappeared in the middle of a mini road swing to California. I knew that his contract was a point of contention with management, and lack of playing time was a point of contention with him. I also knew that his contract situation was one of the main ones about which my informant had spoken, so I was very curious about his whereabouts. After some sleuthing, I learned that both sides had finally agreed to a buyout of the two re-maining years of Eisley’s contract. He was set to make either $13 million or $14 million for the next two years—ridiculous numbers for a backup to the backup, even by NBA standards. After some arm-twisting, Howard agreed to take an amount reported to be upwards of $10 million to do nothing. He is now a free agent and, in addition to the money being paid him by the Suns, can sign with another team. (Eisley is actually a pretty good guy. I genuinely liked him but am still a little baffled why it took so long for him to agree to a buyout of any kind. I can imagine the conversation: So you’re saying that you’ll pay me $10 million and all I have to do in return is not play for your team. I’m really going to have to give that some thought….) At any rate, the transaction freed a roster spot, along with, theoretically, some money that could certainly be used to pay my salary. My future looked brighter.

  This weekend I was told that no real decision had been made regarding my fate with the team. However, I learned that I would be kept around at least through the first game, mainly because it would not cost them anything to do so. The team had guaranteed me $15,000 to come to camp. During the preseason a team gives its players an advance of sorts—$1,500 a week of walking-around money. Four weeks times $1,500 equals…the Suns have paid me $6,000, leaving $9,000 owed. During the actual season, which starts either today (November 1) or tomorrow, the team pays non-guaranteed players like myself by the day until a date in January, at which point the remainder of the player’s salary is guaranteed if the player is still on the team. My minimum salary, based on the number of years I have “played” in the NBA, is something like $720,000. Divided by 180 days, the length of time over which the salary is paid, that comes to $4,000 per day. Which means that the Suns can keep me around for about two and a quarter days without having to commit to paying me anything more. I was told that while the coaching staff would like to keep me, if the management could not make another money-saving move (read: trade a certain player, who will remain nameless, and receive only future draft picks or cash in return), I would be sent home after my two or three-day regular-season stay.

  Note: $4,000 a day in the NBA is far superior to $700 a week in the CBA.

  Today after practice I returned to my home away from home, the Hilton Suites here in Phoenix, in a relatively pleasant mood. That changed quickly with a phone call from the Suns. During the call, the assistant director of player personnel joked about the condition of my back. My back is fine, of course, but the Suns need a reason to put me on the injured list. Only twelve players can dress for the game; because we have fourteen, two of us will be on the injured list even though no one on the team is actually hurt. I felt a bit of conspiratorial glee, as if I was actually part of the inner workings of an NBA team for a change. He told me he was next going to connect me with the GM, Bryan Colangelo, because the GM was required to formally tell me that I was being placed on the injured list. Colangelo also joked about my faux injury and then said that he wanted to let me know where we stood.

  He began by telling me how great I am—always a bad sign. A conversation that starts with one person ticking off the other’s positive traits usually ends up going in the opposite direction. (See also any breakup, ever.) He went on to say that the new owners of the Suns had recently paid $400 million to buy the team and would not allow any “frivolous” spending. He noted that while the coaches would love to have me around, it would be impossible for him to justify keeping me to the owners, especially as I would have to spend much of my time on the injured list. To that end, he informed me that the Suns would release me later in the week. He then went back to friend mode and said that he would try to push my release date back to Thursday because that would result in my not clearing waivers until about Monday morning, allowing me to receive payment for those extra weekend days. If he could not slide that by the owners, he would have to cut me on Wednesday (incidentally, the day the Suns open the season at home against Atlanta). But, he said, he would try to get me the extra $8,000. He closed by saying that he has seen a lot of European basketball; “having watched you play, I would think you would fit in well over there.”

  I probably did a poor job of expressing exactly the level of condescension that was conveyed over the phone. In our short phone call, Colangelo managed to imply that while paying me the absolute lowest possible salary allowed by the NBA would be frivolous, paying Shawn Marion enough that he can sit around on the team’s chartered 737 wearing earrings that cost $25,000 each is a sound financial decision. Without saying it, he said that while the team’s owners could afford to shell out a cool $400 million in order to buy a showpiece basketball team, the extra $720,000 it would take to keep me around would not be “lean management.”

  I especially enjoyed the part where he acted like he was going to do me a huge favor by pushing back my release date by a day. Like I would think, Wow, Bryan, that is nice of you. That extra money will heal the emotional wounds caused by having committed nearly every waking thought for the last month to how I can be a part of your team and then getting as close to it as a person could, only to have it jerked out from under me at the last second.

  I was quite thankful, too, for the little dig about European basketball. As in, Paul, maybe you should stop this nonsense. You’re a tall white guy who can shoot. Go back to Europe. We don’t need your kind here.

  At the conclusion of the call, I was left with the strong feeling that someone who thought he was much smarter than me believed he had truly convinced me of something, namely, that my presence with the Phoenix Suns was a burden he could not bear.

  When the madness was over, I fell onto my hotel bed and burst into tears.

  So that’s that—I will be a member of the Phoenix Suns for anywhere from thirty-six to sixty more hours. Keith tells me that the Bulls have some interest once again. Olympiacos in Athens still calls on a daily basis. The basketball journey will continue. The problem—and what he doesn’t understand—is that I don’t really want to go on to another place. I was struck this morning, when I arrived at practice and was greeted as an equal, how nice it is to be a part of a team that allowed me to feel like I was welcome. For a change, people seemed happy to see me in the morning. They noticed that I’d shaved for the first time in a month (perhaps a Samson-like mistake)
and cared—or at least acted like they did—how I responded when they asked me what I had done on my day off. I suppose that is how people generally behave, but it is new to me.

  I don’t know how many more times I can do this.

  November 15

  I would like to relive my actual dismissal from the Suns because, well, apparently I am a masochist and enjoy opening old wounds.

  As I mentioned, the powers that be in the Suns organization told me that they hoped they could slide a couple extra days of employment by the owners, thus gaining me a few extra dollars for my trouble. So I did not know when I would be exiting the region, but I knew I was not long for the world of the Suns. While somewhat liberating, it was not a particularly pleasant feeling. During practice the day before the first game, I went through the early drills as usual, but then stayed out of the way during the controlled-scrimmage portion of practice. I assumed that the coaches would appreciate my actions; I would not be taking the time of someone who needed the work. And, truth be told, the fight, at least regarding the Suns, had faded out of me. While I was standing there acting like I gave a damn about what was going on in front of my eyes, one of the assistants came up and asked, in a genuinely inquisitive manner, “Did someone tell you to sit out today?” I replied, “No, but they did tell me that they will be cutting me today or tomorrow.” It was not the response he was expecting. Deflated a bit, he said, “Oh, I didn’t realize that decision had been made.”

  On game day, I arrived for the shoot-around expecting a management ambush at any time. I survived a light workout without losing my job and then set off for the weight room. After toning up my massive frame, I sauntered into the nearly deserted locker room, looked around, and decided that the management crew must have thawed its heart and was going to allow me to stay for another day. Not so. The GM was lurking around the corner. When I finished showering, he sat down with me and laid out the facts. Nothing new was said, except there was mention of the fact that a guy named Bo Outlaw had just been released by the Memphis Grizzlies and that there would probably be speculation about, and perhaps, completion of a contract between Outlaw and the Suns. Outlaw had played in Phoenix prior to being traded to Memphis, and everyone in the desert had liked having him around. Because I was reeling a bit, and because I was worried about getting as many Phoenix Suns T-shirts as I could before I left, I did not raise the one important point that came to mind—which revisited me when the Suns did, in fact, sign Outlaw a few days later.

  Namely: in order to get rid of Bo Outlaw, the Memphis Grizzlies had to release him and buy out his contract, to the tune of something like $6 million. By my logic, the Memphis Grizzlies wanted so badly for Bo Outlaw not to play for the team that they paid him $6 million to do it. I realize that this is repetitive: see also Eisley, Howard. But it is such a bizarre concept, I can’t keep stop thinking about it. Apparently the fact that the Grizzlies thought so little of Outlaw’s play that they paid him not to perpetrate it upon a paying audience was not a cause for concern among the management of the Phoenix Suns.

  I was reminded recently of the good that all of this rejection is doing me. I received a call from an old friend a little while ago. He said that he had seen that I had made the Suns’ opening-day roster, but could not find my name in the first game’s box score. He had gone as far as calling my parents’ house to investigate, to no avail. After some more research, a mutual friend had given him the bad news. While we were talking about the situation, he said that I must be getting pretty tough, that all the rejection I was getting could only make the rest of my life seem easier. I think he is right. I can’t claim to have seen it all, but I have had my share of disappointments over the last few years. Each one makes the prospect of something as simple as a bad breakup or an inopportune job loss seem less and less disastrous.

  November 25

  This year’s Thanksgiving dinner was not among my best. The food itself was not too bad, but the location left a little to be desired. Instead of dining in the friendly confines of my grandmother’s house, I decided to branch out. I ate my Thanksgiving dinner this year at the world-renowned restaurant that is found on the lobby level of the Ramada Plaza Hotel at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. I was blessed with such a culinary opportunity because I am en route to Russia to play basketball.

  When my agent called with this particular employment possibility, I was intrigued. As I have noted before, I’ve always wanted to play in Russia at some point in my career. (Why, I do not know.) And the particulars of the contract matched up nicely with my plans for the year. One of the players on the team I will soon be joining, called UNICS Kazan, got hurt a short time ago and the team needs a replacement. Because it is unknown how soon the player will be able to return, my stint will be somewhat temporary. If, after a month, the team has had enough of my brand of basketball, they can send me home without further obligation. If they do want to keep me around, however, I can opt to leave if their treatment of me has not been up to my standards (for example, no harem included with my apartment). If both parties agree that it would be a good idea for me to stick around, the same set of options applies after the second month. After two months, if the lovefest continues, I will stay for the remainder of the year. I’ve heard of very few contract offers with such flexibility. If there is NBA interest while I am in Russia, I can leave (after a month) and make a triumphant return to the United States. If not, I can stay, if they will have me.

  Intellectually, it makes sense. Emotionally, however, it is a disastrous plan. I am not sure what made me think I could deal well with leaving for a very foreign land on Thanksgiving. I must have gotten greedy—the financial aspects of this contract are rather tremendous. (One month’s guaranteed salary is about what I would make as an engineer in an entire year.) But my team is in a city called Kazan, which is about five hundred miles to the interior of Moscow (that would be toward Siberia). The words I’ve heard used to describe the place include godforsaken and hellish; more often, people just change the subject, as in “What is Kazan like?” “Uh, I hear that league is a pretty good one.” And let’s be honest, Russia is still scary. Moscow seems doable, but people disappear from other parts of Russia. (Okay, maybe such events were more likely in Stalin’s time, but that wasn’t all that long ago.) This morning, while I was awaiting clearance to exit the Russian consulate here in New York with my new Russian visa (more on that later), I noticed that one of the old ladies near me was holding a passport issued by the USSR. I am all for rejecting the propaganda that made up a lot of my Cold War–era social studies classes, but I cannot shake the feeling that at least a little of that stuff they taught us about the good old Evil Empire had to have been true.

  If I pull it off, the trip from Kansas City to Kazan will be one of my all-time greatest accomplishments. For whatever reason, it is not as easy to get into Russia as it is to enter a run-of-the-mill European country. Upon arrival in, say, Spain, presentation of one’s passport is sufficient—they don’t need to know of one’s travel plans in advance. To enter Russia, in addition to a valid passport, one has to have a letter of invitation from someone in the country, two passport photos for a Russian visa, a properly filled-out visa form, and most important, $350 in the form of a certified check or money order. I am not sure why Russia has such stringent rules about allowing Americans in; one would think its leaders would be more, not less, welcoming than the rest of Europe. Under normal circumstances, a traveler could take care of the bureaucratic mess through the mail, but due to the time crunch under which I was working, I had to appear at the nearest Russian consulate in person. (Consulates are conveniently located in the well-spaced cities of New York, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, and Los Angeles.) This meant that on my way out of town, so to speak, I had to take a day to secure my visa, which I found to be fantastic news. The Russians were able to coordinate my trip from New York to Kazan but said that they couldn’t make reservations for travel within the United States. (Evidently they don�
��t know how to use a computer.) So they secured my flight out of New York, sent a letter of invitation for me to the consulate, and left me to deal with the rest. I, of course, learned all of this exactly one day before I was to leave my home country.

  I flew out of Kansas City, arrived at La Guardia, retrieved my bags, hailed a cab, rode to the aforementioned Ramada, and settled in for about two hours of real sleep. (Mostly because sleeping at the Ramada JFK is more like actually sleeping in the terminal at JFK—they apparently did not spend much on soundproofing the walls.) I woke up and got another cab for what was supposedly going to be an hour and-a-half journey into the heart of Manhattan. It took twenty-five minutes, so I had some time to kill at 8:30 on Thanksgiving morning. As it turned out, it was fortuitous that I arrived so early; after a short walk down to Central Park, I returned to find a line forming about half an hour before the consulate’s opening at 9:30. I was definitely the only American in the line. It was educational, though, as I met a man from Kazan while standing there. I asked him if he had liked the city. His eyes got wide and he shook his head. Reassuring.