In the spring of 1974, I lost my basketball scholarship to Gonzaga University.
We’d sleepwalked through another 13-13 season, 7-7 in the Big Sky Conference – GU’s sixth straight season of middling hoops. Coach Buonchristiani had inherited most of us from the previous coach, and he was eager to bring in his own guys.
But I was only a junior. I had another season left. And both point guards ahead of me were graduating. “This was supposed to be my year!”
Coach Boner, as we called him, just shrugged. “Sorry, Memaw. Out of my hands.”
My name was, as it is now, Ken, but Coach had nicknamed me Memaw because he said I was slower than his grandmother. “And she died two years ago.”
Technically, Coach Boner was right – not that I was slower than his dead grandma, but that he hadn’t been the one to pull my scholarship. My grade point average had simply dipped, again, below the NCAA-required 2.0.
And yet, if I were a better basketball player, I knew Boner would appeal my suspension. It wasn’t my 1.8 GPA that iced me. It was my 2.3 points per game.
I reminded Coach that these were dangerous times to be taking away scholarships. “You’re basically sentencing me to death, Coach.”
“Relax,” he said, “the draft ended two years ago.”
But I wasn’t talking about Vietnam. I’d promised my girlfriend, Mary Katherine, that we’d get married as soon as my basketball career ended. I had started college worrying about the draft, but it was matrimony I was ducking now.
Boner was a small guy, with a mop of dark hair that spouted from his head like an oil strike. “Sorry, Memaw.” He patted my shoulder. “We all gotta go sometime.”
I looked at transferring to another school, but, predictably, there wasn’t much interest in a 5-11 guard with bad grades, a streaky shot and a single year of eligibility. So, when the semester ended, I had no choice but to pack up my locker, bid screw-you to that sleepy Jesuit college, and open the folder Mary Katherine had prepared: 14 pages of florists, photographers and formalwear. (“I’m thinking powder blue tuxes …”)
That’s when the Russians came to Spokane and saved my life.
My brother-in-law Dean was working for Expo ’74, assisting with the biggest exhibit, the Soviet Pavilion. For the first time in 40 years, the USSR would be attending an American World’s Fair, right here in the Inland Empire! And they were bringing a huge delegation, hundreds of people: officials, artists, dignitaries, and – this is where I fit in – an entire basketball team.
Basketball Club Uralmash was a second-tier professional team from the city of Yekaterinburg, at the base of the Ural Mountains, and they were coming for the opening of the fair to play an exhibition game against Spokane’s pro team.
The problem was this: Spokane didn’t have a pro basketball team. And since the U.S. National Team (made up of the country’s top college players) was already scheduled to play the Soviet National team in Spokane later that fall, that meant we had to find a “professional” team to play these Russian pros three months earlier.
So, Dean and I scrapped together a team of former college players, along with two former high school stars, one from Colfax, the other from the Wellpinit, on the Spokane Reservation. Dean found a way to pay us each $90 a week, and even got us a sponsor, Two Swabbies, the discount military surplus department store started by two old Navy guys, which donated $1,000 and provided us with Keds shoes and gray tank tops that read “Spokane Swabbies” on the front.
“Nice name,” said Mary Katherine, who was apparently still angry with me.
“You know I’d rather be planning our wedding,” I explained. “But this is practically my patriotic duty.”
We practiced at the Spokane Coliseum, where our exhibition game would be played. As player-coach, I instituted a loose, run-and-gun style that suited our scraggly players – and also the fact that we had only one guy taller than 6-3. We were, in a word: bad.
At our final practice, I noticed, on the sidelines, a tall, hawk-faced man, standing in a cloud of cigarette smoke, hands deep in his suit pockets. He sauntered over.
“You can’t lose this game,” the man said. “You know that, right?”
I looked back at my guys. “Oh, I think we can,” I said.
“No,” Hawkman said, “I mean … you cannot lose this game. Not after the Olympics.”
I knew what he was talking about, of course. In the ’72 Olympics, the Soviet Union had beaten the U.S., handing the Americans their first-ever loss in Olympic competition (after 63 wins in a row) when, at the end of the Gold Medal game, a few seconds were mysteriously put back on the clock, giving the Soviets a second chance to win.
“We’ll do our best,” I told Hawkman. “Who are you, anyway?”
“A basketball fan,” he said, making the words sound like CIA.
He leaned in close. “And, Ken, if any of their players talks to you about defecting, you’ll bring it to my attention immediately. Right?”
“How can I bring it to your attention if I don’t know who you are?”
He turned, and without a word, in a cloud of cigarette smoke, left the gym.
We met BC Uralmash the night before the game at a reception at the Soviet Pavilion on Havermale Island, in the center of the World’s Fair. It was a low-slung, white building, with a huge gray, three-dimensional map of the Soviet Union and the words USSR on the side of the building.
Dean led us inside and we shook various dignitaries’ hands, then posed for photos. We wore our Swabbies tank tops over our dress shirts. By now there were only eight of us left; our best former college player had torn a hamstring, and our Colfax kid had quit to go work harvest.
Before us stood our opponents: 12 huge, rough-looking men, most of them in their 30s – with heavy brows, scarred faces and meat hooks for hands, their knuckles like exposed tree roots. We shook these massive mitts, then lined up and posed for pictures in front of a giant bust of Lenin, whose stone head seemed only slightly bigger than Uralmash’s 7-foot center’s noggin, which suddenly nodded at my jersey. He said a word that sounded like Swabbies, causing the other giants to laugh.
Dean told me later we looked like a group of frightened schoolboys being reunited with their soldier fathers after a particularly brutal war.
There was only one player in his 20s on BC Uralmash, a 6-foot-10 string-bean with an Adam’s Apple that popped from his long neck like a second nose. He was talking to Adrian, who had played at the University of Idaho and was one of two Black players on our squad. He asked if Adrian knew Wilt Chamberlain. Or Oscar Robertson.
“No, sorry, can’t say that I do.”
Then he turned to me. “You are coach of Swabbies, yes?”
I said that I was, and then this giraffe of a man turned his back on Adrian, leaned down and looked at me with imploring eyes. “I need your help with something, yes?”
I was about to ask what when the oldest player, in his 40s, broad-shouldered, with light blue eyes, joined our conversation. “I am Maksim.”
“I’m Ken,” I said, “and this is Adrian.”
We all shook hands. Then Maksim turned his back on the other two. “Do you like vodka, Ken?”
Still recalling how the giant had pointed and laughed at me, I lied and said, “Sure,” and Maksim produced from a military-style backpack a bottle with Russian lettering on it.
“Come.” He led me out of the Soviet Pavilion, through the crowd, to a rock wall overlooking the stair-step Spokane River falls. He looked out over the riverbed, the summer river desperately trying to fill the wide, rocky channel. “So, this is your Inland Empire. An empire of pine trees and wheat stalks.” He opened the bottle, took a three-second swig, then handed it to me.
“You are coach of Swabbies, Ken?”
“Player-coach,” I said. I took a small drink. It was what I imagined airplane fuel might taste like.
“But you are so young!”
“Twenty-one,” I said.
“Do you know why my comrade laughed about your team, Ken?”
I said that I didn’t.
“Because your name, it sounds like a Russian word: Zaebis. It is what you would call a curse word, meaning, ah–” He looked for the words. “Fing excellent? But this word, it turns corners, yes? So. Your employer gives you a promotion. Zaebis! But then he says you now must work nights? Zaebis. Your wife, she buys a new dress, and looks so pretty. Zaebis! Then she sleeps with the neighbor. Zaebis.”
“So … it’s ironic,” I said.
“Yes!” Maksim was excited by this. “Good, Ken! Yes. Or, let’s say, your team, which has struggled for years, is chosen to travel to America to represent Soviet excellence. But then you find out this Spokane, Washington, is nowhere near Washington, D.C., but 4,000s kilometers away, in a small river town most Americans don’t even know.”
I smiled. “Zaebis.”
“Swabbies.” He smiled and toasted me with the bottle. Then he looked around. “Ken. Do you know what defection is.”
I said I did.
“I am captain of BC Uralmash. It is a great honor to come here, to beat Americans at their own game, and to show again how the West is rotting.” He rolled his eyes, and pretended to jerk the bottle, acknowledging the company line. “However, if any of my teammates tries to defect, it will be, for me–”
“Zaebis,” I said.
He nodded and handed me the bottle again. I tried to match his long drink, the fire burning all the way down my esophagus. Eyes watering, I handed the bottle back and he tipped it, his Adam’s apple, though not quite as prominent as the giraffe’s, bobbing in and out like a metronome. When he was done, half the bottle was gone.
He wiped his mouth. “Good luck tomorrow, Coach Ken of the Swabbies.”
“You, too, Maksim,” I said, steadying myself on the rock wall.
When he left, I staggered through the crowd, knelt against the fence, and vomited in the river.
♦ ♦ ♦
When I tell my 13-year-old grandson Emil the story of my big game with the Soviets 50 years ago, the one part he can’t believe is, as he puts it: “That Gonzaga was such a crap team, you played there.”
They are now, of course, one of the best basketball teams in the country, year after year in the top-10, 25-straight trips to the NCAA tournament, nine to the Sweet 16. Back then, I’m not sure we knew there was an NCAA tournament.
I tell Emil that attendance was so bad, we used to have to stand downtown, in front of Newberry’s, the Crescent and the Bon Marche, handing out free tickets.
“I don’t know what those places are,” he says, “but that’s shady!” I don’t know if he means the school was being shady sending us out there, or if I was being shady, or maybe the department stores? Honestly, I’m not even sure if shady is good or bad.
“Zaebis,” I say to him.
Mary Katherine comes in then. “Are you telling stories again, Ken?”
“Only about my deep and undying love for you, darling,” I say.
♦ ♦ ♦
Warming up the next day, I still felt queasy – from the vodka, and from nerves. There were nearly 2,000 people at our game, despite the sign outside the Spokane Coliseum which read, SPOKANE SWABS vs. ORALMUSH.
We had just gotten in our layup lines when the giraffe saw me and came over: “Ken, Ken, Ken!”
I met him at the halfcourt line.
“Listen,” the giraffe said. “This favor: I need you get me jeans. Levi-Strauss? If you get me discount on five pairs jeans, Levi-Strauss, how you say, out the back door, I let you score every time, you see? You drive to me each time. Boop, bop, beep, free basket. You see? How easy is? Your Two Swabbies, they sell such jeans, yes?”
I apologized and admitted that I didn’t work at Two Swabbies and couldn’t help him. Aside from Mary Katherine, I have never seen such disappointment on a human face.
Across the court, I saw Maksim looking at me sternly. I shrugged just as one of the referees approached from my left side. “Everything OK here, gentlemen?”
I turned. It was the hawk-faced man, in a striped shirt and black pants, a whistle around his neck.
“All is fine but is going to be a hard game for him,” the giraffe said and pointed at me. Then he returned to his layup line.
“Wait,” I said to the CIA agent. “You’re a ref?”
He smiled and pointed to the other ref. “My partner is in the John Birch Society.” Then he leaned in close. “I told you, Ken. You can’t lose.” He winked and then walked to the scorer’s table.
I suppose it was a lesson in the limits of American power, what happened next. Despite Referees Bircher and Hawkman whistling foul after foul, and 16 first-half traveling calls on the Soviets, they were simply too big and too strong for us. At the half, we trailed 43-27.
But here was the amazing part. I couldn’t miss. I had 20 of our 27 points, even with an angry jeans-hungry Giraffe going out of his way to try to block my shots. Jumpers, layups, even a kind of Kareem Abdul Jabar skyhook I was forced to take over the Soviet giant – everything I put up went in.
Even Coach Boner was impressed, leaning over the railing as we walked off the floor for halftime. “What in God’s name got into you, Memaw? You almost look like a player out there.”
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“I wanted to see if my old players could beat the Russkis,” he said. In addition to me, there were two other former GU guys on the Swabbies. “But so far you’re the only one who looks like you know which feet your shoes go on.”
“Thanks, Coach,” I said, and wondering about my scholarship, added, “You don’t think–”
“Not a chance,” he said.
I was warming up for the second half when Mary Katherine, who was sitting courtside, came over. She looked great, in a white and baby blue dress. “You were amazing, Ken,” she said. “I’m proud of you!” I thanked her and she pulled me into a lovely kiss.
Standing there, as she walked away, I suddenly had a sobering thought: the next 24 minutes would likely be the last competitive basketball game I would ever play. Even now, it’s hard to explain how that devastating this felt – the loss of this thing I had loved since I was 6, the sport I had thought would fill my life.
That’s when Maksim wandered over from his side of the court.
“Sorry about the officiating,” I said.
He shrugged. “Is to be expected.” He nodded to the crowd. “That pretty woman … she is your wife?
“Fiancée,” I said. “We’re getting married in the fall. I’m wearing a blue tux. In fact–” I turned to him. “I’ve decided: I want to defect, Maksim. Take me to Russia. I’ll play for Oralmush.”
Maksim laughed. “Ah yes. I also was unsure to marry. Now, after 22 years, she has been an exceptional wife, through 10 years in the army, and while I traveled the country playing basketball, with two sons and three daughters. And now, Ken, do you know what I think every time I come home?”
“What?”
“I think, ‘If I were to live my life again, I would find you even sooner.’ ”
I looked over at Mary Katherine, who was smiling at me.
Maksim patted my chest. “Good luck, Swabbies.”
“You, too, Zabeis,” I said back.
♦ ♦ ♦
“So,” my grandson asks, “did you come back and win?”
I would like to tell him that we did, that we salvaged American basketball pride and sent those godless Soviets to an ignoble defeat, the first domino in the fall of the Soviet Union. That I somehow got even hotter, and we didn’t even need the cheating refs, and that after the game, Coach Boner gave me back my scholarship and I singlehandedly laid the groundwork for the rise of Gonzaga basketball.
But none of that happened. I had only four more points, though it was still one of the greatest games of my life. It was also, as I feared, my last competitive game. I married Mary Katherine in October and finished my degree at Eastern Washington University. We ended up having three wonderful kids and I taught social studies and coached junior high basketball for 30 years, meaning, I guess, the sport really did fill my life.
The Spokane Swabbies did make a run against BC Uralmash in the summer of ’74, cutting the lead briefly to eight when our only player without college experience, the Spokane Indian from Wellpinit, went off, casually hitting 10 jumpers in a row from increasingly ridiculous places on the court. I swear, at one point, he got a defensive rebound from the Soviet side, pivoted once, and tossed in a 70-foot bank shot, but, of course, that would be an exaggeration.
“In the end, we lost 88-66,” I tell Emil. “I was our second leading scorer.”
“Bummer,” Emil says.
“Yes,” I say, “it was a bummer.”
But then I happen to look out at the patio, where Emil’s grandmother, beautiful Mary Katherine, is sitting in a wrought iron chair, reading a book and sipping a cup of tea.
“But you know what,” I tell Emil. “If I were to live my life again, I might lose even sooner.”
“I have no idea what that means,” Emil says.
“It’s OK,” I say. “You will.”
