Longshot (23 page)

Before I landed in Istanbul,
I had never seen a three-lane highway accommodate six lanes of cars. Common logic says that if you simply let the cars go every other one and merge into the lanes politely, traffic will go as fast as it can. Whereas in Istanbul, common sense is nowhere to be found. Cars will hug the guardrails, even scrape them—paint jobs be damned—en route to wherever they feel it's so important to go. Bumpers will tap and side-view mirrors will collide and drivers will look straight ahead pretending that nothing happened.

I was taken to a tiny hotel, with tiny rooms and tiny beds, in the middle of the mass urbanization that was the crossroads of the world. The next day I was escorted on foot to the practice facility, which was only a few minutes away. Erbil, the team manager, came knocking on my door and said in his broken English, “Lance,…I take you to practice now. Understand?”

My first morning at the gym, I met Coach Oner. He was an older man and had said this would be his last year coaching. He was very welcoming. He was also totally Mafia. He had six separate businesses that he ran on the side and would often show up for practice an hour late, have us do a few drills, and then go back up to his office, where he conducted his other enterprises. He had a chauffeur escort him around town in his Jaguar and had the same setup for his son, who was on the junior team.

Later that day while riding in a taxi, I just stared out the window in awe at the endless ocean of concrete with beautiful towering mosques rising up over the hills. I had never seen anything like it.

The following Monday, I passed the physical exam, and I was paid a week later upon final certification from the doctors. I received my $20,000 advance up front—in cash. That's when I knew something was wrong. They gave me some big spiel about how it was wise to always
take your money in cash, to make sure that it was all there, and how there were often typos and failed payments with wire transactions. A receipt for a wire transaction was just as good as cash—I knew that much. They were just paying me under the table to avoid taxes.

For two weeks I lingered in the tiny hotel in the sweltering humid heat. I listened to books on tape to pass the time while I wasn't at practice. I had not yet received the car that I was due, nor had I been moved into an apartment. They were stalling, and I already knew, within that first week, that I was in for a ride.

The training coach walked us through a warm-up drill every day and then ushered us into the weight room before practice. We did the same lifts every day. If you had any questions about what lifts you should be doing, you were to just recall from memory what you had done the day before and you were golden. We did bench presses, squats, biceps curls, dead lifts, and hang cleans every day. Every day. I'm no certified trainer, but even I could tell you, from trial and error, that if you don't give your muscles a day to recover, they will never get stronger. For the first two weeks I was there, we did the same lifts at the same weight every day. No one went up in strength. No one. It was stupid. And if you tried to venture off and do your own lift, even after you completed the regimen, the strength coach would give you a no-no look and tell you to stick with his routine. What could I say? It was their house, their rules, and their stupidity.

After weights we had practice with Coach Oner's two assistants, who smoked as they coached us, awkwardly, through drills. When they picked up a ball, you could tell it didn't feel natural in their hands. They were probably old soccer coaches whose time had come, who had no other livelihood, and so took up a job coaching basketball, even though they had no clue what they were doing. When they shot the ball, they proved your assumptions correct.

In our first preseason game I had twenty-five points and fourteen rebounds, surprising everyone. Coach Oner came up to me, gave me a kiss on the cheek, and said, “You're a steal!” implying that I was well worth the $90,000 they had bid for me. They even called John Greig several times just to reiterate how pleased they were. “You don't play like a rookie,” Oner said to me while offering me a ride in his car.

“Probably because I'm much older than your normal rookie,” I said, referring to the six years I spent in college basketball.

This conversation could've been a great one had the circumstances been less awkward. I was riding in Coach Oner's car with the $20,000
they had paid me in cash. For a week I had been walking around Istanbul with all of this money in my pocket, trying to figure out how to get it into my bank account back home in Salt Lake. Because of the heightened security measures around the world after 9/11, I couldn't open a bank account in Turkey without a Turkish social security number. And they wouldn't blindly transfer it in faith, either. The only way I could get it out of Istanbul was to carry it out. I didn't want to be hiding this money in my hotel room any longer, so I asked Coach Oner to stash it away for me in his bank account. I trusted him, and he liked me, and he was honest with me, always.

I could've held on to the money and carried it with me on the plane when I flew back to the States a week later for Tara's wedding, but I just didn't like the idea of carrying that much cash on me and the hassle of reporting it to customs. I had faith that Coach Oner would transfer the money for me through his own private bank account.

Coach Oner took me to my first-ever European soccer game. It was Galatasaray playing Ankara. I had never seen anything like it. I hardly watched the game. I just watched the crowd. It was amazing to see these thousands of people in different parts of the stadium who would carry through rally cries, cheers, and chants in harmonious timing, each section playing its part in the orchestra. Incredible. We don't have fans like that in America, for any sport. I have never seen such tradition choreographed through the masses. Galatasaray won the game, and I got food poisoning. I had to be taken to the hospital because I had been vomiting every twenty minutes for eight hours straight through the night. Don't get lamb kebabs from a vendor at a Turkish soccer game.

When the time came for me to fly back home for a few days for Tara's wedding, the team was worried about letting me go, as they feared I might not come back or might weasel my way out of the contract and try to sign on with someone better for more money. But I told them they could trust me, even though my first paycheck was past due by four days at this point.

“You'll have it when you get back,” the secretary assured me.

Eighteen hours is how long it takes to fly from Istanbul to Salt Lake City. I arrived in time to make the rehearsal dinner for Tara's wedding, thanks to a little subterfuge on my part, when I snuck through security at O'Hare to make it to onto the plane just before it departed the gate. The door had already been shut. I may have violated international laws,
but it didn't weigh on my conscience, as I don't buy into that speculative threat-level-red fear mongering. All I know is that I made it to the rehearsal dinner in one piece.

The wedding was the next day. It was a splendid event, and I was pleased to see that Tara, who had battled through reactive, self-destructive behavior, had found and was about to settle down with a high-quality guy such as John Greene. I got to see all my friends and loved ones and happily tell them about the situation in Istanbul, which by this point had exceeded my expectations.

I had invited Court to come with me when I first decided to go to Turkey. He loves traveling the world, experiencing new cultures, and is very good with languages. I wanted someone to come with me, as the idea of learning a new language, with my hearing impairment, was overwhelming. Plus, I wanted to take Mac, my dog, with me, and I needed someone to watch over him when I was gone on away games. Court had made up his mind to fly back with me.

The day after Tara's wedding, I was startled to realize that Court had not yet packed or moved out of his apartment.

“Why haven't you moved out?”

“Because I had no one to help me,” he said defensively, as though that absolved him of any wrongdoing, which it didn't. Court also wanted to be bring his cat, Tommy. If it were not for the fact that Mac loves cats and was very good friends with Tommy, I wouldn't have agreed to let the cat come. Tommy was a thorn in my side. He had nothing but total disregard for human authority and would openly challenge you for your food, jumping on the table right in front of you, racing to eat as much of it as possible before you could throw him off. No matter how many times you flicked or spanked him, or even threw him against a wall, he would never relent. His one redeeming quality was that he was best buds with Mac.

When we arrived in Istanbul with our pets in tow, the first thing Court noticed was the women. Turkish women are incredibly beautiful. And Court is obsessed with women. We took a taxi to my apartment, a three-bedroom flat. I also finally had my very own car: a beat-up used minivan. But I wasn't complaining. I actually prefer to be assigned used beaters; that way, if you happen to ding them or wreck them, no one loses sleep over it.

I couldn't stay in the apartment with Court for long, as one of the team managers was there waiting. He and I were going to take a ferry
across the strait to the Asian side of Turkey, where we were to meet up with the team for a preseason tournament.

When I arrived, I met the new players on the team. Malik Dixon was an American point guard, and Malik spelled the end for me. He was a good guy. But he was a shoot-first point guard. And Coach Oner was giving Malik the green light to shoot whenever he wanted. I'm the type of big man who's only as good as his point guard lets him be. The tournament lasted three days, and I didn't play well. The team was used to me scoring twenty and ten before I left for the wedding and before Malik arrived. All I really scored that tournament was a set of stitches in my cheek.

Borak, the team captain, was back from an injury. He was a Turkish All-Star, and he was going to shoot it every chance he got. With Malik and Borak, there simply weren't enough shots for anyone else. And then there was Hussein. This guy was trouble for me. He arrived late to the team for reasons I don't know; I think there was a buyout with another team and Galatasaray quickly bought him. Hussein knew I was the obstacle standing in his way to starting and making more money in the future. So in practice, while taking it easy on the other guys, he would cheap-shot me and then initiate an altercation. Because he was such good friends with all the other guys and spoke Turkish, they gave him the benefit of the doubt, and they all began to think I was a just another whiny American. Hussein validated John's warnings about the possibility that a teammate would try to make me look bad.

Even in games, Hussein would throw me difficult passes that were just out of reach or had too much heat on them. Or he would purposely miss my pass, so that I looked the part of the ass, giving me a turnover, and Coach Oner would take me out.

With change in offensive schemes, Malik and Borak now carrying the weight of the offense, the team owners began to pressure Oner to bring in a more shot-blocking-minded center. The owners kept saying that I was a rookie and would eventually crack, that with so little experience I'd never be able to make it through the wear and tear of the long season. Plus, they wanted to make a real push for the championship this year and felt they truly needed to invest in a more experienced center, at least one that could block shots.

The revolving door was gaining inertia. Every week, for three weeks, the team brought in two new big guys, Americans, either veterans or shot blockers. They'd have them practice against me, believing that the
next one would be the one who was better than me. Yet they kept sending all of them home because I was outplaying and outworking all of them in practice. This went on for three weeks. By now it was October, and aside from the $20,000 advance that I received upon arrival in August, I had not yet received a paycheck. We were coming up on the third payday, the previous two still unpaid.

As far as the advance, I had yet to see that safe in my bank account. Coach Oner kept messing up the transaction information, or maybe he was just holding on to it; I don't know. It was lost somewhere in cyberspace. After six weeks of employment with Galatasaray, I had received not a dime for my work.

My gut instinct had proved true. I was now in the situation I had feared.

After practices, to ease my mind of the financial stress and the politics, Court and I went out into Istanbul and visited the sites. The Hagia Sofia is immaculate. To think that man, fifteen hundred years ago, created such a powerful structure is awe inspiring. The notion that Court thought he could possibly convince the guards, who spoke no English, to clean up the pigeon shit that had accrued on the walls of this famous piece of architecture, one that they took for granted, was inspiring in and of itself. They simply looked at him like all Europeans do: There goes another American thinking he rules the world.

In Istanbul, you don't have to be wary of the enticements of harlots. Rather, you must be on the lookout for rug sellers. It's illegal to solicit in public in most of Istanbul, but when you emerge from a taxi or car in the bazaars of the city's old district, you find people waiting, whistling and whispering into you ear. Public solicitation is legal here.

First they'll whistle lightly under their tongue, like prostitutes calling their johns: “Hey…” Then, in a throaty voice that bespeaks years of cigarette-smoke intake, they'll ask, “You want to buy a rug?”

The first time we were accosted, Court and I were flattered, as we had visions of pimping out our apartment with a nice handmade Persian rug but hadn't known where to look for one. To our delight, one came looking for us—or rather, the seller of one. We followed him. He spoke to us in good yet broken English: “You chose right. Stay with me. Buy only from me. Trust no one. No one else. Just me, Hassan. Trust no one.” He reiterated this point several times as he took us to a shop in the back alleyway.