Russia -- 6 April 2004 -- Game Day (#8)

 

 

 

 

 

    Well, yes, it is game day; but before I can write about basketball, I have some catching up to do. 

    When I gave my much joked about advice to everyone on keeping a journal, with the goal in mind of making a more accurate record of their experiences than memory alone might provide, I cautioned that whatever they plan for their journals, it needs to be do-able. The alternative is no journaling at all, no written record. Time and events will get lost very quickly. Days will run together.

    6 April 2004  I should have followed my own advice more closely! I am trying to steal moments everywhere to record the amazing things that have happened. It is already Tuesday and I have not finished writing about Sunday! 

    So my revised plan is to enter some notes about Monday and Tuesday so that I can return later to fill in the account.

    Palm Sunday [04-04-04] ended with dinner at the Ministry Center. We have 'team time' at the end of each day with devotions and a briefing on what to expect tomorrow. Looming large in everyone's mind were the basketball games we had come to play. We knew the younger guys would be playing college (high school) or university teams, but as yet we did not know who the Dads would be playing or where the games were to take place.

    The Dads had practiced together as a team on a number of occasions in the weeks leading up to our trip; we had worked on plays, we had done conditioning drills, and so forth. And we had joked a lot about who our opponents might be. We had been cautioned frequently to remember that winning was not our real goal, although as a former athlete raised on American values about playing hard that advice felt more than a little off center. After all, Larry Bird was my guy: What Would Larry Say?

    But first, the morning of Monday, 5 April 2004:  Notes

Breakfast at hotel. Pancakes. Also, scalding coffee/ plain yogurt. 

    We had a devotional time at Ken & Marilyn Blake's apartment attached to the Ministry Center (pictured above). All the Wesleyan missionaries serving in Vladimir were there -- the Robinsons (Canada), the Blakes, two young American women who work with orphanages. Sang four hymns, which all the older guys (the Dads) knew well and the younger ones did not.

    Four of us had been asked to share, so I gave another small testimony. One of the missionaries spoke on David and Goliath, encouraging us to face the Goliaths in our own lives. He wasn't talking about basketball opponents, but in retrospect he could have been. At the time, though, we still didn't know what to expect.

    At 3 in the afternoon we traveled a short distance to to play our first games. I will have more to say about basketball later, but for now the short version on our games is this: the boys' team won a squeaker against a well matched team of their peers; the Dads on the other hand, lost -- big time. We were outclassed. Overwhelmed. Crushed. Taken to the wood shed. Thrashed. All the cliches for being humbled in competition apply here. 

    This may have been the David and Goliath moment I mentioned earlier.The photograph of me (in green) jumping center tells you all you need to know about who controlled the game from beginning to end. 

    I am not sure now, years later, why I thought I should jump -- maybe it was the Larry Bird thing again -- but the Russian guys already had a play in motion that we couldn't stop. That pretty much accounts for the afternoon. It was a complete and fairly quick take down, which I was feeling bad about until I realized it allowed us almost immediately to play as friends rather than as competitors.

    We learned later, over dinner, that this team was not only Vladimir City Champions, they were also an Army Veterans team that had played together for over 30 years. Well, now! Had we known that going in, perhaps I would have approached the game with a bit more humility.

  We played at a place call Elektropibo, which had a gym, locker rooms, and a nice room for dinner that accommodated all the guys on the teams. A quick internet search for this place seems to indicate that Elecktropibo is an industrial and/or research center with these athletic facilities as part of the complex. At the time, however, none of this information was explained to us and none of us could read Russian.

    

     After the games, as was to be our practice, we had dinner together with the other teams, all in the same complex as the gymnasium. 

 

    Dinner was already laid out for us when we arrived at the dining hall. Here Stefan (in green) is talking with Andrew (Andrei) our senior translator and tour guide. He described himself as a jack of all trades. Among other things, he made the yellow bench pictured above as well as the nativity set I was able to purchase and bring back to the U.S. He is the man in the black jacket in the Mission Center photograph above.

    I talked mostly with Misha and Yuri, two young men who had come along as translators. They spoke English very well, and they were eager to talk. I tried to ask questions of the older guys through the translators but it was tough going. The older men were friendly enough but quiet with us, which I can understand; and I from my end just flat out didn't know what to say or ask. We had been told not to ask certain kinds of questions -- anything related to politics, for example -- and not to show pictures of our own houses, and so forth, so I wasn't sure where to start.

    Nevertheless, my notes record that we had an "excellent time."