Courting A Big Red

He wants the chance very badly. The first time he saw an NBA game on TV, he had just awakened from a nap. "When my friend woke me up," he says, "it seemed that something was wrong with the TV, technically. Everything looked like it was being broadcast at high speed. Then I realized it wasn't sped up. It was hard for me to believe how fast the game was being played."

Sabonis has the right kind of temper for the NBA: short. It's not unusual for him to get mortally hacked off three or four times a day about some little thing or another. It shows up on the court. In a light workout last week against Portland player personnel director Bucky Buck-walter's son, Bryan, Sabonis got mad enough to dispense with d�tente and give it the big Socialist Slam. "He's got to learn the NBA power game." says Portland assistant Jack Schalow, who is spending the most time trying to teach it to him. "But he's very strong."

If Sabonis can learn the basic NBA rules—no hemorrhage, no foul—he could become that most precious basketball commodity, a remember-when, back-to-the-hoop, post-up center. Which is exactly why some people in basketball are accusing the Blazers of treason. "I see Sabonis as being a fulfillment of Lenin's prophecy." John Thompson, the U.S. Olympic basketball coach, told the Portland Oregonian . "The capitalists are selling [the Communists] the rope that they can hang us with. I personally feel we're being used.... We are in direct competition with them. To prepare Sabonis to play against us just isn't right."

This brought a pointed chuckle from NBA commissioner David Stern, who said. " Coach Thompson is a great coach, but I'm glad he's not our secretary of state."

The Blazers don't appreciate the xenophobia either. "I worked medical infantry in Vietnam," says Dr. Robert Cook, the team physician and the man in charge of Sabonis's care. "I treated wounded Viet Cong. I would never withhold treatment from anybody for any reason."

Of course, everyone might be wasting wind if the Soviet government doesn't let Sabonis come to stay. However, there are positive signs. First, the Soviets could have sent Sabonis anywhere in the U.S.—or the world, for that matter—to get treatment. Why Portland, unless they wanted Sabonis to get comfortable there? Second, in May Sabonis asked for and received a six-month extension on his visa. Third, FIBA, the sport's international governing body, is expected to vote next April to allow NBA players to compete in the 1992 Olympics, which would mean that the Soviets could have Sabonis back whenever they needed him for international competition. "I have pretty good vibes it could happen," says Blazer president Harry Glickman.

Money should not be an object, although neither the Trail Blazers nor the Soviets have disclosed how, or how much, Sabonis would be paid. To encourage Moscow, Larry Weinberg, who sold the team on May 31, was hitting up the Soviets regularly, using Turner's Goodwill Games producer Bob Wussler to put in good words with—so it was rumored—Mikhail Gorbachev himself. Why would the owners of the Atlanta Hawks want to help another NBA team? Because the Hawks own the draft rights to two Soviets themselves. And Sabonis wouldn't hurt TBS's cable ratings either. Welcome to the borscht belt, y'all.

Sabonis couldn't give a flying ruble about the politics. "I'm a sportsman," he says. All he wants to do in Portland is get his tendon fixed up, play the game and have a little capitalist fun. In fact, the Soviet press chastised him recently for too much "frivolity" after he and the good doctor took a two-day trip to Chicago for a Lithuanian festival, where Sabonis was a big hit.

Sabonis has spawned more Russian fiction than Leo Tolstoy. Louisiana State coach Dale Brown, who tried to get Sabonis to his school two years ago, says he heard the KGB actually cut the big guy's tendon to keep him from defecting to Baton Rouge. Then there were published reports in Soviet papers that 1) Sabonis had become so depressed about his injured tendon that he had become an alcoholic; 2) he had become an alcoholic and cut his heel open on an empty liquor bottle; and 3) he had killed himself.

It turns out that Sabas, as he is known, gets a chuckle out of going along with any rumor a reporter might throw at him. So if one were to say to him, "We hear you've been writing haiku late at night while wearing women's clothing." he would go along with it and laugh it up later. He just likes his fun. He has already had two dates in Portland, gotten his Oregon driver's license, been deep-sea fishing, gone shopping for fancy suits, taken side trips to Olympia, Wash., and Los Angeles, and learned to play the tape deck in his car at ear-shattering decibel levels. He turns it down a little to listen to his English-lesson tapes, and he has already got an English tutor.