The LA Clippers in Moscow -- Who Did We Tick Off?

The NBA has undertaken an effort to invade Europe. Somehow both the Clippers and the City of Moscow pissed off someone important because they ended up with each other. My beloved Sixers got Barcelona (maybe David Stern doesn't hate Allen Iverson after all) and Russia got the Clippers. For God's sake, the Clippers !?!? So anyway, a fellow Fellow and I decide to suck it up and go see the God-forsaken Clippers in God-forsaken Moscow.

Well, I call the ticket hotline on Thursday and cannot get through, no big deal, games are Friday and Saturday as well. Call Friday, no dice. Check the internet Friday night and find out that the ticket center is closed and will be closed for the remainder of the weekend. Yeah, that makes sense, why would the box office be open on the weekends anyway? What could possibly be going on in a sports stadium on Saturday and Sunday?

So now we have to shlepp out to the stadium and scalp tickets. Scalping is not illegal here, well maybe it is, but everybody does it and it is encouraged in the popular culture -- sort of like drinking too much. So after much confusion and a unneccessary and expensive cab ride, we arrive at what we believe to be the stadium.

The stadium couldn't be harder to find if they actually hid it. Its like behind this shopping mall down this little two lane street. Very strange. I mean you can see the Linc (the Eagle home stadium) from outer space -- well not outer space, but it is actually in the flight path for Philadelphia International. The Moscow CSKA stadium was so out of the way, you could hold a spy convention there.

Sidebar for a moment to riff on Russian addresses and building locations -- My fellow Fellow made the blazingly insightful (pun intended) comment that Russian fireman must have a difficult time finding fire locations, because establishments are almost never clearly marked with their addresses. Streets change names, many addresses have multiple buildings attached to them eg 12 Malaya Gruzinskaya dom 1, dom 2 etc. The address for my building is located about 30 yards from the street, off to the right, behind some trees. It is impossible to see my address from the street, in broad daylight. OK, back to our regularly scheduled program.....

So as we are walking up, a guy comes up to us and holds out a ticket. Odd, but he doesn't say anything. My fellow Fellow holds up two fingers and says we need "dva" . The guy whips out another ticket from his coat pocket and still doesn't say anything. MFF says how much. The guy underlines the price on the ticket R1700 with his finger. MFF says the price is too much. The guy gestures again. Finally we both understand that the guy is deaf. MFF borrows a pen and pad from me and continues the negotiation in writing. For two the deaf guy wants R2600. Too much, so we walk away. After we have gone about 50 yards -- I refuse to go metric, Russia will just have to deal -- MFF looks at the paper and says, maybe he wrote R2000 (about $40 each). We agree that is an OK price and we head back. The deaf guy agrees to R2000 for both tickets. I ask MFF to check the tix to ensure they are not fakes. MFF gives the tickets a cursory glance -- the date is correct, the bottom part is intact, its all good. We head off to the stadium, tickets in hand. I take a closer look at my ticket and notice that I am sitting in area A-4. On the back of the ticket is a schematic of the stadium. I see areas A1-A3 and A5-A8, alas, no A-4.

Hmmmm, we just got jacked by a deaf guy. Now see there are a few ways to look at this.

1) It is our fault for allowing prejudice to cloud our judgment. We were both secretly thinking disabled people are nice, they don't commit crimes, they are handicapped.

2)Deaf or not, the guy violated scalper etiquette and in a country where custom is far more powerful than law, that is a big deal.

3) Could we possibly be arrested for trying to enter the stadium with fake tickets? 'Cause we are going to make a run for the door.

So we nonchalantly approach the guards with terror-striken faces and try to pass off our A-4 tickets as legit. We make it through the first line, second line defense. We are now actually in the stadium, so far, so good. Now we still have a teensy problem, which is A-4 doesn't exist. So where to do we go to sit? We "estimate" where A-4 should be and head there. Thank God there are empty seats and we just sit down. Now the stress of the total fake out has made us both thirsty.

I offer to go get beers and chips (we both can't go because we will lose our seats). I purchase two room temperature beers and chips and start back to my seat. I am tiptoeing with the beers so that I do not spill them. About 50 yards away from me in the concourse is a security guard. He watches me tip-toe the entire lenght of the concourse. When I get within spitting of him, he tells me "Nel'zya" or forbidden. Basically, I can't bring the beers into the playing arena . I lose all my Russian and say in English "Are you freaking serious?" When the hell did Russians get all picky about where you can drink? This, in a country where it is not only legal but common to see people drinking beer on the street at 9 o'clock in the morning. So I can drink before my work day, but I cannot drink at a sporting event? Huh? So I leave the beers on a table outside the stadium and round up MFF. We leave the arena to drink/inhale our beers. We return to find that of course our "seats" are now occupied.

No worries, we just travel down to the front row and sit court side for about a quarter and a half.

A word about the game. First of all it was the third game in three days for the Clippers and they played tired. Secondly, there are three African-Americans on the Russian CSKA -- two guys you never heard of, and Trajan Langdon from Duke and Cleveland Cavaliers. Interesting insight into the Russian psyche: one black guy on the team, RJ Holden, is actually a Russian citizen AND Putin himself expedited RJ's citizenship paperwork. Has Putin gone all Angela Davis on us? No, not really, there is a law that firmly stipulates the number of foreigners allowed on Russian sports teams. Giving RJ Russian citizenship conveniently skirts that issue.

BTW, CSKA are the Russian National and Euroleague Champions. Makes you go hmmmmm.

Anyway, the game was absymal. I was embarrassed to be an American. The Russians never lead by less that 10 points, ever. They took our boys to the wood shed. It was interesting (in a car wreck sort of way) to watch the Clippers wake up to the realization that they were going to lose to two scruffy white guys and three NBA has beens. Sam Cassells was so mad, I thought he was going to stroke out. Anyway CSKA won 94-75.

So much for our dominance in Dr. Naismith's game.