There's a stretch of 280 South just outside San Francisco that looks like Israel. It's been on my mind in the week since Shabbatai Kalmanovic's murder. Her parents say Lauren Jackson cried when she heard the news. The man was not well known to me, or I suspect to most Americans. The only way I can try to make sense of the shards of his story is to turn to the part I know something about. This was a Jewish guy who didn't fit. First, the name. Although Shabbatai is still an extant last name, most European Jewish parents stopped using it as a first name about three hundred years ago, since being connected with the second-most infamous false messiah in history isn't such a great idea. Granted the Russian Jewish community seems not to be tuned in to the Jewish experience on the rest of the continent. The chief rabbi's name is Adolph. I swear to you. Add to that the bizarre note that in many accounts Kalmanovic added a 'von,' which sits with his Lithuanian background about as well as my calling myself Fat bin Louie. 'Von' is originally a German signifier of nobility. You can bet they weren't handing it out to Jews. So how he came by it, or if it's something he added himself, I don't know.

Then, there's the fact that the guy spent five years in an Israeli jail for allegedly selling state secrets to the KGB. According to one article I read, he was only 22 when he arrived in Israel and was probably not an official spy. Voepel writes that he always claimed there was more to the story. Perhaps promising information was the only way he was allowed to leave in the first place. But then, why return to Russia to live? Why have more loyalty to a place which has a venerable history of anti-Semitism? His release was secured by tireless effort from the Russian Jewish community, which also signals yet another disconnect between this community and the rest of world Jewry. Generally if you screw over Israel, you're on your own (I don't condone this; it's just a fact). Yet Chief Rabbi Adolph says that Kalmanovic valued his Judaism, that he came to shul on all the holidays. To be honest, going to shul on holidays is not such a big deal. If you're not there every week or every day, you're not that religious. But it's a big deal in an anti-Semitic society to visibly connect to an unpopular group, and it probably fueled Kalmanovic's self-identification as a philanthropist outsider (he must have given a fortune to that synagogue based on the way the rabbi talked about him). That's also part of what caused him to become such a staunch advocate for women's basketball. It was something outside the mainstream that could help make him seem like a courageous iconoclast. Yet part of me also wonders if he would have been so keen on the project if the players he closely connected with weren't white? Unfounded speculation, take it for what it's worth.

Sadly, the way that Kalmanovic was an insider to Russian society was in the way he amassed his wealth. You simply don't get incredibly rich in post-Soviet Russia without doing something wrong, and you certainly don't get murdered in a Russian mob hit unless you are either a crusading journalist or have mob connections. Rumors are that he was involved in the bloodiest part of the diamond trade from places like Sierra Leone. The troika of stars actually used to joke about the dirty money they were getting paid. Perhaps it didn't matter to them, devalued as they are in their own society. Maybe Kalmanovic drew parallels between the way female basketball players are treated in the U.S. and the way he was treated in Russia. By all accounts he was lavish with money and friendship, and I'm sure that Lauren Jackson's tears were genuine. I still wonder how these players slept at night. They may have convinced themselves that what he did wasn't so bad in comparison. But Kalmanovic knew his own history, and though he tried to wipe it out through philanthropy, it seems to have caught up to him in the end. There are now so many questions about his life that will never be answered.

View Original Post at ftlouie.typepad.com/womensports

• Filed Under:  
• Basketball, Sports, SportsPLUS, OpEd, Russian/Euroleague

• Tags:
• russia
• murder
• Spartak
• Shabbatai Kalmanovic
• assassination