copio e incollo da ESPN.com
The Fesenko Entertainment Machine
August 22, 2007 3:53 PM
One day the word "Fesenko" will be like "karaoke." It will be something people go to bars to do for fun. I'm not sure, exactly, what it will be, but it will be entertaining.
Consider that Jazz rookie Kyrylo Fesenko hasn't even set foot in the NBA yet, and already he's the originator of a half-dozen great lines of the summer. Here's one TrueHoop reader Welk spotted on JazzHoops.net, translated from the Russian on SovSport.Ru:
Once during a practice I had to get open to get the ball and put it in the basket. I cut behind the player few times but never got an alley oop, so I was disappointed and went to the coach and said, "Are you sleeping? Or you don't see the court?"
He didn't reply. Later I found out from my agent that it wasn't a coach, but legendary player of "golden Chicago" Ron Harper.
My agent told me: "Nobody has talked to Harper like that before. He has more championship rings than you have birthmarks on your body!"
Another Kyrylo Fesenko Story
August 24, 2007 3:22 PM
In June, before the draft, Kyrylo Fesenko trained with David Thorpe at the Pro Training Center at IMG, in Bradenton Florida.
One of his first days there, Thorpe recalls, Fesenko was working on finishing around the basket, with coach Mike Moreau. Fesenko missed several shots in a row, and got frustrated. He's a big, strong dude. And in anger, he fired a pass into the wall.
"Three of the walls around our gym are concrete," explains Thorpe. "But that one wall, the one that seperates the gym from the weight room, is sheetrock."
Boom. Big, basketball-shaped hole in the wall.
Coach Moreau saw what happened and said "ooh, that's going to cost you fifty bucks."
He was kidding.
The next morning, Fesenko arrives for workouts with fifty dollars in cash, and hands it to a perplexed Coach Moreau. They have some kind of conversation, and Moreau explains that he was kidding, and anyway a piece of sheetrock only costs a few dollars. Fesenko tells Moreau to keep a few dollars.
Time goes by. Fesenko gets drafted in the second round, plays in the Rocky Mountain Revue, gets signed to a three-year deal with the Jazz, and flies back home to the Ukraine. Moreau and Thorpe are coaching away, having forgotten all about that hole in the wall.
Then, suddenly, it dawns on Moreau that soon Fesenko will be back in the gym, tuning up for the season. And if that hole is still there, he's going to think Coach Moreau just pocketed that money!
"Sure enough," says Thorpe, "the other morning, there was a maintenance guy patching up that hole."