FuenteTC: I’m gonna ask you to abruptly switch gears here, because this is something I’m amazed more people haven’t asked you about. You played professional basketball in Mongolia. Why? More importantly: How?
MT: It was 1996. I was living in Moscow, working for the Moscow Times as a reporter. And I used to play streetball at Moscow State University — actually, if you Google it, you can see the courts. They’re some of the best outdoor basketball courts in the world. And there’s this gigantic — they call them Stalin skyscrapers — in the background of the Moscow State building. So you’re playing out on this court with this giant, behemoth Soviet building behind you. I used to go out there all the time.
One of the guys I was playing with one day was Mongolian. So we got to talking, and he told me there was a league called the MBA — the Mongolian Basketball Association — that was the only other pro league in the world with NBA rules. Twenty-four second shot clock, same distance to the 3-point line, everything. So I quit my job the next day, gathered my s*it up, got on the Trans-Siberian Railroad, took a train to Ulaanbaatar, not knowing anybody. I had a tryout with a team called the Mountain Eagles.
TC: I feel like that’s better than in the Philippines, where you have teams named after liquor distributors. I think there’s one called the Gin Kings?
MT: The one Andray Blatche played for?
TC: That sounds about right.
MT: So I had a tryout, and I made it. Now, there are a couple of funny things about this that I never mention. One is how the league came into being, which is amazing. The President of the Mongolian Stock Exchange had gone to U.S. on an exchange program in 1994, the year the Knicks and the Rockets played in the Finals. He fell immediately in love with NBA basketball, and he’d record every single game in his dorm room — on videotapes. So when he went back to Mongolia, he brought all these tapes with him, and he illegally broadcast the entire playoff series in Mongolia, and they were the highest-rated television programs in the history of the country. Everybody was completely addicted to basketball.
By the time I got to Ulaanbaatar two years later, it was like Indiana. Seriously. Every single courtyard had a basketball hoop. And Mongolians are really into sports. They love wrestling first and foremost, but they just completely took up basketball with abandon. So when I was on this team — there were maybe eight teams in the league — I was like a national celebrity, almost overnight. I was called “the Mongolian Rodman.” And I totally hammed it up. Back then I had hair, so I was dying my hair different colors. I had a goatee. Believe it or not, even though I’m only 6-foot-2, I was leading the league in rebounding. I was getting in fights every game. It was a blast. I would’ve stayed there, but I got pneumonia and had to leave.
But it was an amazing experience. There were a lot of funny stories. Mongolia had this famous wrestler named Orgilbold. I think he wrestled Sambo, which is a style they have in the Olympics. This guy was 7-foot-2 and 380 pounds.
TC: Shaq-sized, basically.
MT: Yeah, exactly. I mean, he didn’t exactly have Shaq’s build. This guy had a gut, and was just a weird-looking dude. But I was walking around with my teammates, and I said, “Who the f*ck is that guy?” They were like, “That’s Orgilbold. He’s a wrestler.” I said, “Why the hell isn’t he playing for us?” They were like, “He can’t play for us.” I said, “He doesn’t need to play! We’ll just put him under the basket, have him put his arms up like this. Nobody will ever score on us again!”
TC: Like Chief in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest!
MT: Exactly! So we drag this guy into a practice. I was trying to talk to him, but his Russian wasn’t great, so it was awkward. But it turned out that he literally couldn’t catch a pass. Every pass we threw at him would just bounce off his nose. He couldn’t block a shot; couldn’t do anything. So we worked with him for probably a week and a half, and that was my big, obsessive project. I couldn’t sleep because I was thinking about how I was going to turn this guy into the star of Asia. But it didn’t work out. There were a bunch of little adventures like that.
TC: That’s perfect, because my next question was literally going to be, “What was the single-most bananas thing you saw or experienced?” I think this qualifies.
MT: Players smoked on the bench during games. And the Mongolians drink a kind of tea that contains butter and salt, so it has these little fat globules floating it, and it comes in these little cisterns. So when you got off the court, you’d blaze up a cigarette and drink this disgusting butter tea. For some reason, I just laughed every time that happened.
TC: How many people would show up to these games?
MT: Oh, lots. Probably a thousand. And you have to remember, Mongolia in the winter makes Russia look like Club Med. That’s the reason I got sick. Celsius, I think it was around minus-20 — something like that. It was brutal. One of the gyms we played in had a hole in the window, so we could see our breath while we were playing. That was a nightmare.
TC: As a 26-year-old, you must’ve just constantly been like, “I can’t f*cking believe I’m doing this.”
MT: I woke up every morning laughing. I’d forget where I was for a second. Then I’d remember and just start laughing. I even had my own radio show in Mongolia where I’d have people call in. I was doing the broadcast in Russian, though, so it was weird. I’m honestly not even that great of a basketball player, but I was like a celebrity in this country. It was very funny. I miss it.
TC: Everyone who reads you gets the sense that you Feel the Bern, right?
MT: Yeah, definitely.
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