Slava Stories: Worst Trip Ever

In 2003, I worked the gold-medal game of the World Championship of ice hockey in Finland with a second-degree concussion after my partner got locked up in a Russian prison with all our money and equipment.

The 2003 Worlds was my first major international event, after 4 years as a foreign correspondent for Sport-Express. As such, I was supposed to be paired up with a more experienced veteran writer, whom I will here call Max, for no reason at all other than this being his real name. Max, besides being older and more battle-tested, had the kinds of sources and connections with the Russian team that I didn’t have at the time. Also, as I was arriving in Finland from Washington and he from Moscow, he carried our money, laptops and mobiles. I carried just myself.

He was also entrusted with applying for our credentials and making hotel reservations in Tampere. As I said, a battle-tested veteran. One other thing we should know about Max: he was a good self-taught writer, but for most of his professional life he was a Soviet naval officer. And Soviet naval officers, by virtue of occasionally being exposed to the Soviet Navy, often find themselves ineligible for passports as carriers of state secrets.

Max, natch, had never mentioned this fact to our bosses. This, incidentally, was also his 1st foreign trip. Another thing we should know about Max is that calling him a “fuck-up” does no justice to either the process or the direction mentioned in this idiom. Max was probably the most Russian guy I ever met, in regards to things like “planning”, “preparation” and “caution”. So, naturally, his solution to the problem was to approach some shady characters and ask them how much it costs to forge a passport. They asked for 500 rubles, about $15 in 2003. The photo was to be financed by Max. It wasn’t a bad deal, really…

So, I had arrived in Tampere, feeling pretty good about myself, partly because of my first big assignment and partly because I got extremely lucky right off the bat, having been seated next to Daniel Alfredsson on the plane and so having scored a major exclusive just like that…

Here are the things I found out within an hour of my arrival: a) I had no hotel room because the reservation never came through, b) I had no credential (though there was one waiting for Max), c) Max was most definitely not in Tampere. Also, d) all the hotels were booked solid. Here is what I found out after a screaming match with deputy editor in chief over a payphone (they still had those back then, I my cell wouldn’t work in Finland): Max was arrested by Russian border guards for carrying a forged passport the owner of which was missing in Mordovia.

Also, Max never actually bothered with booking a hotel, or applying for MY credential, though he was charged with both tasks. Max was considered an upstanding naval officer in the USSR, which can only mean that The Hunt for the Red October wasn’t actually based on real events. I mean, a major missed opportunity here, America. Think about it! Instead of bothering with the space race and the Strategic Defense Initiative, and even the nukes, you could’ve up and attacked us by sea. Would’ve been over in two weeks, tops.

At this point, my priority wasn’t so much writing a good story about the arrival of the Russian team as simply not getting deported for sleeping on the streets of Tampere… I still don’t know how I managed to get a hotel room. Must’ve been a no-show. A stroke of luck. The credential was easier. I screamed at the media officers in my thickest Russian accent and told them to cancel Max’s credential and make one for me. I still have it. My face on the picture is the mask of undiluted homicidal rage.

Then, I called the head of my newspaper’s hockey department. Russian newspapers have hockey departments. We love our pucks. I will call my boss Dima, for the same reason I am calling Max Max. Dima had a very simple philosophy when dealing with life’s problems. He ignored them. Dima firmly subscribed to the idea that when life gives you lemons, you show it the middle figure and just go ahead and use them instead of the eye drops you needed. And by “you” he meant “people other than Dima”, more specifically, “Dima’s underlings.”

The only thought Dima articulated to me when I finished telling him my horror story was: “So, you are saying I can slash the per diem by 50%?”… In short, I was to write every single inch planned for the Worlds myself. Without Max. Or a laptop. Also, my first story is late. Bye.

I filed my story by dictating it to the “stenography bureau” (they still had those) over the hotel phone. Then, I went to bed thinking this is the end of my journalistic career. I was woken up at 2 am by a knock on my door. Standing on the doorstep was a severely disheveled man. He was wearing a track suit, about a week’s worth of stubble and that facial expression peculiar to Russians, which, depending on the circumstances, may mean they are either about to say hello or punch you in the goddamn face. The man said hello. He was holding a briefcase.

The story he relayed would’ve made for a good hour-long episode of Breaking Bad, but he managed to do it in a few sentences of stunted, growling Russian. Max, languishing in prison, used on of his phone calls to summon a buddy in Saint Petersburg and give him the briefcase. It contained the laptop, the mobile, and instructions on how to use the filing software, all written in Max’s signature flowery style, which he managed to do, somehow, during the friend’s visit. The buddy then drove from St. Pete to Finland in his Lada. He was visibly inebriated. After handing me the laptop, he walked away without saying another word. Then, he returned, knocked on my door again and asked for 20 euros. He ran out of gas during his cross-European rescue mission. This, by the way, is Russians at their finest. And I never even asked his name or thank him properly, such was my shock…

About two weeks later, I was sitting in my hotel room in Helsinki, after what can only be described as the journalistic version of Gulag. I did wind up covering every single inch planned for the two of us by myself. In three different cities. Without any prior experience. I slept for an average of 3 hours a night. I had used my entire arsenal of Russian epithets, complimentary and not, to describe the play of Ilya Kovalchuk and Alex Semin. I had nothing left in the tank. It was the last day of the Worlds. I was a dead man walking.

So, naturally, Dima demanded a 2000-word analytical piece about Russia’s glorious failure in the quarterfinals. These postmortem pieces were traditional and, due to Russia’s persistent suckiness in those days, were called “obituaries.” I had written my lede and blacked out… I still don’t know what actually happened, but as much as I could Sherlock it out, I probably dozed off while leaning back on a chair, which led to the chair’s leg breaking and tipping me over, with my head catching the corner of the nightstand. I was probably out for 20 minutes.

I woke up with a puddle of vomit next to me and my head an epicenter of a nuclear blast. I had no recollection of the fall and it took me a long time to remember where I was and what I was doing. Actually, I called my brother-in-law in Moscow and asked him. He still says it was the most surreal phone conversation he ever had… Then, I sat down on the bed and finished the story. I know I did it, because it still exists online. I do not remember a single second of actually writing it. It’s 2,176 words long.

It refers to the defensive pairing of Proshkin and Yerofeyev as “a gaping hole” and compares Igor Grigorenko to a guerrilla fighter who got stranded in the woods by his comrades (Datsyuk and Kovalchuk). I even managed to drop the name of a rich gangster/sponsor who paid the paper, which was a normal practice at the time and a method for newspapers to partially finance the reporters’ travel.

Dima lobbied the editors to pay me a bonus for this article and it was named the story of the month. Fans quoted it to me a year later. After filing, I packed up my laptop and went to the Bronze Medal Game. It was Czech Republic vs Slovakia. My Belarusian colleagues pointed at me. Specifically, at an enormous lump on the side of my head. I looked in the mirror and saw a person ready for a cameo appearance on The Walking Dead. But it wasn’t a thing in 2003, so I just worked the Bronze Medal Game and the final while thoroughly concussed.

I have no idea what I did and how I did it. The memory is spotty. I do remember interviewing the Canadian forward Anson Carter who scored the golden goal in OT and asking him about Barbados, which is where his family is from. I don’t know how he felt about being questioned by a person who was obviously unwell.

The deputy editor-in-chief, a fatherly figure to us all, called to congratulate me. His exact words: “It’s probably good that it was this bad. Just wait until you work the Olympics.”

The moral here, I guess, is that there is no job like sports writing and Russian sports writing is the freaking best. This whole story, by the way, is relayed in a chapter of my colleague Igor Rabiner’s best-selling book about Russian sports journalism. I am still waiting for my signed copy.

PS. As for Max, he was released the next day and the charges were dropped, which most likely means a bribe was involved. He has never gotten a passport again, though. Max was fired a year later amid allegations of shady financial dealings. Russian Navy, man… I ran across him years later when we both wrote for a Russian political news site. His column was ultra-patriotic and passionately argued on rational, sane discourse such as the Americans’ faking the moon landing by forcing Stanley Kubric to film it in Hollywood.

Dima quit 7 years later, leaving behind an unsurpassed legacy of a ruthless slave driver whose underlings generated brilliant stories. And he never could write his own copy to save his life. He is a businessman now. For a while, he edited that very political site and clearly favored Max’s conspiracy theories.

As for Sport-Express, unquestionably the top Russian sports paper of the day, it went to hell in a handbasket after its founder died in 2009. It’s now owned by Putin’s mistress Alina Kabayeva and peddles “sports patriotism”. But not in hockey. Dima’s successor is my (now former) brother-in-law.

Finally, the father-figure deputy editor-in-chief has, sadly, been left out in the cold in the new information age. He has written a book about Russian journalism, with a focus on its rampant alcohol culture. We haven’t spoken since 2014, when I called Russia a fascist state and he publicly announced I am dead to him forever.

As for me, the very next year, I worked the Worlds in Czech Republic, and it involved my partner Alexei’s creative book-keeping, a slum for Albanian refugees, a missing crate of vodka, and a Russian player’s father’s over-the-top sexual exploits. But it’s a story for another time…