Sue Bird and Diana Taurasi tell intense story of playing for Russian spy due to low WNBA wages

As a result of how poorly women are paid to play basketball in America, most of the best professional basketball players in the world head overseas after their WNBA seasons end. Athletes can only profit off their talents for so long and need to maximize earnings while their bodies are at their peak. The maximum salary in the W was just $117,500 for the 2019 season. In Russia, China, and Turkey among other countries in Europe and Asia, players can make 10 times that amount.

The circumstances abroad are crappy for most. American players are typically unfamiliar with the countries they’re living in, rarely speak the native language, and often need translators to communicate with teammates and coaches. They’re usually without friends and have to leave their families for months at a time. And for Sue Bird and Diana Taurasi, it meant playing for a KGB spy-turned Russian billionaire businessman.

In an ESPN 30 for 30 podcast, Bird and Taurasi detailed their experience and complicated feelings towards Shabtai Kalmanovich. From a financial standpoint, he was everything the pair wished existed at home. Kalmanovich treated Taurasi and Bird like royalty, and had a real love for women’s basketball. He spoiled the hell out of them, paid them multiple-times their American salaries, and gave reason for them to want to return to Moscow each year. For the first time since they were stars at the University of Connecticut, Bird and Taurasi were treated like the best athletes in the world.

Kalmanovich gave Taurasi and Bird the best sides of himself, but they knew there was another. “He wore two hats,” Bird said. Kalmanovich was a Russian spy for 17 years as he became a wealthy business man by exploiting cheap labor in South Africa. He was eventually caught for passing forged checks to the U.S. while in England, then was extradited to America, and sent to Israel, where he was arrested for espionage. He served five years in prison, was released, then re-located back to Russia where he grew as a businessman, including becoming the general manager for the Spartak Moscow basketball team. That’s where Taurasi and Bird starred for four consecutive EuroLeague championships, until one day in 2009, Kalmanovich was murdered in a contract-style hit.

“The only reason you go [to Russia] is for money,” Taurasi said. “That is the only reason you leave your country to go to a different country to play basketball.” That’s exactly what Kalmanovich provided, and then some.

While playing for another Russian team, Dynamo Kursk, Bird and Taurasi met with Kalmanovich for the first time in 2006. It was Taurasi’s first season in Russia, and she’d sworn off ever returning after feuding with the head coach. “You don’t know Russia the way I can show you Russia,” Bird recalled Kalmanovich saying. And he was right.

Kalmanovich was very well-connected, so much so that during the meeting, he dialed the phone and had an Israeli passport made for Bird as a loophole to a EuroLeague rule that prevented teams from signing more than two American players. (He’d later sign Tina Thompson.)

Then, Kalmanovich outlined contracts for Bird and Taurasi who, depending on bonuses, could make between $400,000 and $1 million. For the first time in their lives, this was a life-changing money offer. And it didn’t stop there. When the team traveled, Kalmanovich put his players in the best hotels. They recalled a time when a commercial flight was set to leave during the team’s game, and Kalmanovich called to have it moved back so his team could make it. Bird and Taurasi were provided a mini mansion with a pool and sauna to live in. He also left them his credit card to use how they pleased.

“Well now I can put up with Russia,” Taurasi said.

The Spartak Moscow team was really, really good. Taurasi and Bird won four EuroLeague titles (the best league in the region), and two Russian premier league titles. They were paid well, kept well, and treated like a men’s athletics star. But that was only for half the year. Then they played four months in the WNBA, where they’d hardly make six figures and travel in crappy conditions.

“You get back to the WNBA and you’re lugging your shit around, getting on a terrible American Airlines flight at 4:45 a.m.,” Taurasi said. The league prohibits charter flights, and younger players double-up in hotel rooms. The pay disparity and treatment between men and women basketball players is drastic. This past WNBA season, Taurasi voiced her anger, saying, “We had to go to a communist country to get paid like capitalists, which is so backward to everything that was in the history books in sixth grade.”

Moscow may have been freezing and snowing. Taurasi and Bird may not have spoken the language. And Kalmanovich, no matter how friendly and warm he was to them, may have had a secret, dark past, but at least they were making money they could live for a long time on.

“I think about what I have in my life now from a financial standpoint, and it’s in large part due to Shabs,” Bird said. “It’s just this one person who took an interest in women’s basketball, but what would my life be without that? I can retire and be fine, and not a lot of people can say that at 38.”

Kalmanovich was murdered outside the Kremlin during the 2009 season. Nobody was ever charged for his murder, though it was concluded it was a professional hit. It likely happened as a result of a business disagreement. This was his other hat.

Bird was rehabbing an injury in America at the time, but Taurasi was there, and attended his funeral. Kalmanovich’s wife met with Taurasi, and admitted she could no longer promise her the lofty salary Shabtai did, and gave her the option to play elsewhere. Taurasi opted to stay and play for free. Bird returned, and the duo won one last championship.

“[Kalmanovich] viewed us as performers and entertainers and wanted to share our talents with the world,” Bird said. “He was allowing us to have a career and make money doing it. You’re able to take that home, and have a life.”

“He made everything bigger than life,” Taurasi said. “And at the time, women’s basketball needed someone to make it bigger than life.”

Those are statements made by American women about an ex-KGB spy. They’re no dummies. Taurasi and Bird were fully aware that Kalmanovich wasn’t the warm, helpful man he presented himself as. Taurasi noted that each team the team flew, there was a guy in a black SUV with a suitcase waiting for him. “We saw one side of Shabtai,” Taurasi said. “We knew there was another side.”

But Kalmanovich cared about the women’s game enough to invest in it, provide for it, and as a result, got two of the best players of all time to want to fly halfway across the world and play for his team. They loved playing in Moscow. They welcomed Kalmanovich like a father, and ate meals at his house. This is where they felt most respected.

In the current WNBA, players are making threats to not return. Brittney Griner foreshadowed an early retirement because she doesn’t feel the league protects her. Australian star Liz Cambage threatened to sit the season if she wasn’t traded. Taurasi herself, in 2015, skipped the WNBA season because her Russian team, UMMC Ekaterinburg, paid her more to rest.

Change might be coming. The league and the players’ union are currently negotiating for a new Collective Bargaining Agreement that may improve financial and travel conditions. But that’s a work in progress.

To conclude the podcast, the host asked Taurasi and Bird one final question: “If [Kalmanovich] were a mafia figure, what would that mean for you as a player?”

Bird’s response was reasoned:

If you presented me with facts that he was out there murdering people, that would be hard to detach from. It would be hard because he did mean so much to us in all these other ways, and we never saw that ever.

Taurasi’s response is crushing:

I can only go from how he treated me. I can only go on the basis of how he helped my career. And that’s easy for me to say, right, because he did nothing but help me. Would it be ignorant for me to be like ‘Oh it wouldn’t change my perception at all?’ I don’t know? I don’t know if it would, to tell you the truth. The good person in me say ‘Yeah of course it would.’ I should feel different. I don’t know if I would though. I really don’t.