In Russia, I’d been using a weight jacket during my individual training sessions, trying to bulk up because I’d lost so much weight. I was down to about 70 something kilos, which was very light for a 1.96 metre athlete. It made me faster, but not stronger. While I was training with the weightbelt, doing sprints to build up muscle, my back had started to get achy. But as usual, I’d just taken medication and played on.
I came back to Australia and was a bridesmaid at Suzy Batkovic’s wedding, which I know was lovely, but I remember so little, everything at that time was a bit of a blur. I was back in Australia for a month and that really helped, being home and resting, before heading back to Seattle.
My 2009 season with Seattle started well, but I strained my Achilles tendon halfway through and had to rest it for a couple of games. Towards the end of the season there was plenty of media hype about the fact that I was close to scoring 5000 career points, a milestone only reached at that stage by three WNBA players—Lisa Leslie, Tina Thompson and Katie Smith. I achieved it in a game against Atlanta. Later in that same game, there was a free throw awarded to the other team and I went to the free-throw line and lined up. One of the Atlanta players, I can’t remember who, shot the free throw and I jumped up to get the rebound and when I landed my back crunched, but I kept playing even though it hurt. The game ended, we lost the game by nine points and the team went into the locker room. I sat down and Brian was having a go at us, saying whatever he was saying, and I shifted forward on the bench and let out the biggest ‘FUCK!’. The pain was so excruciating, my body had cooled down and the injury in my back grabbed me as I moved. I remember everyone looking at me and my face going bright red, but nobody said anything, and Brian continued on with his rant. I went to the training room to get my back looked at and was told it was probably just a sprain, and so I played on, for another four games.
That injury happened while we were on the road. We played against Detroit, Indiana and Washington, but in the next game, against Connecticut, I was in so much pain that I collapsed in the locker room post-game. I think it was a mix of pain and frustration at the situation I was in. When I got to my apartment that night I called Scotty Burne, who had been the Opals’s team doctor at the 2006 Commonwealth Games and who I trust to this day, and talked to him about my injury and the pain I was experiencing, and he told me to go and get bone scans straight away. So I went the next day, with my coach Brian, who was also really concerned and supportive. I’d been a bit mad at him pushing me to play, but he’d tried to protect me, limiting my time on court while I was injured when everyone thought it was just a bad sprain. We went back to the specialist and were told that I had in fact fractured my back. I’d been playing with two stress fractures in my lumbar spine, one on the left side and one on the right side of my L5 (the fifth lumbar vertebra). The right-hand side was completely fractured, the other was more like a stress fracture.
I was furious that I’d been playing, because I’d probably made the fractures worse. I don’t know how I’d even managed to continue in that condition. I’d played through a lot of pain before, and I knew my body well enough to recognise when I’d hurt myself. So when I’d said there was something wrong, I would have hoped to be listened to, especially given that I was a veteran of the game—at this point I was 28 years old. I just felt like I was stuck, and there was nowhere to turn. As it turned out, this was a real turning point for me, it was a lesson. I was the only one who really knew what my body was telling me, and I felt as though I couldn’t trust anyone else to make the call.
Everyone in Australia was worried about me, I was a big part of the national team. I was committed to play in Russia, and I had other commitments to other teams. One of the hardest things about playing year-round was that I didn’t only have to worry about the team I was currently on if I got injured—I was playing for two or three teams each year, and I had to worry about each of them. An injury would impact all of my contracts, all my commitments, so I was always trying to weigh up what was right for my body as well as whoever I was playing for.
I came straight home to Australia and then had to stay off my feet and not load my back for the next three months, before gradually starting my rehab—which I did at the AIS. I would be heading off to Russia again for another season, but I had to get my back right before I returned. I had to try and get it stronger, I needed to take that amount of time off to let it heal—I couldn’t run, there was absolutely no weight-bearing, but in the end my trainer at the AIS, Ross Smith, rehabbed me and got me ready for Russia.
My family were also really concerned about me, they could see I wasn’t happy. I was sitting at my uncle Lyle’s place and I remember him asking me, ‘How are we going to stop you going back to Russia, how do we get you out of that situation?’. I told him half-seriously and half in jest that the only way would be if Shabtai had a heart attack, because I knew he’d already had a triple bypass, either that or he’d have to be murdered. I truly believed it would take one of those two things for me to be released, I felt like he had so much control over me. I believed I could only play in Europe under him, it might have all been in my head, but I know what I saw and I know how I felt and I know what Shabtai said to me as well, ‘When you’re over here, you play for me’. It was just known, I couldn’t play anywhere else in Europe. I once saw him go up and say something to a man on the corner of the basketball court in the Czech Republic, and the guy wet himself. You know when you see something you don’t understand or it doesn’t quite register and you do a double-take? That’s what it was like. It was unbelievable. There were so many times with Shabs that I felt I did that.
Nothing comes for free in life. Shabs knew I was struggling emotionally and he tried to make it better for me, but ultimately I think he put more pressure on me by doing that, and it made me even worse.
Being back in Canberra I reconnected with Paulie and talked to her about what I’d been through. I remember sitting on her loungeroom floor in front of the fire and just breaking down into tears, and she listened and supported me, as she does. In eastern Europe, I’d seen the way women were treated, it’s not so much the inequality, it’s just that men really have the power over there, the more money you have, the more you get, anything you want, it’s yours. Even thinking about Shabtai, he wanted me to play on his team, he got me, that’s how it was. In Australia, there’s still some talk about women not being equal to men, particularly in sports, because we aren’t as strong or as athletic or as big, but it’s more covert here than in Russia, where it seemed more overt. I don’t know how it is now, but it was a different world when I was there.
I was staying at Paulie’s place because I’d long since sold my house, and I was only training a couple of days a week with Ross at the AIS, and then training back at Albury the other days. Paulie always has a room for me. One night she was away, and there was a massive thunderstorm, it felt like it was straight out of a horror movie. At night, I tend to have my phone on silent, but at about 11 pm I could hear it vibrating. I decided to ignore it. I thought someone was being terribly rude calling me at that hour, and I tried to go back to sleep through the tumultuous thunder and lightning. Eventually I looked at my phone and saw it was Sue. She’d been calling me constantly. I answered and she said, ‘Dude, where have you been? Shabtai’s dead, he’s been murdered’. I was stunned. I didn’t sleep the rest of that night and by eight in the morning I was on a plane to Israel for his funeral. It was the most bizarre shit I’ve ever been through in my life, between the crazy storm and then the news that Shabtai had been killed.
I flew out on Melbourne Cup day, 3 November 2009. The horse that won the cup that year was Shocking, with Crime Scene coming in second.
According to the newspapers, Shabtai von Kalmanovich had been a KGB spy, successful businessman, concert promoter and basketball sponsor. On 2 November 2009, he was shot ten times by an unknown gunman as he sat in his black Mercedes at traffic lights in Moscow waiting for the signal to change. He’d actually been on his way to his office to pick up one of my teammates to take her to a concert, she was lucky she wasn’t in his car with him. Nobody knows who shot him, no one was ever arrested.
Shabtai was very important to me. I’m still trying to work out in what way, because there was part of me that loved him and part of me that was so intimidated by him. Shabtai was a scary man, but he was always good to me, he always wanted to try and make me comfortable and happy—I truly believe, though, that our cultures were so different he could never have known what I needed over there. He was involved in a lot of different things, I heard so many stories over the years, and it was hard to decipher what was fact and what was fiction. I know that whatever I heard come out of his mouth was generally true, which is frightening in itself. Looking back, I wish I’d been more present mentally during that time, so I could have asked him more questions and learnt as much as possible from him. The man knew five different languages (at least), he was incredibly intelligent, his life was straight out of a movie. As much as I felt constricted in his world, he really tried to make that time as good as he could for me, for all of us. Some of his later ventures in particular were very honourable, he was extremely generous and he tried to help people, he really did, there was a very kind side to him. The other side, what little I saw, I will never talk about because of his wife Anna and his gorgeous kids, who I still think about to this day, particularly his youngest daughter, who I have seen turn into her own beautiful person.
I still see Shabtai in my dreams, both good and bad dreams.