A Healing Visit From Afar

A spark of recognition flashed in Ivan Zhdanov's eyes when he entered the Wizards' practice court last night. He asked a team official whether this was the same court where Gilbert Arenas and DeShawn Stevenson held their legendary shooting contest that became a YouTube sensation.

"I saw this!" Zhdanov said. "In this gym. Craaaazy!"

That an 18-year old from Kyrgyzstan would be familiar with the Internet exploits of Gilbert should no longer surprise me. But then Gilbert entered the practice court and was mobbed by a group of seven Kyrgystan youth players, wearing matching Arenas jerseys and asking for photos and handshakes. He's apparently huge in Central Asia.

"I'm so glad," Zhdanov said through an interpreter after meeting Gilbert. "My dream has come true."

"It's just something unbelievable," added Marat Lokenov, another player. "Something I will never forget."

A late-March game between the flailing Wizards and the Bulls might not mean much to local fans, and judging by the crowd, it didn't. To these kids, though, it did, and not merely for the usual I-love-this-game reasons.

Six of them were on a commercial plane bound for a tournament in Iran last August. The plane crashed 10 minutes after take-off, killing 10 of the team members. Their coach, Bakhtiar Kadyrov, was badly burned helping passengers escape and spent three months in a hospital. None of the team members had flown since the crash until this month, when they traveled from Bishkek to Moscow to Vienna to D.C. for a trip hosted by the State Department, which had sent a Sports Envoy team to Kyrgyzstan last summer, before the tragedy.

"For us, this has an amazingly healing effect," Kadyrov, the coach and a member of parliament, told me through an interpreter. "And there is a lot of phobia, just to even walk on the airplane. But the motivation is so strong to go to America. Just to think about this is a dream."

The teenagers are bound for Indianapolis to watch the NCAA tournament next weekend, but last night they were at Verizon Center for their first NBA game. They met with Darius Songaila and Oleksiy Pecherov before the game, asking for their practice methodology; Pecherov recommended they go to Best Buy and look for Magic Johnson DVDs. They met with Tommy Sheppard, the Wizards' vice president of basketball administration; "We have something in common, we all have basketball, so I feel like I already know you guys," Sheppard said. They asked Dominic McGuire to dunk, quizzed Laron Profit about recovery techniques, and treated Gilbert with the same awe I've seen from U.S. teens.

"Since I started playing basketball that was my dream, to watch a game of NBA players," Zhanysh Adiev said through the interpreter. "Look at me. I'm shining like a new pin."

-- Dan Steinberg