He loves his history and so his solace is in the books. They are piled in his bags back on the bus, many bound in the intricate style of his people and written with the magnificent letters that come from the beginning of time.

Sharavjamts Tserenjanhor gives a small laugh, he looks down shyly and shakes his head as he tries to describe the look of his new basketball teammates watching him — a 7-foot Mongolian sitting on a bench in the locker room licking his fingertips and rustling through the pages of a book. Game time comes in a few minutes and there he is, reading again.

"They try not to distract me," he says, carefully picking his words in broken English. "They are very good."

Of all the things the Harlem Globetrotters have done for attention — a woman and a Hispanic from the Bronx with a bullet lodged in his skull — this might just be the most outrageous yet. A 7-foot man from Mongolia pulling the red, white and blue shorts on over a pair of the skinniest legs you have seen on a basketball player. Then going out and rolling the ball along his arms and around his back to the tune of "Sweet Georgia Brown."

Only the Globetrotters who come to KeyArena tonight are not what they used to be. The game isn't so much about race anymore as it is keeping alive an old show, making it fresh and still making it sing. Everybody has seen the bucket-with-shredded-paper trick and the free throw on a string and the tugging down of the referee's pants. Heck, the foils of the event aren't even called the Washington Generals anymore.

The Globetrotters are the last of the great travelling sports carnivals. At least they're the only one anybody seems to care about anymore, but even this isn't enough. They have to come up with something new, a different twist. And hence they have this: a 7-foot man with a name so long and clogged with consonants that they simply call him "Shark."

As the players who walk behind him at this lunch stop at the Yakima Mall shout:

"Go get 'em, Shark!"

Really he doesn't need this, doesn't need the sleepless nights and the afternoons without even a cheap motel to rest his head. His wife and child don't have to be waiting in Phoenix for weeks on end, hoping the Globetrotters will have a break in their schedule and he can come see them. He does not need to be eating, as the Globetrotters do so many days, in the food court at another small-town shopping mall.

He doesn't need any of it because he has the books. He has a degree and he has status in his homeland as the nation's top basketball player. He was just a month from finishing his law degree when the call came from the Globetrotters. But he wanted to take a chance on seeing the world and playing basketball in the United States. And there was a part of him that always wanted to be a Harlem Globetrotter.

Shark nods his head as he says this. Really, it is true.

As a child he watched the Globetrotters on a Russian television channel. These were in the days when communists ran his homeland with an iron fist. Then one day there came this fuzzy image of black American men tossing a ball around their backs, off their fingertips and between their legs. Shark's young eyes grew wide and he said, "Wow, what are they doing with the ball?"

"I was like shocked," he says between bites of a cheeseburger at the A&W Root Beer stand at the Yakima Mall. "After that, I always wanted to see them and do the magic thing."

Then he was discovered — as all strange and unusual things often are — by former LSU Coach Dale Brown, who was on a goodwill trip to Asia. Brown watched as two teams of tiny Mongolian players warmed up on the court, then gaped in shock as a giant appeared from the locker room. That night Shark scored 50 points and dribbled as if he were Magic Johnson.

And Brown, still thinking like a college basketball coach, immediately pondered the places where he could get Shark into school. Except Shark was already 27 and had played professionally in Mongolia for four years. That's when Brown came up with an idea: the Globetrotters. He e-mailed the suggestion to Shark, who read it and beamed.

"I didn't want to say 'yes,' I wanted to yell it across the ocean," he says.

What is odd is that he doesn't long for the NBA. He doesn't want the riches and the fleet of cars. He wants to live his dream of playing with the Globetrotters and then he wants to go home, where the fall of communism hit hard, where rogue bands of criminals roam and crime lingers on every street corner. He wants to go back to the unsafe place, because he thinks this is where he belongs, where he can make a difference.

He wants to finish the law degree and become a politician.

"I like history," he says. "I read a lot of biographies. When you read history and hear good things, you can also see through things. You can see the things the historians hide from the people if you read very carefully."

It was only after the government fell and he could study the real history did he begin to understand the United States, a country he was wary of as a child. Then he came to America in 1998, on a 45-day trip to Seattle of all places, as a guide to a group of Mongolian exchange students. He remembers standing outside of KeyArena, taking pictures of the building and longing to see an NBA game.

But it was the middle of summer, so there was nothing. In the end the closest he got was seeing Sam Perkins at Sea-Tac Airport on the day he was to return home. Perkins looked at the Sonics T-shirt Shark wore.

"Maybe someday you'll be wearing that for us," Perkins said.

This is probably as close as he will get — wearing the red, white and blue while whistling "Sweet Georgia Brown."

And that will be enough.

Via

General Basketball, Oklahoma City Thunder

Read the Full Story Discuss Send Feedback