Diana Taurasi is on the shortest list of the best women’s basketball players in the world, but you won’t see her in the WNBA this season. She’s under orders from her Russian team — which pays her upwards of 10 times what she makes in the United States — to sit out to avoid injury.
This life of displacement, as chronicled in The New York Times, has turned the former UConn star into a luxury spa customer, a jaded Putin watcher — and a total lush.
“I’ve probably drunk enough vodka for a village,” Taurasi told the newspaper. “It just happens. I mean, with the weather being so crappy, nothing to do. Might as well be hung over. And you can’t not drink. You must drink. It’s just part of the world here. Any Russian team: You win, you drink. You lose, you drink.”
I’ve probably drunk enough vodka for a village … You win, you drink. You lose, you drink.
- Diana Taurasi
It’s a somewhat startling admission by Taurasi, who pleaded guilty to DUI in 2009 after she was pulled over in Arizona with a BAC of 0.17, more than twice the legal limit. But she has a full-time driver now — that’s one of the perks of her lavish deal with UMMC Yekaterinburg, owned by an Uzbek mining multibillionaire.
And the local liquor isn’t the only element of Russian culture Taurasi has absorbed. She is keenly aware of the mood of political repression and anti-Americanism that has escalated in her new home in recent years, especially in the wake of the conflict in Ukraine and subsequent economic sanctions by the West. “You do feel a little of the American resentment,” she said, “like they feel like we’re taking their bread.”
Her interview with the Times followed the murder of opposition leader Boris Nemtsov in Moscow, and she correctly predicted the outcome of the sham investigation, which would be concluded days later.
“They’re never going to find him,” Taurasi said. “And if they do, they’ll pin it on some guy from Chechnya.”
The 32-year-old three-time US gold medalist, who began playing in Russia in 2006 after being recruited by oligarch Shabtai von Kalmanovic (executed in his Mercedes three years later), puts up with it because the money is simply too good.
In addition to a salary in the $1.5 million range, she has a personal translator, the 24-hour driver, a complimentary two-bedroom apartment and a pass to the plush spa at the Hyatt, according to the Times. Her team always flies charter. That’s compared to the league-max $109,500 she earned with the Phoenix Mercury, who got across the country on connecting commercial flights.
“That’s very taboo for athletes,” she said of prioritizing the bottom line. “It’s like, you’re an athlete — you shouldn’t think about that. Oh, really? I shouldn’t think about when I’m 40 and I can’t walk cause my knees are busted? Who’s going to want to hire me in the business world? I have no work experience. And this is my profession. Why shouldn’t I try to make the most money I can?”
But being half a world away from her family in California takes its inevitable toll. Taurasi’s homesick melancholy is evident in the profile’s final scene.
“At the end of the day, you’re in the middle of nowhere with hardly anyone to talk to. It’s a lonely life,” Taurasi said. “I was thinking about my parents, and 10 years have gone by, and really, I haven’t seen them at all. People are starting to get old in my life. My sister’s got two kids, 6 and 4, and I don’t even remember them growing up, ’cause you know, you’re just not around.”
