Shabazz Muhammad was lazily watching TV in his apartment when he heard his phone buzz. Looking down to see who was texting him, he smiled when he saw the familiar name.
“Hello friend Shabazz!” read the text. “I hoping you can watch my game in Russia tonight. It will be ten in morning for you so not need stay up late, haha! I send you email link to sport streaming website to watchings game.”
Shabazz pulled out his laptop and brought up his email. Sure enough, there was an email from one Alexey Shved, with no subject line and just a URL in the body. Clicking the link, Shabazz was brought to a strange-looking website with Russian-language banner ads covering half the page. Buried underneath a drift of popups which seemed to multiply when he tried to close them, Shabazz finally found the low-quality live stream of the game. Khimki Moscow, Alexey’s team, was playing some other Russian team that Shabazz couldn’t figure out the name of. The words were all in Cyrillic characters commentators were unintelligible.
Concerned that his computer would contract a virus if he stayed on the page any longer, Shabazz neverthless watched with rapt attention whenever Alexey was in the game. Alexey was clearly a cut above the rest of his teammates, not to mention the opposition, and they were feeding him on nearly every possession. And whenever he came out, Khimki’s offense would suffer badly, and Shabazz would watch the TV instead until his friend checked back into the game.
Shabazz wondered if Alexey was performing extra well knowing that his friend and ex-teammate was watching from thousands of miles away. The thought of their bond being felt across such a long distance made Shabazz break into a large grin.
Finally, the game was over. Shabazz could read the scores at least: Khimki had won by thirty points. Now they were getting ready to interview Alexey; the inset under his face seemed to indicate that he had scored forty points and gotten ten assists. Or was it rebounds? The interview proceeded in Russian spoken so fast that Shabazz wondered how anybody could possibly understand it, and he was about to close the stream when Alexey suddenly switched to English.
“Hello friend Shabazz!” Alexey exclaimed with a wave, turning to face the camera instead of the interviewer, who had to move quickly to keep the microphone in front of Alexey’s face. “I hope you watching! I scoring points for you, feelings you right with me for every shoot I make even with vast distance between!” Shabazz felt his eyes watering, but didn’t want to blink away the tears lest he miss something. “We are best friends, Shabazz and Alexey, a true friendship which ignoring physical separation! Very soon we will hanging out, I promise! Bye-bye Shabazz!”
Alexey waved one last time, then turned away from the camera and walked to his locker room. Shabazz stared silently at his laptop long after the stream ended and went to black. “Yes, Alexey. Soon we will hanging out,” he finally whispered before closing his laptop shut.