This is
my favorite story on the NBA in a long time. As if David Stern didn't have enough evidence that the NBA and Europe is a bad marriage, the Greek team Olympiakos came across the pond last week to play the Spurs and the Cavs, and they didn't go home to Greece until they had made a few death threats. That's right, a few DEATH THREATS.
Evidently, current U.S. court judgments mandate that Olymiakos pay $1,100,000 to none other than former Jazz-man Chris Morris, who played for the club in 1999.
So Morris' agent, Gary Ebert, calls some team representative named Angelopolous while the Greeks are in town, and ends up talking to some other Greek (I will assume it is Angelopolous' hairy bodyguard) who basically says, 'you'll never get the money we owe to Chris Morris,' and 'you better leave Angelopolous (expletive) alone or I will kill you."
Lesson learned: If the NBA ever expands to Europe, I can see the headlines now: "UTAH JAZZ PLAYER CARLOS BOOZER KIDNAPPED FOR RANSOM IN ATHENS." Then Jerry Sloan will be stomping around saying, "Damn it, where is Jarron Collins when we need him? Can anyone else negotiate us out of this f$%#ing situation?"
3 comments:
To be fair to Olympiakos, I threw out a couple of death threats when Chris Morris was on the Jazz.
This is the best part of the story:
Moments later Ebert called back and told the man he didn't appreciate being threatened. "He didn't have much to say that time," says Ebert. "I think he was surprised I had his number."
Clearly we're not dealing with a band of Jeopardy champions here. . . they don't understand the concept of caller ID. But then again we knew that after they signed Chris Morris to a million dollar contract.
Why is this so one sided here?
This representative called Angelopoulos is a Billionaire, actually, who owns the team. Do random agents who are owed money by some owners from years ago call Mark Cuban and bitch around?
And why are these "agents" refusing to come to europe to the court that is waiting for their case to be decided? Why is a deal in europe an american thing to be judged upon? Let me tell you, they are not coming to court to europe because they will come back to the states as losers, so they stay over there and play the angry americans.
And this whole death threat thing seems very fishy, since no official side in the states decided to take action on it, as apparently the threats were most probably invented for publicity reasons. Greek media are treating this whole thing as a ridiculous attemt to milk some money out of a fairly new very rich ownership. And the fact that you are writing a story here calling a forbes 500 guy like Angelopoulos 'some representative' is fairly embarassing, you may inform yourself before you write a story.
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