San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
EX-AZTEC SHEPARD RECALLS UKRAINE EXIT
Odessa team kept him there until the bombs began falling
Winston Shepard is a light sleeper.
“The lightest of light sleepers,” he says. “A wind breeze will wake me up.” Boooooooom.
It was shortly after 5 a.m. on Feb. 24, in the southern Ukrainian port city of Odessa on the Black Sea. Shepard, a San Diego State alum now playing for the BC
Odessa professional basketball team, shot out of bed and turned on his phone. It was blowing up, too.
Russia had launched coordinated missile strikes in multiple Ukraine cities to signal a full-fledged invasion that the Western world had anticipated for months and that everyday Ukrainians, to hear Shepard tell it, were convinced would never happen. A few hours later, he received a text from team officials canceling practice.
Figuring he might be holed up in his apartment for a few days with an empty refrigerator, Shepard ventured to the local grocery store.
“I get there, and it’s packed to capacity, it’s people out the door,” Shepard says. “I’m like, ‘Whoa, I see.’ I’m an American, I’m not from here, I don’t understand the history, I don’t understand the backdrop. I’m just seeing that Uber Eats is open, restaurants are open, everything is operating as normal. But now I’m seeing everybody piled up at the grocery store and standing in line at the ATM. Now this is different, this is more serious than I had been led to believe.
“I’m like, ‘OK, OK.’ ” He bought water, juice, noodles, veggies, some chicken, a few pieces of salmon — enough to feed him for the rest of the week. A day later, he was gone. “I ended up taking an L on all the stuff I bought,” he says.
Shepard wants you to know this, though: His wasn’t a harrowing journey,
smuggled out in the trunk of car speeding across the Ukrainian countryside as helicopter gunships opened fire, or a stowaway on a Bulgarian freighter dodging torpedoes in the Black Sea, or a passenger in a prop plane flying under the radar to avoid detection by Russian fighter jets. It wasn’t that extreme, that dramatic.
But his 6-foot-8 frame was stuffed into the backseat of a speeding car across the Ukrainian countryside. And he had an hour’s notice to cram what belongings he could into a single suitcase and make a run for the Romanian border.
“It’s easy to laugh now, smile now, because you got out of there,” Shepard, 28, says from his home in Houston. “It’s almost like a thrill. It’s still a crazy story, but in the face of chaos it was rather smooth. It’s crazy to think about, but there are (foreign) players still in Ukraine. One guy was trying to get out, and his city was getting heavily bombed. I don’t have any horror stories like that.”
Whirlwind career
Shepard came to SDSU in 2012 from Nevada’s Findlay Prep as the highestrated prep recruit in program history. He figured he’d play a year, maybe two, and turn pro.
He stayed all four, playing on three NCAA Tournament teams and one that reached the Sweet 16, ranking eighth in school history in scoring, recording SDSU’S only triple-double (10 points, 10 rebounds, 12 assists) as a senior. He went undrafted, then landed in Hungary and helped Alba Fehervar to a league championship. He played in the 2017 NBA Summer League with the Atlanta Hawks and spent part of the ensuing season with the Golden State Warriors’ G League affiliate in Santa Cruz.
Then the Canterbury Rams in New Zealand, Mornar in Montenegro, Maccabi Ashdod in Israel.
Then Westports Dragons in Malaysia, Rayos de Hermosillo in Mexico, another stint in Hungary.
Then Titanes de Distrito
Nacional last summer in the Dominican Republic.
He didn’t like any of the offers he received for the 2021-22 season, so he waited it out. In December, BC Odessa from the Ukrainian Basketball Superleague was looking for a replacement for an injured player. It’s a respected league, an opportunity to establish himself in the more lucrative European basketball universe. Shepard got on a plane.
Things were going well. He liked the historic city on the shores of Black Sea, liked the people, liked the coaches, liked his teammates. He was shooting 40 percent behind the 3-point arc and averaging nearly 10 rebounds per game. On Feb. 10, he played 36 minutes and had a double-double (10 points, 11 rebounds) in a 7566 win against Mykolaiv.
Shepard went back to his apartment and learned the U.S. State Department had issued an advisory recommending all Americans in Ukraine “should depart now via commercial or private means,” citing intelligence that Russia had mobilized more than 100,000 troops on the border. Two days later, U.S. citizens working at the embassy in Kyiv were evacuated.
Agent Harrison Gaines called BC Odessa officials to negotiate contract settlement for his two American clients, Shepard and former Washington State guard Charles Callison. The club refused, claiming the force majeure clause didn’t trigger merely under the threat of war and the government had informed them it wasn’t imminent. Leave now and you’d break your contract, and be unable to secure a letter of clearance to play elsewhere this season and wade through an arbitration process to be released for next season.
“The Ukrainian people,” Shepard says, “the coaches, the doctors, the teammates, the grocery store workers, the restaurant workers, everybody was convinced or trying to convince me that, ‘There’s nothing that’s going to happen, we’re not worried one bit, everything will continue to operate as normal, we will continue to practice and travel and have games.’
“I want to emphasize that every person there, up until Feb. 24, was convinced nothing would happen. They were like, ‘You guys are panicking. This is American propaganda. Don’t worry about it.’ My mom starts texting me, my agent starts texting me. And I’m like, dang, everyday life seems like nothing is going on.
“Can you imagine being in San Diego and troops lined up on the California border? We’d be in a frenzy. They weren’t.”
Gaines’ argument: “This wasn’t about basketball or a contract. I saw it as a life-and-death situation when you’re dealing with war.” Callison left. Shepard stayed. “I just rolled the dice,” he says.
He played Feb. 12 against Krivbas, grabbing another 11 rebounds in an 85-77 win. He played Feb. 17 at Dnipro, five hours by bus to the northeast, not far from where Russian soldiers were massed.
Then, … boooooooom.
Time to go
Shepard texted Gaines: H, I heard the bomb. I know it’s real now.
Gaines’ reply: You have to go. You have to listen.
Shepard tried to book a flight out of Odessa that day. They were all canceled.
The following day, the club arranged for a driver to shuttle four of them — Shepard, Latvian center Lauris Blaus, American forward Brian Fitzpatrick and Fitzpatrick’s girlfriend — to Romania. They’d head west and cross through the southern tip of Moldova, parts of which are controlled by Russia.
The car: a small SUV. They had three basketball players all 6-8 or taller, plus luggage — room for one suitcase each. It was 2 p.m. They were leaving at 3.
Shepard left behind clothes, sneakers and a refrigerator full of food.
“This guy is driving like Dale Earnhardt,” Shepard says. “It was pandemonium. You can’t get on the highway, so we’re driving on back streets. There are two lanes. We’re in the right one, and people are coming the opposite way. As soon as there’s an opening to swerve on the other side of the road and pass someone, every single time we did it.”
Ukraine mandated that all men between ages 18 and 60 stay to fight. The players were free to leave, but the driver was allowed to remain in Romania only for an hour.
They got to Galati, a town on the Danube River that dates to the sixth century B.C. The driver dropped them off on the side of the road, waved and headed back to Ukraine. It was 2 a.m.
Shepard found a room at Vega Hotel on the river. Two days later, he took a train to Bucharest, flew to Istanbul, Turkey, then home to the security and serenity of Houston.
He hopes to be back on a plane in a few weeks, free to sign with another club for the remaining two months of the season, a paycheck to replace the one he lost in Ukraine, the nomadic life of a professional basketball player continued.
Until then, he watches the images on TV, reads newspaper reports, sees the maps of troop movements showing the Russian Army heading toward the strategic port of Odessa. Residents have spent the last few days at the city beach filling sandbags to fortify the famed waterfront against an amphibious invasion from warships parked ominously off the coast. Others are cutting up tram rails to create anti-tank barricades with ground forces approaching from the north and east.
Shepard’s thoughts drift to his teammates, whether they have gone from guarding an opposing center to guarding a city.
“Regular civilians going up against trained soldiers, I wouldn’t even begin to know how that would look or play out,” he says. “When you play in these overseas places and you’re traveling around the world, a year seems like nothing. But some of these guys, you get really close to. You see them every day. You slap fives with them. You see the ladies who clean the gym, and every time they come in they smile at you.
“You get to thinking about these people and their families and their lives. Thank the Lord that I’m safe and sound back in Houston. To know I don’t know what the future holds for them, it’s pretty scary to me. It’s kind of grim.”