Russian uses his wealth to court a basketball dream

At the start of the quarter, he sends them onto the court with his ritual, lingering embrace and a pat on the lower back. Like so many of the rich, powerful and shadowy men living large in today's Russia, Shabtai von Kalmanovic is a man with a colorful, sometimes mysterious past.

He has been linked romantically to Liza Minnelli. He did prison time in Israel, accused of being a Soviet spy. He has amassed what he says is the largest collection of Judaica in Eastern Europe. This is a man who can do just about anything that catches his fancy.

As it turns out, he's got a thing for basketball, a sport he played growing up in Lithuania. He has dumped millions of dollars into rebuilding Spartak, the franchise he owns, into what is now one of Europe's best women's basketball teams.

Kalmanovic cherry-picks the brightest stars from the Women's National Basketball Assn., pays them as much as 10 times more than they earn in the United States, and brings them to Moscow in the WNBA off-season, where they live in luxury and play before halfhearted audiences.

It's an extreme measure, he acknowledges, but he insists that drastic steps are necessary to awaken a taste for women's basketball in Russia.

"If they win a game, I feel like a winner," he says. "To make basketball popular, you need victories. You cannot make a sport popular without winning."

To spend a night in Kalmanovic's gym in suburban Moscow is to learn a little something about America, about the miles and time zones that young basketball stars are willing to cross to supplement their incomes and secure their futures beyond the rocky, relatively unglamorous world of the WNBA.

But it's also a surreal sketch of a booming Russia, where the rich can't find enough ways to blow their cash. The 60-year-old Kalmanovic is part of a growing band of Russian millionaires investing in sports franchises as vanity projects, jostling to outspend and outplay one another with a patriotic, high-rolling fervor.

Many team owners split the cost with the government. Kalmanovic says he'll pour at least $7 million into the program this season, roughly half of the team's budget. The rest will come from the Moscow regional government.