If any good came of the injury, it’s that Rundles has been able to spend more time with his new family. They even managed to carve out a bit of a social life, which is no easy feat in Cherkasy. There are a few things you should know about the city.

First, nobody goes to Cherkasy. At least not if they can help it. Sure, most Ukrainians have heard of the place, but few will cop to ever having been there. It’s Ukraine’ version Sheboygan: a city that feels slightly familiar while at the same time being completely foreign to all but those who call it home.

There’s no big mystery to its lack appeal for tourists. Cherkasy is located in the middle of the country, isolated from the cultural and economic hubs of Kiev, Odessa, and Lviv. It’s a drab city stocked with dozens of drab, utilitarian apartment buildings left over from Soviet times — an esthetic outlier in a country lousy with natural and man-made beauty.

There’s nothing particularly impressive or memorable about Cherkasy, unless of course you’re impressed by the sheer number of stray dogs limping through abandoned, trash strewn lots. It’s also the country’s largest producer of fertilizer, so there’s that.

The splendor of Cherkasy

Despite its size — it’s home to nearly 300,000 residents — Cherkasy doesn’t exactly have a bustling nightlife, especially for expats who don’t speak Ukrainian or Russian. But the Rundles clan has settled into a comfortable pattern. Thursday is date night, which means they pack up the usually-sleeping baby and head out to one of four or so local restaurants with English speaking waiters.

After nearly six months in Ukraine, Rundles is so thirsty for the sound of American voices that on the night before his team’s penultimate game of the season he invites me to join him for his weekly family dinner. The Italian restaurant he picks is nearly empty, and the moment we walk in the wait staff swarms around Rundles. He’s an exotic local celebrity and is treated as such. The normally dour Ukrainian workers dote on him, asking in broken English about his foot and when he’ll be ready to play again.

“This is my spot,” he says with a wry smile.

The topic of conversation soon turns to Maksym Mikhelson, the Monkeys’ fiery head coach and the man lobbying hardest for Rundles to play through the pain. Mikhelson has a stern, irritable demeanor that makes you think he’d like nothing better than to punch you in the gut. He’s stumpy and thick, the kind of guy who could have played “Russian thug number three” in an 80s action movie. Mikhelson had been coaching Cherkasy’s junior team when he was called up to lead the professional club. He’s a hard ass in the mold of Bobby Knight, which is fine when you’re dealing with 17-year-olds, but not as easy when you’re coaching grown men.

Just ask P.J. Carlesimo.

Maksym Mikhelson looks unhappy most of the time

Among a host of other seemingly arbitrary rules, Mikhelson forbids his team from drinking alcohol. Rundles is convinced he’s got moles planted around town ready to tattle on misbehaving players. A tipster told the coach she’d seen one of his Ukrainian players buying beer at a grocery story on an off day. The player admitted to the indiscretion, but said he was shopping for someone else. Mikhelson fined him anyway.

“I’m a grown-ass man. Nobody’s gonna tell me I can’t drink a beer,” Rundles says as he orders a grape juice from a grinning waiter.

Rundles respects his coach, but he’s been around the game long enough to form his own opinions about how things should be done. He thinks Mikhelson works players, especially veterans, too hard in practice without giving them enough time to stretch and warm up. That might seem like a petty offense in the grand scheme of things, but it’s also how you get hurt. And an injured player will soon be an unemployed player. Rundles has a guaranteed two-year contract, so he gets paid either way; others don’t have that luxury and getting axed midseason would be disastrous.

It should be noted that nobody gets rich playing professional basketball in Ukraine, but good foreigners can make a comfortable living. Like most Americans playing overseas, Rundles wisely insisted on being paid in dollars rather than Ukraine’s hryvnia, which in the past six months has been in an historic freefall.

Rundles earns $4,000 a month during the season. In the financial hierarchy of American athletes, that would put him somewhere between a mediocre water polo player and a really good juggler.

Even in Ukraine that salary doesn’t make you an honorary member of the oligarchy, but you won’t have to worry about picking up the bar tab after a night out with teammates. For perspective, the average monthly salary in Cherkasy is somewhere in the neighborhood of 2,700 hryvnia. Depending on when you look, that breaks down to about $130.

The country’s financial insecurity has everyone on edge and wondering if things will get worse before they get any better. Inflation is sky high, unemployment is north of nine percent, and endemic corruption has quashed any hope that the government will somehow save the day.

“I was at the store recently and saw the lady in front of me buying eight large tubs of cooking grease and flour,” Rundles says. “The (inflation) is going up every day, but people’s jobs and their salaries aren’t just staying the same, they’re getting cut. How does that work? You figure that out.”

Much of the country is desperately poor, but it somehow feels even worse in Cherkasy, where they don’t even get the benefit of a substantial tourism industry. That kind of crushing poverty can lead good people to do unthinkable things. Rundles knows this, and while he’s had no problems with crime, he keeps his eyes open.

“I watch myself and my family very carefully,” he says, “because at times like this people are very desperate and will go to measures — even if they’re your friend — to get over on you. Not because they want to but because they have to. Tupac said I never did a crime I never had to. Being here reminds me of that. If you’re living here in a bad neighborhood or a bad situation, what can you do?”

Cameron and Camille

The problem is, keeping people at arm’s length just isn’t in Rundles’ DNA. His default position is to give everyone, even strangers in a strange land, the benefit of the doubt. He genuinely likes people and wants them to like him, and his life philosophy can be boiled down to: “If you’re cool and like to have fun, we’re probably gonna get along.”

That’s nice and all, but not everyone in Cherkasy is interested in getting along. Ukraine is an ethnically homogeneous country, and it becomes even more so the further you get from the country’s more cosmopolitan cities. Rundles, who is biracial, might as well be a unicorn in Cherkasy. Many residents have never seen a black man in person, and every time Rundles leaves his house he feels their stares. It’s mostly innocent, if not a little rude, but there have been times when he hasn’t exactly felt welcome in the city.

“I understand life and cultures, and it’s probably not his fault why he thinks like that. He grew up like that. His father is like that. His friends are like that. So if he sees me, why wouldn’t he give me that face, that ‘who the fuck are you’ face?” Rundles says.

It was months before Rundles laid eyes on another black person, and spotting non-whites became something of a sport for him and Ashley Hamilton, an Englishman and the team’s only other black player. When the pair finally saw another person of color inside a local grocery store, they followed him from aisle to aisle and eventually introduced themselves.

“I said, ‘Is that a black dude?’ So we walked around and we found him, we tracked him down. He was like, ‘Hey, what’s up?’ We were friends immediately. He didn’t know any black people either.”

It wasn’t just the overwhelming whiteness that Rundles had to adjust to, either. Americans are used to being spoon fed a certain brand of faux-friendliness. Waiters with shit-eating grins treat you like family when you walk into Denny’s. Cheery bank tellers implore you to have a good day. Co-workers who loathe each other trade pleasantries about their weekends. We all know it’s a sham, but we feel compelled to play our parts.

Unlike America, Ukraine is generally a no-bullshit zone. Cheeriness for its own sake is not a cultural convention many subscribe to. You likely won’t be greeted with a smile when you walk into a restaurant, and you’ll get little more than a funny look if you say “dobry den” to a stranger.

“Nobody smiles,” Rundles says. “They’ll help you, but they look mean. They look mad all the time, especially the Russians.”

It would be easy to confuse their cool demeanor for hostility, but that’s generally not the case. Most Ukrainians are kind, generous and exceedingly patient with foreigners. Given the economic and political climate, it’s a minor miracle there aren’t daily riots in the streets.

“I take my hat off to the Ukrainians that they’ve been able to hold it together when things are very bad,” Rundles says.

The lack of diversity, the poorly made hamburgers, the various idiosyncrasies that make up Ukraine, these are all things Rundles can and has adapted to. He makes it work. But there are still things about the country that he cannot handle. The guns, for example, draped on the shoulders of young soldiers who stop the team bus at checkpoints, are still an issue.

“You never get used to that, because that’s death,” he says. “So I don’t even look out the window no more, because it’s not even beautiful to me.”