This is one of the strangest NBA stories you are ever going to read.
This summer the Spurs decided to keep the band together for a couple more years, and as part of that they agreed to a new two-year, $14.5 million contract with Manu Ginobili. That might be overpaying him at this point, but that’s a debate for another day.
Ginobili went home to Argentina this summer, as he does every summer, so the Spurs sent an intern from the front office down there to get him to sign the deal (they like things hand delivered).
And that’s when it got weird. We’ll let Jeré Longman of the New York Times tell the story.Hours before the Spurs’ intern was to fly home from Buenos Aires, team officials said that he was strafed by a bird in a park. As he tidied up at a fountain, his backpack disappeared. Inside were Ginobili’s signed contract, along with the intern’s passport, cellphone and laptop.
Luckily, an international sports crisis was averted. An assistant traveling to Buenos Aires soon after brought a fresh contract and returned it to Texas without incident.
“No birds got to him,” Sean Marks, the Spurs’ director of basketball operations, said with a laugh. “We were all waiting for Manu’s contract to show up on eBay. It hasn’t yet.”
Let me get this straight: There is a criminal in Buenos Aires who has trained a bird or birds to attack people then he steals their belongings during the attack? That’s brilliant. Okay, it is probably just a guy who knows that the birds in the park can do this and uses the opportunity for his crimes… but I love the idea of the trained criminal attack birds so I will choose to believe that is what happened.
What I’d really like to hear is a recording of the call when the intern called back to San Antonio to explain how birds attacked him and that’s why he lost Ginobili’s contract and a team laptop. That was probably the best part of the entire incident.
