Ponitka's Pierogi by Edward Drobinski - HTML preview

2 – Back to the Basics - House and Money

This too was his dream. And, like all dreams, it was over. Worse, it wasn’t exactly only his dream. It was fine with him, but it was his wife Adelaide’s (Ada) (nee Poniatowski) dream and a capitulation to his NBA fans, who expect such things. It wasn’t only because nobody offered him a contract. It wasn’t only because it had 15 rooms and solid stone construction. It was that it sat on fifteen natural acres in the 2/3 Polish, White town of Pulawski Township, Michigan, and they liked it.

The house has a stone façade that feels even older than the man who owns it; thick walls, irregular stones, the kind of construction that suggests permanence rather than flash. There were steeply pitched roofs with multiple angles and chimneys, giving the house a slightly storybook silhouette. It was embellished only by the large windows that break the severity of the stone and let in the pastoral light of Pulawski Township.

The gravel drive that curves toward the entrance, bordered by trimmed boxed hedges; was not manicured to death, just kept in line, like a man who respects order but doesn't worship it.

The house sits in a pocket of lush greenery, the kind that comes from land that's been tended for decades.

The acreage feels quiet, self-contained, almost like a small estate that grew organically rather than being imposed on the land. The hedges and trees create a sense of privacy without defensiveness. Ponitka isn't hiding, he's just not performing. He’s no longer putting on a show.

There's a rural calm to the whole scene; the gravel, the stone, the greenery, the soft light. It has the energy of a place where someone successful but still fundamentally practical would live; no ostentation, no architectural stunts, just solidity and space.

As Ponitka's house it fits him perfectly. Old world materials for a man with old world instincts. Understated scale masking real size 15 rooms tucked into a structure that doesn't brag. Land first, house second, because acreage is the unstated real status symbol in Pulawski Township, not that that matters to him particularly; other than it offering the privacy a man scrutinized for more than a decade would require.

Wladyslaw Ponitka’s twelve year run was over. He sat staring at the dark staircase from a seat in his equally dark living room. He was reminded of thoughts of the Old Country, which he had never seen. It had to go. With no contract his income couldn’t even pay the property taxes anymore. He had contracted for some renovations “to put the house in condition for selling,” but the contract actually was intended to delay the inevitable, in hope of some sort of miracle. His NBA contract negotiating agent, Norm Pitkin, said that he couldn’t come up with anything, not even in Utah.

Wlady had always wondered why so many NBA stars; Allen Iverson, Christian Laettner, and a dozen others who’d earned more in a single season than he had in his entire career, managed to go bankrupt within a few years of retirement. He would never say it aloud, not even to the teammates he trusted, but the thought hovered in the back of his mind like a private punchline; “They must be stupid.”

He told himself he was different. He didn’t buy pet tigers. He didn’t travel with a blood sucking entourage. He didn’t have a jeweler on speed dial. His biggest indulgence was a leased BMW he returned the moment the team cut him. He prided himself on that restraint, convinced it was evidence of superior intelligence rather than the simple fact that he’d never had enough money to develop expensive habits in the first place. Still the fact that others like Michael Jordan and Shaquille O’Neal did well after their retirements strongly suggested that it wasn’t hard for those with some sense.

In his head, the logic was airtight. Bankruptcy was something that happened to people who couldn’t do math, or who let cousins manage their finances, or who believed every investment pitch that began with the words “guaranteed return.” It wasn’t something that happened to a role player who’d spent most of his career on minimum deals, the last one on a series of renewed ten day contracts.

He thought he was immune. He thought he was too grounded, too practical, too ..... Polish, even.

But beneath that quiet arrogance was a truth he never examined. He had no idea how much his lifestyle actually cost, because the lifestyle had always been subsidized by the league. The house, the flights, the hotels, the trainers, the meals, the per diem; he’d mistaken all of it for calm frugality when it was really just chaotic infrastructure.