Enes Kanter of the Oklahoma City Thunder shrank his nearly 7-foot-tall frame into the red dot on Indiana Jones’s map this offseason. Since his team was eliminated from the NBA playoffs last month, the Turkish center said he went from countries in the Asia-Pacific to eastern Europe, and eventually to London and New York City. He has spent the last year trying to grow his children’s charity worldwide; his itinerary seems normal. But he has spent far longer excoriating his home government in public. And so, he recalled on Monday, he lived last weekend not like a globetrotting philanthropist, but a so-called “dangerous man” on the run.
“It actually started in Indonesia. So I remember I was sleeping around 2:30-something, and my manager knocked on my door. He said the secret service and Indonesian army was looking for me, because the Turkish government told him that I’m a dangerous man,” he told CBS on Monday. “So I was like—we didn’t know what to do. That’s why we had to kind of escape the country, and went to Singapore. Then we came to Romania, and that’s where all the madness started.”
There, Kanter was stopped at the Bucharest airport on Saturday, after authorities discovered that his passport had been revoked by Turkey. The ordeal didn’t leave him stranded, however. As a U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency spokesperson reminds, lawful permanent residents do not need a passport to enter the United States. Kanter is a green card holder, and he credits the Department of Homeland Security for intervening on his behalf.. He arrived in the Big Apple via England on Sunday.
He blamed the episode on retaliation from Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan—a man Kanter has “likened to Adolf Hitler on multiple occasions,” as the Associated Press documents:
A request for comment to the Turkish embassy was not returned as of press time. The grounds near its foreign envoy’s residence in the nation’s capital was the site of an unrelated diplomatic spat last week—one that came with fists, as Philip Terzian noted. Supporters and security personnel for Erdogan, who was the White House’s guest, engaged a group of protesters, which resulted in nine hospitalizations. “The State Department has been content to look away, and President Trump is unlikely to have mentioned this transgression to his guest,” Terzian wrote. “Who would have guessed that Istanbul Rules–official Turkish violence against innocent Americans on U.S. soil–now apply in Washington?”
The New York Times quoted a demonstrator who posed a similar question.
You don’t have to imagine what Kanter would say. “Right now I am country-less,” he said at his league’s players association headquarters in Manhattan. “I am open to adoption, definitely. I am going to try to become an American citizen.”
