Jazz Notes: Wife gives Kirilenko woman 'allowance'
Andrei Kirilenko has been granted restricted free agency - by his wife.
Masha Lopatova, a former Russian pop star who has been married to the Jazz forward for nearly six years, understands the temptation NBA players are faced with as they travel around the country for seven months a year. And she believes that forbidding something only makes it more tempting. That's why, she revealed in a story in the current issue of ESPN The Magazine, she allows Kirilenko an "allowance" of one night per year with another woman.
"What's forbidden is always desirable. And athletes, particularly men, are susceptible to all the things they are offered," Lopatova said before the Jazz's loss to Charlotte on Wednesday. "It's the same way raising children - If I tell my child, 'No pizza, no pizza, no pizza,' what does he want more than anything? Pizza.
So this is the arrangement that Andrei and I have," she said, adding, in the spirit of openness, that she does not have a reciprocal agreement with her husband. "If I know about it, it's not cheating."
Kirilenko, according to the magazine story written by Salt Lake City freelance writer Chad Nielsen, has no plans to exercise his "allowance."
"Of course it was a surprise," Kirilenko said. "I'm not planning to do anything. But she said, 'If you want to do it, you can do it.' "
Lopatova said she doesn't worry about revealing something so personal, even in conservative Salt Lake City. "Me and Andrei, we're very open people. I barely have secrets. It's not like I'm one person in Salt Lake City and a different person in Moscow. My whole life is on the surface," said Lopatova, a celebrity in Russia who has a 4-year-old son, Fedor, with the Jazz veteran. "I find that people in this country are really interested in athletes and their [families], for some reason. They don't want to know what kind of books I read, but they prefer to know what kind of underwear I wear."
Now that the not-so-secret is out, Lopatova joked in the ESPN story, "Girls will be lining up outside his hotel door."
Mrs. Kirilenko
