Chip Browns Profile of Mikhail Prokhorov and the inevitable challenge of revamping the New Jersey(Brooklyn) Nets

Inside he began rummaging through closets and drawers. Here was a four-inch nail a strongman friend of the family had bent in half; a boomerang from Australia; a Sharp double tape deck for the whole family that Prokhorov eventually “privatized.” A hall shelf was filled with books on physics, finance, and bound leather editions of classic writers like Balzac, Chekhov and Dickens. In his boyhood room were VCR tapes of Rambo (“I love Rambo — every five or seven years I watch it again”) and hockey photo books and chess manuals. Prokhorov was a gifted chess player, trouncing all the grown-ups on the beach during a family vacation to the Baltic Sea when he was 6, but he gave the game up, preferring hockey and soccer and sports where he could “feel the pulse of the opponent.” His bedroom wasn’t much bigger than a shoebox, with barely enough space for the extra long bed. His father was in charge of ordering supersize beds for the basketball athletes competing in the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow and added one for his son. When Mikhail was older and wanted a girlfriend to stay over, he had to set up a cot.