After spending the first five days of Russia’s invasion in Ukraine, American basketball player Maurice “Mo” Creek now says he’s making his way out of the country.
Creek, an Oxon Hill, Maryland, native who played in college at Indiana and George Washington, shared on social media Monday that he was traveling to the country’s border. The 31-year-old who plays basketball professionally in Ukraine quote tweeted a post that said he was in a car on his way to the Ukraine border.
“GLORY TO GOD,” Creek tweeted.
GLORY TO GOD https://t.co/VVHwC5pWho
— Mo Creek (@Mo_Creek) February 28, 2022
Creek, who spent three seasons at Indiana before transferring to George Washington and leading the Colonials in scoring in 2013-14, started playing professionally in Ukraine in 2019. This season, he’s a member of MBC Mykolaiv in the Ukrainian Basketball SuperLeague. He had spent the first five days of Russia’s invasion stranded in the city of Mykolaiv.
Creek was supposed to leave Ukraine on Saturday but that was delayed due to air raid sirens.
“JUST WHEN I THOUGHT I WOULD BE GETTING OUT UKRAINE TODAY…THE SIRENS GO OFF,” he tweeted Saturday.
The next day, he tweeted that he had “never felt so hopeless in my life.”
We are praying for you Mo. Keep the faith. I love you!❤️🙏🏼 https://t.co/0mKt9i557p pic.twitter.com/g4SJAr6trt
— Mike Lonergan (@MikeLonergan) February 27, 2022
“I’ve been hearing the bombs at night, the shooting at night, and it’s terrifying for me to hear that,” Creek said Sunday on Fox News. “My family is on the phone, worried sick. My coaching staff with me right now is worried sick. I’m worried. It’s just bad right now.”
Creek said he was staying in a bomb shelter in his apartment complex’s basement.
“I’ve been going back and forth between my apartment and the bomb shelter that they put me in to be safe, because the war is going on around our area,” Creek said in an interview with BasketballNews.com. “So we just have to be as safe as possible, keep our heads held low.”
Creek wasn’t the only American basketball player tasked with finding a way out of Ukraine.
Toure’ Murry, who starred at Wichita State before brief stints in the NBA with the Knicks, Jazz and Wizards, was able to return to the United States on Saturday. He said during an interview on “Fox & Friends” Sunday that the experience was a “whirlwind.”
“It was just sitting outside in traffic all day and then walking to the border and standing outside for 14 hours plus in the cold, freezing,” Murry said. “Just the ambiguity of not knowing what to do and not knowing if you’re going to see your family again, it was a very scary moment.”
• Jacob Calvin Meyer can be reached at jmeyer@washingtontimes.com.
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