Jazz, Y. real Russian dolls

From Russia with love.

Far, far away, in what was once the darkside of this planet, the Utah Jazz and BYU football are in the spotlight — or at least on tables of cubicles at a place called Izmailovsky Park — a famed tourist shopping stop outside of Moscow.

They are embodied in the form of the famed Russian martryosh doll, also known as a stacking or nesting doll, a popular souvenir alongside fur hats and carved chess sets.

The martryoshka dolls are famous. You open up one, and there are smaller ones inside. These can be huge art projects, some standing waist high. They follow popular themes, anything from the Beatles, Rolling Stones, U.S. presidents, NBA and NFL teams, college football in America to the most famous dictators in history including Saddam and Adolf Hitler, according to Scott Taylor, Deseret Morning News Utah County sports director.

If you hang around town long enough, you can even have one of these martryoshka dolls custom-made of your own family.

It's interesting to see how the American teams are viewed by Muscovite artists who create the dolls for spend-easy tourists from the States.

Taylor just returned from Russia where he and his wife Cheryl visited after picking up their son Austin from an LDS Mission to Ukraine.

The Taylors made a stop at Izmailovsky Park, and Scott was impressed when he saw these nesting dolls featuring the Jazz and BYU. The featured icon and nesting sequence was interesting and got a chuckle from the Taylors on that side of the world.

The Jazz doll featured (could you guess?) No. 47 Andrei Kirilenko as the main statue doll, complete in uniform and jersey number, his face painted in flesh tones with a smile. If you opened up Kirilenko, out hatched a smaller doll, Carlos Arroyo and inside Carlos was Gordan Giricek, followed by Carlos Boozer, who had Jarron Collins inside him.

On the bottom of the doll read: Made in Russia 2005.

Cost? About 500 rubles, or around $20.

The six-inch high BYU doll icon was of No. 12, quarterback John Beck, complete with a gold stripe and the old blue helmet with the Y symbol. Beck's name is on the back of his jersey, his face peers from behind a painted face guard. Taylor brought one of these back to Provo.

Inside Beck, if you popped him in half, was No. 11, Rey Brathwaite, the running back who was expelled after the 2003 season for a well-documented party where honor code ideals were not featured.

Inside Brathwaite was a smaller doll, the figurine of No. 16, Thomas Stancil, another football player who left the team and withdrew from school and never really saw the light of day in a Cougar uniform.

Inside Stancil was a figurine of Daniel Coats, an injured tight end who has worked hard to match the glory of his first five games his freshman year in 2003.

Inside Coats was the last figurine, No. 8, an inch-and-a-half doll of injury-plagued senior-to-be quarterback Matt Berry.

A collector's item for sure.

The doll maker may have been a little off.

Or was it an historic art piece?

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E-mail: dharmon@desnews.com