Halftime performers like Red Panda, the Amazing Sladek, and Christian and Scooby are show-stoppers

They used to say youngsters dreamed about running away from home to join the circus.

Christian Stoinev “did the opposite.” He left the circus for college.

His great-grandfather established a circus in Mexico in 1888. Stoinev first performed when he was 5, literally standing on the shoulders of his father, a Bulgarian acrobat, in a balancing routine. At 17, he left that life, seeking a sports-broadcast journalism degree, hoping against hope it might lead to a life in basketball.

Turns out it did, seven minutes a night.

Now, he is among a self-contracting troupe of entertainers — independent but united in spirit — who travel the continent making a living during fleeting halftimes at NBA, NCAA and G League basketball games and intermissions at NHL and minor league hockey games.

They are flaming hula-hoop twirlers, performance painters, novelty acts, aerial experts, masters of strength and concentration as well as dog acts and hand balancers.

Stoinev’s “Christian and Scooby” act with his pet Chihuahuas and his own skills is some of both. They’ll bring it to Target Center on Friday for Game 3 of the Timberwolves’ Western Conference semifinals against Denver. Speed painter David Garibaldi is booked for Game 4.

“What you might be able to do on your feet, I can do on my hands,” Stoinev said.

The halftime performers have spent lifetimes perfecting moves that are executed and done in mere moments.

You’ll find some on TikTok or YouTube clips bantering with “America’s Got Talent” judge Simon Cowell, “Good Morning America” hosts and talk-show comedians Jimmy Fallon, Steve Harvey and Pat McAfee.

There are local tumbling and dog-agility groups that perform at halftimes, but only a select number do it for a living traveling from town to town for those scintillating minutes out of a 15-minute NBA halftime.

Like pro basketball itself, it’s all about entertainment.

“You’re looking for something that will entertain everybody from the youngest fan to the oldest,” said Timberwolves/Lynx director of game entertainment Sheridan West, “and do it in seven minutes.”

The teams provide a steady income for the best acts, which can earn between $2,500 and $5,000 a night plus expenses.

“You’ll never get rich, but it’s a great living and lifestyle,” said Gary Borstelmann, the chair-stacking hand balancer known as the Amazing Sladek.

Many have managers, booking agents or helpful spouses. Some work 100 appearances a year or more and have Delta Diamond Medallion and Marriott Titanium Elite status. Occupational hazards include canceled flights and lost luggage.

Most travel light and by themselves, unless your act requires six wooden stacking chairs and a collapsible table.

And one — legendary and ageless, Chinese-born, unicycle-riding, bowl-flipping acrobat Red Panda — has something of an unofficial fan club.

Father and son Joe and Dominic Bollettieri from St. Louis Park stopped short in a Target Center arena bowl darkened during halftime when Red Panda was introduced at Game 2 of the Phoenix playoff series.

“You’ve got to see her,” Joe told his son. “It never gets old.”

She has long been called the very best in her very specialized field, but don’t tell the woman known professionally as Red Panda that she’s the GOAT among NBA halftime acts.

“What does that mean?” Krystal Niu asked.

The Greatest Of All Time, of course.

“Wow, I didn’t hear that,” she said. “They call me Red Panda, though.”

Yes, they do, from Target Center to Serbia.

When she started out, she needed a name.

“What was I going to be, Bowl-Flipping Unicycle Girl?” she asked.

How about Red because the color symbolizes luck, joy and happiness in China? And Panda because it’s China’s national animal and also endangered, special and rare?

Trained hard by her father while growing up there, she has flipped bowls from her right foot, through the air and stacked wobbly atop her head since she was 7. When she grew older, her father added a unicycle and more bowls to the act.

“Flipped more bowls, higher and higher, until we realized our pitched ceiling wasn’t high enough,” she said. “So my dad tore our ceiling out.”

Niu joined the Shanghai Acrobatic Troupe when she was 13 and traveled the world performing, including time spent at Disney World’s EPCOT theme park. She fell in love with expressive American audiences and accepted a residency. Until then, she didn’t know what a standing ovation was.

“I was so young then,” she said. “It made me feel appreciated and grateful every time I went somewhere.”

That was nearly 35 years ago. She’s now in her 50s and lives in Reno after calling San Francisco home for decades. A couple of retirements through the years were passing. She remains on the road with 50 gigs a year or more, traveling alone with a set of wrenches and a special 7-foot unicycle — 2 feet taller than she is — that disassembles into four pieces.

She flips five bowls aligned up her shin at a time, increasing the suspense every time while hypnotic music plays — and while wearing white pumps.

“It’s a unique act no one would ever think of,” West said. “You don’t grow up riding a unicycle or flipping bowls onto your head. Doing both at the same time is just incredible to us mere mortals.”

Her act is enduring. Her image is included in the NBA 2K24 video game. Internet debates ask if she deserves a place in the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame.

“I’m honored,” she said.

Last month, she entertained at the European Champions League Final Four in Serbia. Four days before that, she worked a Wolves-Suns playoff game at Target Center, unhappy she dropped her specifically contoured metal bowls twice.

Her work done after those seven minutes, she broke down her unicycle, left the building like Elvis did and traveled on.

“I love performing,” Niu said. “It is the reason I keep on. I like the feeling something unpredictable could happen, doesn’t matter how much I practice. I still try my best.”

Stoinev and his Chihuahua are bringing it all back to where it started Friday night for Game 3 of the Timberwolves’ playoff series with Denver.

Eleven years ago, the WNBA’s Minnesota Lynx gave him his big break, hiring his two-part balancing act for the first time, straight out of college.

“That summer, I just started knocking on doors and sending emails,” said Stoinev, a fifth-generation circus performer. “I don’t even remember what the email was, info@minnesotalynx.com, maybe. Eventually, they reached out to me and gave me that opportunity. I am grateful because it was a start. We must have done OK.”

A decade later, Stoinev and his dog — actually two now, Percy and Milo — still travel the halftime circuit. He does the walking handstands and gravity-defying feats of strength. Percy balances on basketballs or the soles of his owner’s feet and through it all, looks adorable. Milo dunks on a miniature basket at quarter breaks.

Stoinev graduated from Illinois State — and its own collegiate circus — with a broadcasting degree he hoped might get him to the NBA. He made it, but with his hands and strength.

Now Las Vegas-based, he wowed judges three times on “America’s Got Talent.” The first time, he balanced his 180-pound body on one index finger stuck in a champagne bottle.

“I’ve learned something,” Stoinev said. “A lot of people can talk sports. Not many hand balance.”

A New York state high-school gymnastics champion, Borstelmann went to college in 1976 with his whole life planned: He’d teach gym, coach baseball, start his own Boy Scout troop.

One summer, the circus visited his Long Island hometown. By summer’s end, he rode horses standing bareback and joined its three-man trampoline act.

“Instead of going back to school, I went on with the show,” he said.

Not long after, Chinese acrobats came to Broadway in nearby Manhattan. One closed the show’s first half with a towering “pagoda of chairs,” all of it balanced without a safety wire on four bottles set on a table.

“When he finished up top, he stood, took a bow, people cheered and the curtain closed,” he said. “And that was it for me.”

Within a year, Borstelmann owned his first chairs and learned to stack six of them, stretching more than 25 feet high, with a “handstand to heaven” on top.

Forty-five years later, he’s still in “show business,” the last decade stacking chairs in sold-out arenas.

When asked how often he has fallen, he said, “Say that again.”

Borstelmann counts three “close calls” and added, “If I fall, I hope I go to heaven and not to hell in a handbasket.”

The Amazing Sladek comes from his mother’s family name because the Amazing Borstelmann doesn’t quite sound the same.

He’s 65, with no intention to retire. He drives his chairs — made of poplar, his fifth set in 45 years — 60,000 miles a year in his van. He works out vigorously on days he doesn’t perform.

“I want to be the oldest aerial acrobat,” said Borstelmann, who appeared at a Wolves game in December, the Big Ten tournaments at Target Center in March, and will return for the Lynx opener. “I always wanted to do my last show in my last season, in my 65th year. Here’s my problem: This is my 65th year and I’m still going strong.”

As stage names go, Grace Good is, well, pretty good.

Except that it isn’t.

It’s the legal, given name for a TikTok star with 3 million followers.

“A lot of people ask what name they should put on the check,” she said.

She first picked up a hula hoop when she went away to attend Middle Tennessee State and taught herself to twirl and spin in her dorm quad for fun.

Good became good enough to busk alongside her hometown Nashville’s street musicians and found inspiration in fire-spinning women who performed at Tennessee’s Bonnaroo music festival.

She learned from other hula-hoopers to incorporate fire and aerial acrobatics into an act she performed at bars, house parties, circus shows and corporate events.

“The love of the flame,” Good said.

NBA teams came calling three years ago. Her act includes the “Big Red Ball” upon which she treads and spins as many as a dozen hula hoops.

Now 31, Good lives in both Nashville and Las Vegas, the circus industry’s hub. She estimates she’ll work 60 pro and college basketball halftimes as well as minor-league baseball this year.

Good has performed four times at Target Center in the last nine months. “It feels like home here now,” she said.

She appeared on “America’s Got Talent” four times, reaching the semifinals. Prickly judge Cowell called both “really boring” and “amazing” in the same performance while host Terry Crews dryly said this:

“Grace is good.”

Steve Max was one of those kids who taught himself juggling and magic tricks.

You know the ones.

By 15, he worked birthday parties, and 47 years later, he still credits his father, Stan, for driving him everywhere. He tried stand-up comedy — “A tough line of work” — and worked the Catskill Mountains resort night clubs, where legends Henny Youngman and Milton Berle once did.

He watched and learned how to work a crowd. It’s also where he started to incorporate the child’s game “Simon Says” into his act as “Simon Sez.”

“Audiences liked the ‘Simon Sez’ better than my magic,” he said. “I’m smart. I can take a hint. I put the magic away, and here we are, still doing my thing.”

He’s in his 21st year playing that game with halftime participants and corporate crowds.

His act is a change of pace from the acrobats and animal acts. He brings audience participation onto the court in a fast-talking, free-form bit that changes every night.

“I cannot do a handstand or back flip,” said Max, who is 62.

His schedule from October to April included 87 pro and college games and six corporate events. One night in March he was at Target Center, the next at a Los Angeles Clippers game because he travels light.

“No animals, no fire hoops,” he said. “I’m proud to say I’ve never pooped on the court.”

Max calls the game “inherently fun” because it has just one rule: Do what ‘Simon Sez’ — or doesn’t say.

“No one can do anything to stay in the game if I want to get you out,” Max said.

All that for seven minutes in a 15-minute NBA halftime.

“That’s what I live for, the opportunity to entertain 18,000 people and make everyone laugh and smile,” Max said. “It’s a great way to make a living.”