The Spaniard puts an end to a career in which not only did he conquer unthinkable sporting heights, he also earned the respect of the NBA. “He is not perceived as a foreigner”, Scariolo confesses
Before stepping on the moon, Pau Gasol he was a gangly boy who put up with “bad taste” jokes at school. Before not only succeeding in the NBA, but earning their respect, Pau Gasol was a teenager who dreamed of studying medicine and who played the piano and was not captured by Bara until he was 16 years old. Before the legend, the origin, the foundations of what has been an unthinkable trajectory. It might seem that basketball chose him and surely it was the opposite. Just as he ended up firing not when the most serious injury of his career pushed him to it, but when he decided to do so. Before physical conditions, a privileged mind.
At 14 he was 189 centimeters tall. They called him ‘Fido Dido’, like that character who became the image of the 7up drink. And when I finally entered the Bara quarry, Juan Carlos Navarro he remembers that “he was quite reserved, that he rarely opens up to new companions.” That shy and filiform boy whom the Bomba ‘adopted’ as his best friend – and his girlfriend took him to the movies – was going to become one of the most successful and influential athletes in history. Because Pau Gasol has crossed the limits of basketball during his 22 years of professional career. Phil Jackson He came to define him as “a man of the Renaissance.”
That August 3 in Saitama, the whimsical most emblematic place of his career, Pau was saying goodbye without wanting to say it. He parted company with the national team, his playground, and the Olympic Games, one of the many territories in which he reigned. Of basketball? “It is time to disconnect and talk with the family about whether it is worth continuing to play basketball or whether to take a step aside to other challenges.” It has taken two months to confirm what already seemed like evidence. Although what was not possible for the guy who at the age of 41 returned to play at the first level after a broken foot that kept him completely apart for two years. That last return was his last lesson.
Pau had conquered everything before. He will only have two thorns left, that Euroleague lost in the Cologne final and that eternal frustration against the USA Team, the team that beat him time and again at the Olympics, although in so many of those defeats there were paradoxically some of his most golden moments. Trying to compose an album with your most special moments is not an easy task these days. But undoubtedly the lost finals in Beijing and London to the US occupy two of the top spots.
That boy from Sant Boi who dreamed of studying Medicine -the professional field of his parents; he had to abandon his career, one of his great “sacrifices” – that he had started in music theory and the piano, he was going to see how his adolescence was a burst of expectations, not only a physical stretch. In that initial season in the junior of Bara under the command of Juan Llaneza -had come from the Cornell cadet, where his first coach, Juanjo Campos placeholder image, he put it as a base-, they assure that it grew 10 centimeters. That still weak talent was polished Juan Montes, Quim Costa and Ato Garca Reneses, who made him debut in ACB at the age of 18, on January 17 at the Quinto Centenario pavilion in Cceres. “In those 29 seconds I touched the ball once, to serve in the bottom after the last basket of the local team. In the images I can be seen with an overwhelming petty face,” he recalls in his book ‘Under the hoop’. A few months later, with the junior team, the world gold in Lisbon (to extend the European gold in Varna last year), the starting flags of the unimaginable.
Pau remembers how it hurt to miss the Sydney Games, which they already attended Ral Lpez and Navarro. But his great year was yet to come, a 2001 where he broke down all the doors. MVP of the Cup and the ACB with Bara, number three in the draft to become the second Spanish after Fernando Martn in the NBA and debut with the selection in the Eurobasket (bronze in Turkey).
With Spain he showed a devastating commitment for two decades. He won 11 medals (216 matches …), four of them gold, three Eurobasket and a World Cup, to put his name without question in the Olympus of the best players in European history together with Nowitzki, Sabonis, Petrovic… Also here he showed off his intelligence, always rejecting any ideological appropriation of his figure, of each other, despite the insistence.
The Gasol myth is written by his more than 1,200 NBA games (not counting the playoffs), his two rings, his presence in six All Star … But perhaps more than the palmars, there is his footprint forever in the best league in the world. world. Gestures such as the Kobe Bryant, With whom he made a fraternal friendship, to take him together with the Lakers, the transfer that changed his life. Or the 2015 All Star jump start at Madison Square Garden with his brother are worth more than crowns. “One of the most impressive aspects of Pau’s career is how he has managed to find a place in the world of the NBA. That he is very willing to embrace foreign talent to improve his competition, but that he is less willing to grant positions of responsibility or representativeness. I have breathed respect for Pau from the beginning, in a world where that is worth a lot. And it’s hard to earn it, because they don’t give it to you at all, especially if you come from another world “, he highlights Sergio Scariolo, which rounds off a “sports legend”: “Pau reached a point where he was perceived not as a foreign player, but as an important, respected player, with a voice and vote within the NBA scene.”
The man who ended all complexes, the player who forever changed Spanish basketball.
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