A basketball legend like louis scola happened this Sunday for the tune of taking fallarthe thematic program on basketball of esRadiowhere he underwent an extensive interview in which he reviewed his extensive career and his current plans.
Almost a year and a half after hanging up his boots, the Buenos Aires native fondly remembers his time as a player, especially at a high level. “I really liked to play… well. What I do now is not so much fun“, he joked, alluding to his role as manager in the Italian Pallacanestro Varese. A club about which he recounted some of the points of his management, innovative at a European level having drunk from NBA sources, and with which he hopes, in the medium term, one day reach the Euroleague. “I would like the Italian league to be considered more. Varese is in the discussion because of its history and its location. Not today, but in the future. My goal is to try to arrive at some point, but today it is not on the table because it is not realistic. But the idea is to make a ‘Baskonia Model’ and be there one day”, he defended. Likewise, regarding his training for what is his new life, Scola stated that “throughout my career I tried to take stuff from all over the world, which is kind of what I used to do as a player. I was imagining myself as the manager that I could be in the future“.
Logically, the man who was a Baskonia player for a decade, who today has become a legend of the Vitoria club, reviewed in the talk on esRadio some of the highlights of his career, such as the well-known high demand of coach Dusko Ivanovic in the club’s golden era of Zurbano. “He was very merciless with me, but I am very fond of him and today, in the distance, I perfectly understand what he was doing at that moment.“, he valued about the renowned Montenegrin coach. Before that, Scola became an anomalous case in Spanish basketball, when he held a non-EU record, at just 18 years old, during his loan to Gijón Basketball. A ‘recklessness’ in which The Argentine acknowledges that there was “a level of total unconsciousness that is necessary, because if you are aware, you don’t do it, and I at the time i had no idea what i was doing“. In fact, he attributed the greatest merit in that bet “to the coach, who was Moncho López”, later the national coach.
In the more than 40 minute interview there was also room for many anecdotes with the Argentine team, in which Scola was a transcendental part of the so-called ‘Golden Generation’. Therefore, he spoke as an authoritative voice of the recent elimination of the albiceleste from the World Cup to be held next summer in the Philippines, Japan and Indonesia. “I experienced it with great sadness because many times we were one game away from being out and it could happen to us. Argentina has to build its new generation from below because we do not have a sufficient level of talent to aspire to just go and win. We have good players but We are not at the level of talent in the United States, Spain, France or Australia“, he reasoned.
