Forty years ago, a man who worked in Madrid went to A Coruña to see his parents, with his newborn son. Suddenly, in a park in the Herculean city, he noticed that a boy had stood up a bench, so that the open space under the armrest was like a basket. “I remember that in Coruña, like in all cities, almost all the parks had soccer goals. If we had managed to get a young kid to do that, it means that ours was bigger than we thought.”
That man’s name is Fernando Romay. For years, the ceiling of Spanish basketball, and one of the most charismatic men of those 80s in basketball. What they had achieved was the Olympic silver in Los Angeles 84. “Damn, do you have to say it’s forty years? You can’t say a few years ago, a while ago. No, seriously? Forty years?” he scolds us. .
Romay is once again in Ceuta; city that he knows well and visited just a couple of weeks ago. Regarding money “it is something that the Gasol, Navarro, Calderón and company have not managed to surpass us, even if they deserved it. “It is not that if we had not existed, they would not have been there, no: it is that we laid the foundations for the children today play basketball.
Sure: there are important figures. For example, Antonio Díaz-Miguel. “Antonio was not a basketball professional. He was a clothing broker, he traveled to the United States, and in his time it coincided with the peak of each basketball season. There he became friends with the greatest of North American basketball, Bobby Knight and company. He brought videos to Spain, and we who lived in a pension that Real Madrid paid us went like crazy to see those plays that had taken place months ago. More than the clarity of ideas, which I had no idea, Antonio highlighted. for knowing how to look for alternatives where there were none.
And does Spain deserve to be in Paris? “I hope so, because the ‘Golden boys’ who are winning so many things in lower categories deserve a turning point.” And about it, two conveniently confirmed urban legends. The first: “of course I drove a Seat 600. Madrid paid me for basketball, not soccer,” he says sarcastically. The second: the Spanish team from Los Angeles 84 appeared with advertising on the shirts, something totally prohibited. “What happened is that it was from the Foreign Bank of Spain. We knew it, but that BEE meant Spanish Basketball Team was what the Americans believed… There was no hard question, what were we doing?”
2024-04-27 22:20:24
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