Pepper Basketball: Rules, Drills & Benefits

There is a player profile that you adore when he is on your team and that drives you crazy when he plays for a rival team. They are usually people with a lot of personality, aware of their virtues and with a special talent for identifying the weaknesses of their opponents. They also have a kind of magnet to attract the passions that emerge from the stands: for the good when they play at home and for the bad in away games. Spirits multiply their energy. The insults, too. They generate a significant feeling of frustration, since the more they are whistled and pressured, the better they play. And since the grass always seems greener in the neighbor’s yard, we tend to think that there are only players like that on rival teams. We would love to have an athlete like that wearing our jersey, so that everything we criticize turns out, in the end, to be what we really wanted.

It happens that behind these players there are people with a story and that the vast majority do nothing other than try to give the best possible performance and, given their magnetism, relieve their teammates of the pressure. The bad boys of European basketball (Ediciones JC) is the book in which Jose Manuel Puertas tells the story of 14 basketball players who went down in history as bad boys who always lived on the edge of the rules on the court. With first-hand testimonies, Puertas offers complete and interesting profiles of John Pinone, Anicet Lavodrama, Salva Diez, Branislav Prelevic, Alfonso Reyes o Joe Arlauckas. All of them speak naturally and transparently about the role they represented and help describe an entire era of basketball. Pushing and elbowing in the zone, leadership in the locker room, ego management and the difficulty of differentiating between the player and the person. Like that day in 1997 when Pedro Fernández approached his teammate Salva Díez on the Caja San Fernando bench and said: “Damn, Salva, I saw you before and thought you were a son of a bitch, but now I wouldn’t change you for the world.”