The incredible journey Marc Gasol, from the NBA and the world Olympus to the LEB Gold

Updated:26/11/2021 00:33h

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Almost everything in the sports life of Marc Gasol has escaped logic, but this ending in Girona to play in the LEB Oro and in the team that he founded in 2014, it is perhaps the only thing truly expected and desired by the pivot. «It was always clear to me that I wanted to end my career here. For this reason, when I returned from the Games and I knew that I wanted to continue dedicating myself to basketball, there were no more options for me, “the pivot acknowledged yesterday. could debut with Bàsquet Girona on December 3 against Peñas Huesca.

At 36 years old, tired of the demands of the NBA and partly missing his children’s childhood, the Catalan decided to nip it in the bud last summer.

He said goodbye to the national team after the Games and also said goodbye to the American league. He left his future up in the air, although he had always declared that he wanted to finish his career in Gerona, the city that welcomed him when his sporting life was shipwrecked. There, where seven years ago he founded a basketball school with his name, is where the pivot will play his last games. A world and NBA champion who is not afraid to go down into the mud to return Girona to the ACB.

«A feeling has moved me, a dream that I have had for a long time. I have always had a special bond with Girona», Said the player, surrounded by his family, friends and crowds of fans in Fontajau. It was an open secret that Marc himself had been in charge of sliding already in recent days. A yearning for youth come true that will lead him to play in halls very different from the ones he was used to visiting in the NBA. The venues where the LEB Oro, the second division of national basketball, is played, do not have VIP seats and there are no Hollywood stars at the foot of the court. and you don’t travel by private plane or sleep in five-star hotels, but Marc doesn’t care about that. He has been able to feel like coming home and giving back to the city everything that he gave him in the two seasons he spent there.

This new world will return him to that past in the ACB, when almost no one trusted him and he had to carry the burden of being Pau’s brother. Now, with an NBA ring and two World Cups with Spain on his back, the situation is very different, although Marc has hardly changed. Yes, his physique has done it, because the Gasol who triumphed with the shirt of the Akasvayu Girona -club that disappeared in 2013 and whose farewell prompted Marc himself to create a new one so that basketball would continue to be linked to the city- he was a meaty guy and not fibrous like he is now. Years ago he adopted a healthier lifestyle, becoming flexitarian and shaping his figure to take better advantage of the last years of his career. He even learned to grow his own food at home, and from there he began to lose weight and become a more determined player. At his home in Spain, where he moved last summer, he has a vegetable garden that he himself works whenever he can.

Girona in the heart

Otherwise, he remains the same personable and loving kind of simple hobbies and committed to humanitarian causes. He usually goes almost always by electric car to avoid polluting more than necessary and since 2018 he actively supports the rescue of migrants at sea. Colaborate with ‘Open Arms‘and spends a lot of time the Foundation that bears his surname, which is responsible for fighting childhood obesity. Tasks that will now have to be put aside a little with his return to the courts.

Sportingly, little or nothing remains of that kid who stood out in a Memphis institute when the Gasol family decided to accompany Pau on his adventure NBA in 2001. Two years later, being a star in the state of Tennessee, he returned to join Barcelona. As a Barça player he never had the necessary confidence to finish breaking. Yes, he did it at Akasvayu Girona, where he arrived after winning the 2006 World Cup with Spain and where Pesic made him MVP of the ACB.

He had to try his luck in the NBA, follow in his brother’s footsteps, and he did so by landing again in Memphis, another city that occupies a giant place in his heart. He spent eleven seasons there before opening new horizons. He was only one in the Raptors, but it was enough to touch the sky and win the ring. The second Spanish to get it. That same summer he repeated world gold with Spain, reaching the ceiling of his career. Journey that would enter a slow downhill and that, after a year with the Lakers, has brought him home.

Now he will continue to enjoy basketball to another level, happy to be close to his family.

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