Pau Gasol has gone through the podcast of J.J. Redick, with whom he shared battles in the golden years of the Lakers along with Kobe Bryant, to review how he is after his retirement and look back to review a legendary career. On The Old Man And The Three the man from Barcelona, who lives in San Francisco with his wife and daughter, reveals that the Warriors are letting him participate in team activity, in addition to telling stories of his past not only linked to Los Angeles but also to Memphis, Barcelona or even his lush beard from 2006.
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Pau speaks as a retired player. At that point he arrived at the end of 2021, after having returned to Spain to finish his career at Barça. Drivers ask him, also because of the closeness of Redick’s retirement from the NBA, if he misses something. “I look at the present and how positive it is. The past is behind me and I can’t touch it. Now I’m better off being a father, a husband, etc. The flexibility I have makes me say, for example: ‘Let’s take a plane and go to Hawaii. How much do you want? A week, two or three?’. In those things, this life is better”dice.
Not everything is rosy, of course. Gasol stands on a specific aspect that happened to him as soon as he left the professional practice of basketball: “There are times when you’re anxious. In the first few months I woke up in the middle of the night and my heart was racing. But it’s part of the process, it’s normal”. Being in San Francisco, the city team is one of those that is opening up job horizons for him: “Now I am exploring some options. The Warriors have opened the doors for me to be part of meetings. Hopefully I can do it more and more”.
He insists that the process is gradual. Positive, of course, for having overcome a serious injury that forced him almost two years to finish his degree on his own terms:
“I had already retired from the NBA but I signed with Barcelona. My goal was to return to the courts. I returned to the team with which I started and was able to go to the Olympic Games, the fifth, which was something very special. Then I saw that there were to turn the page and be done. But there’s no way to prepare for this. There are ups and downs, but I’m better than worse.”
“When I signed with Portland after the first surgery, my doctor told me that in six months I could do the preseason and play with whichever team it was. But, two weeks after playing my first game with the Blazers, I They said, ‘This isn’t going well.’ At that point I thought, ‘This is not what I’ve worked so hard for in those months, and my career may end here.’ And, as a member of the NBPA, I also started thinking in the change of chapter of my life in another sense. You have to study, educate yourself, establish good relationships… And at that moment the pandemic arrived, more adversity, and I wondered what I was going to do to capture that phase and get the best out of it of her. And it went well, I had a good ending.”
Pau, whose mother is a doctor and whose father is a nurse, nurtured this branch of health at home from a very young age. He had to decide when he started college and began to excel in basketball: “I couldn’t miss medicine classes. And, being with Barça B, they started calling me from the first team, I had to travel to away games and I started not going to class. That year it was like that. I couldn’t even get the I had a driver’s license. I had to decide between the two ways of life and I gave myself a year: I bet everything on one of the two and it went well”.
The NBA arrived and, after Fernando Martín, a second man in space for Spain. But for a player still to be done in physical and mental terms, the change was enormous with what he had experienced in the ACB: “The biggest change was the number of games. And the mentality too: I came from winning in Spain and with the Grizzlies I lost four games in a week. It was a much more physical style, preparing yourself more on that field than mentally so as not to be It’s a survival league. There are big contracts and you play for a place, you have to earn respect. And it’s a more individualistic competition, in Europe the longest possessions are played and the ball is passed more, and talent is also obviously older”.
The center tells what went through his mind after that 2003 Draft, in which the Grizzlies transferred Shareef Abdur-Rahim to some Hawks who had just selected the Spaniard in third position: “When I got to the NBA I only did it pursuing my dream: to play with the best in the world. I didn’t know anything about Memphis or Atlanta. Elvis sounded familiar to me, it was the only thing I was familiar with. I remember, yes, that at that time I was glad that the team had moved from Vancouver. In terms of taxes it meant that more money was going to go into my pocket and more when I had to pay for my departure from Barca.”. Redick jokingly adds that it was in California, when he was on the Lakers, that the tax men got the hang of it: “Now I live in California too. But it’s a blessing, it’s a good problem to have”.
After reviewing his defeated years in Memphis, in which even Mike Fratello advised him to change his physical appearance (that’s why he grew the hair and beard that made him so famous at the time of the 2006 World Cup in Japan) and intimidate the rivals, where they took three zeros in three series of playoffs for which they qualified (he did not win a playoff game until he left the Grizzlies), moment for the Lakers, the arrival on the planet of Kobe Bryant and the two consecutive titles at the end of the first decade of the 21st century. Pau explains it this way:
“The first thing that surprised me was that they traded me. I had told the team that I wasn’t happy. I was frustrated. I asked for the trade last season, it wasn’t granted and I thought I’d stay in Memphis. But it happened later. They told me and I had to process first that he had been traded before realizing it was to the Lakers. Earlier we had met in Barcelona, in a hotel, and we talked about how we were both looking at our situations (Chicago was interested in him), but I I was left with the fact that we could never play together because Memphis wanted to trade me and he was not going to be the one to go there. I started to pressure them to see how my brother, who had been drafted by the Lakers, played, and they found a way to make that transfer possible.”
“Kobe was fired up from the start. As a smart guy, he knew this was his chance. Ever since I got to the hotel in Washington. I got there at 1:00 a.m. and we were playing in the morning and he told me to call him as soon as I was done. all the interviews for him to come to my room. I don’t even wait for the next day. He came and said: ‘I’m very happy that you’re here, let’s be clear, but now we’re going to win the fucking title. I know you’re ready, we’re going to do it’. So I realized that this is how everything was going to be, I had to follow him and do everything he told me. And the impact was immediate: he would put me in situations on court where I was dominant and could make a difference.”
“When he felt that he was not at that level of more than he asked for, he realized it and gave me that look of his and said: ‘Hey. Ready? It’s time.’ We looked at each other like that and that was it “
“I remember a time when he tested me. After the Beijing Games, in 2008, I decided that I would take some time to rest my body. Going back to the Lakers, in the preseason, Phil [Jackson] he canceled one of the practices and he asked me to do a one-on-one in the post. I hadn’t been active since the Games, but he hadn’t stopped. He kicked my ass, of course. He told him: ‘Slow down a bit, man, I’m going to end up burned’. He wanted to know where he was at. He replied: ‘Here there is no time to rest. The foot always has to be on the pedal’. That’s a good example of how he was always on.”
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This conversation also talks about the battles between the United States and Spain, especially in 2008 and 2012. Also about the players with whom the National Team tried to dethrone the number ones: “I was surprised that Juan Carlos [Navarro] did not have better offers to stay longer in the NBA. I convinced him to try there for a year or two and they transferred me that year. ‘You’ve let me down,’ he told me. He was in one of the rookie quintets, but he returned to Barça, where he finished his career and now he’s the general manager.”. Da, apart from Rudy, ‘Chacho’, Ibaka or his brother Marc, who have tasted the honeys of the big league, two more names: “In those teams there was also Felipe Reyes, a great guy who could have played in the NBA, or Sergio Llull, who has had an incredible career in Europe and I think he would have made a difference in the NBA if he had chosen to play there”. And it is that the role of Europeans has changed a lot since those years, and from the past in which he was the new kid, so he is glad that the dominance of the NBA now has a foreign gene: “Doncic, Jokic and Antetokounmpo are top-10 in the League. The last MVPs are European, which is extraordinary. I am very proud of what international basketball has achieved: it is no longer reaching and being an All-Star or winning a championship , is to be one of the best in the League day in and day out. And the NBA has done it very openly to this talent”.
