NBA (DR) / Gil’s Arena (DR)
By Pierre-Andréa Fraile | Sports journalist
Contrary to the usual requirements for the top level, many NBA stars have displayed a certain penchant for drinking. However, a legend of the league would have no equal in this regard.
Popular belief has it that high-level sport is reserved for an elite for whom sacrifices are legion on a daily basis. In addition to a highly regulated diet, logic would dictate that alcohol should be banned for the lucky few. And yet, NBA figures demonstrate that this is not an obligation. Some would even position themselves as experts in matters of binge drinking.
Arvydas Sabonis’s Crazy Drinking
A member of the legendary Jail Blazers team, Rasheed Wallace has since seen it all in this locker room. One of his teammates, for example, marked him for his crazy resistance to drinking, namely a certain… Arvydas Sabonis. He tells the microphone of Sheed & Tyler :
Rasheed Wallace : If you drink with him, you can be sure that your liver and kidneys will fail.
Originally from Lithuania, Sabonis had a very special relationship with… vodka, which he could almost swallow like water. At least that’s what Wallace suggests through an anecdote delivered in another episode of his podcast:
Rasheed Wallace : Drinking is his thing. I’ll never try to follow him into that again in my life, no sir.
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“Give me 100 bottles of vodka, 50 of champagne, 60 of tequila, and put it all on his tab.”
Even back then, when he drank, it was vodka. I remember seeing him and my guy Detlef Schrempf downing a whole magnum of vodka, just the two of them.
For your information, a magnum is nothing other than a 1.5L bottle. Enough to realize the superhuman tolerance of the legendary pivot. However, the latter’s deviations did not stop there and could be observed… in the middle of a match, as Damon Stoudamire was able to explain in The Post Game :
Damon Stoudamire : It was halftime and I was like, ‘Where’s Sabonis, where’s the big guy?’ Turns out he was on a loading dock in the arena smoking a cigarette.
And yet, despite all these bad habits to be banned, “Sabas” has fully earned his Hall of Famer status given his exploits on the league’s fields:
Jokic gets comparisons to Arvydas Sabonis. Before entering the NBA Sabonis ruptured his Achilles tendon twice and he had a severely arthritic foot and before entering the NBA at 31. Washed Sabonis is an MVP candidate in today’s NBA. Elite skilled big man. pic.twitter.com/TinnnHAmk1
— SI (@SI_02_) June 11, 2023
Considered by some to be the precursor to modern pivots such as Nikola Jokic, Arvydas Sabonis was not a role model away from the courts. Fortunately, it seems that his son, Domantas, did not follow in his footsteps in this regard.
2024-07-15 19:10:00
#drink #liver #kidneys #fail
