Popovich: end of the era of a sage who achieved impossible in Spurs
The legend of San Antonio will not direct the team anymore: it will remain as president of the Spurs, but its legacy will be infinite.
Gregg Popovich He will not return to the Spurs Bank. It will be difficult for the world of basketball, for the extreme followers of the NBA, accept that this is a fact. With 76 years, he will now be president of the San Antonio franchise. The man who led five championships to a small market, who fought like nobody to recover a stroke that moved him away from the battlefield, will have a change of position.
The deserved rest of who was one of the best strategists of all time.
Many forget, but we talk here about the figure of the most winning coach in the history of the NBA. A statesman. Someone who knew how to win, but was willing to lose to form. He used his last years in the substitute bank to gestate the common good. For Popovichthe Texan franchise was like Antonio Gaudí the Sagrada Familia: it will not be present on the day the missing bricks are placed.
He received, praise in the form of caresses in his golden stage and blows in the form of ruthless criticisms in his humble, logical, inevitable and scheduled fall. Ignorance, anxiety and insolence are the capital sins of this era. In a world of one hundred flat meters, Popovich He always thought of marathon mode. Another teaching: to know how nobody the world that surrounded him at each stage of his life.
We talk here about a giant man. Especially different. Disruptive by nature, their press conferences were always genuine. He knew how to take the microphone in the middle of a party to defend a former player of his people’s boos. Teach Victor Wembanyama playing basketball.
You can commit to your environment, denounce violence in your country, combat racism. He chose – and chose – not being silent despite the logical comfort to which he invites you to enjoy the impunity of the powerful. He taught with his actions.
Popovich It is, ultimately, culture. And culture does not necessarily correspond to the triumphs.
It is a job of years. Of lustra. Of decades.
‘Poppo’, as they said at the beginning, began his career as a coach in 1979 directing the Pomona-Pitzer. At that time, Tim Duncan I was only three years old, Manu Ginobili He prepared for his second birthday and Tony Parker It was still a future project of his parents.
Son of Mother Croatian and Serbian father, graduated at the Air Force Academy, specialized in Soviet studies at the Air Force Academy and served five years in the Army.
He traveled a long way to be who he is today. They are not just his more than 20 years at the head of the Spurs, or his five championships obtained with the team. Popovich It crossed everything: good and bad times. The Spurs have already taught it, it will always be the parable of the quarry, kindness of Jacob Riis: “The rock is broken and it is not because of the last blow but for the hundred that preceded it.”
Popovich He was the only NBA coach capable of generating an invisible renewal of his campuses to always be competitive year after year. When the Rubicón crosses, when eternity is made skin, the message comes in the form of prophets.
Blessed, then, the one who can make someone speak to him as Duncan, Manu and Parker told him to Popovich in his exaltation to eternity. On the verge of broken, with sincere thanks. In liquid times, fidelity is an increasingly precious value.
PopovichIt is also a real feminist. With facts, because the words are taken by the wind. AND Becky Hammon He knows it. He gave her the opportunity to mix among men, treated her with the same obligations and rights. It takes to arrive, but, in the end, there is reward.
Perhaps that is why his merit is not in the brilliant sports result that he got as a coach. Popovich He never thought about him: Wembanyama is the future. What did that crazy old man sit so much in the substitute bank? What is a passion if that is not?
Ginobili points to Wemby movements. The secrets of the game. The discipline of the franchise. In the distance, Pop He smiles, because he still remembers that wild foal that came to the United States without tame. Willing to devour the world. “This is what I do,” Manu told him.
Wembanyama seed will germinate when Pop He is no longer sitting there. It costs to assimilate it, but it is the truth. There is no greater definition of greatness than that this man carried out: transcend for the rest. Put what is left of the body. Give everything to enjoy it.
Democratic, solidarity and global basketball may be executed by many, but will always belong to it. The common good over the individual. The solidarity hand on the other. Humility over the ego. Some men, like Popovichthey were born to write the story.
All others, guardians of his legacy, we will always be ready to tell it.
