Aday Mara, the dreamer and joker child: “He wanted to be like Casillas. He danced to Ricky Martin music”

In 2010when Aday Mara was 5 years old, Pau Gasol He won his second ring with the Lakers. In 2013, at 8 – barely beginning to remember but already approaching 1.70 in height – Aday saw himself having the world in his hands in the form of a ball in the image and likeness of his idol. But, although today I evoke Pau, not a basketball like Gasol, but a soccer ball like Iker Casillas. In 2010 he only had eyes to see Spain win its first soccer World Cup with those saintly hands of the savior Iker.

“Before he was 10, Aday played goalkeeper for the school team. The extracurricular activity he did was soccer, not basketball,” he says. Basilio Sánchez Golmayoa Physical Education teacher at the Marie Curie School in Zaragoza attended by the now emerging NBA star of the Oklahoma City Thunder.

“He wanted to be like Casillas, a goalkeeper. It was still the boom of the first World Cup that Spain had won. Many sports are offered at school, but soccer, you know,” explains Basilio Golmayo.

Basilio was Aday Mara’s Physical Education teacher in fifth and sixth grade and today he feels proud to see the center in the NBA while he enthusiastically explains the events and adventures of the Aday child.

To begin with, the teacher remembers that he wanted to be Mara first as a child and how the center changed one ball for the other.

Aday realized that he had more skill for basketball than for soccer, even though he wanted to play soccer with his hands. He had it in his blood with the precedent of his father Xavierformer professional player CAI Zaragoza in the 80s. But no one told him to take the orange baton as his inheritance. The ball was always in his court while his growth found no ceiling until his current 2.21.

“His parents, with very good judgment, never wanted to determine him to play basketball. Over time, it was Aday’s decision, who realized that he had many abilities to play basketball. It’s like his chip changed and he just started wanting to play basketball,” recalls Basilio Golmayo.

Today’s Thunder rookie 21 years He made his first steps in basketball at Basket Lupus in the neighborhood of La Jota – his neighborhood in Zaragoza -, before enrolling in the lower categories of the Casademont Zaragoza.

By the time the Marie Curie School teacher had Aday Mara in his Physical Education classes between the ages of 10 and 12, the current Thunder center was already on his way to catching his father’s 2.01 with the more than 1.90 he measured.

“Being such a tall child, he needed us to adapt the school furniture for him. I am short, I am 1.65 meters tall. I have the memory that when we put up the volleyball net to play in the school’s mini-basketball baskets, he would put an elastic band on me so that I could go from one side to the other,” Aday’s former teacher also recalls.

Volleyball was the other sport that ran in Mara’s blood, since her mother, Angelica “Geli” Gomezwas an outstanding volleyball player in Spain with her 1.93 who won several national titles, was international with the Spanish team on 178 occasions and also distinguished herself as a great blocker. Already a collector of Aday badges in the NBA with the tiredness he has already had of blocking shots –11 plugs in 8 games -, the breed comes to the greyhound. And in that other sport that Mara seems to play, it seems that it is also volleyball that she plays with those slaps that she sometimes hits the ball when she blocks, as if they were simple smashes.

But Aday amazes in the NBA for being a big hand and a handyman at the same time with that special touch with the ball. In those fun Physical Education classes and through various activities, Basilio Golmayo observed that Aday Mara was not the typical, rugged giant that one might assume a child of such size to be.

“Although he was very tall, he was a very motor-coordinated boy, because not only was he able to throw and pass well, he had very good peripheral vision for all types of team sports. We played datchballultimate and other types of sports,” recalls the teacher.

Datchball is a sport in which two teams throw balls at each other with the aim of touching and eliminating the players of the rival team, while ultimate is also a collective sport without physical contact in which it is played with a flying disc either frisbee

“He had a brutal ability to catch balls or flying discs. When we played datchball, sometimes I started playing with them and if he threw a ball at you you had to consider yourself dead because he would immediately hit you. He had a lot of skills for the sport,” Golmayo highlights.

Aday Mara transfers today that gift he has with the ball with his bombs and those shots of sky hook with whom he still doesn’t dare so much in the NBA but with whom he got tired of scoring one basket after another in the NCAA with UCLA and, above all, Michigan.

A sincere smile or that typical spontaneous half-smile appears on the face of any player in the United States, NBA or NCAA, when they start talking about Aday Mara. It is the only thing he is as a player with everything he does and also his fun and noble character, funny but not malicious.

Adem Bonanow in LeBron James’ Sixers, played with Mara at UCLA and remembered for MD how she sometimes ordered food and the Aragonese sometimes wrote things to her in Spanish. Yaxel Lendeborg, A budding star on the Warriors, he recalled how Aday once stayed with him at a practice with the Michigan Wolverines, making him believe that he had injured him after a foot collision.

Basilio also smiles when he talks about the character of the child Aday.

“He was a good-natured boy. He got along well with everyone, he was not problematic,” Basilio Golmayo also remembers.

“I don’t remember any pranks, but he liked partying. And when there was partying he immediately joined in,” adds the teacher.

“In Physical Education class sometimes we work on teaching units on rhythm, dances or choreography and things like that. I have a video of him with the final group choreography that they put together in fifth and sixth grade dancing. I also remember that it was music by Ricky Martin,” explains Basilio.

“Now he dances on the floor,” admits Aday Mara’s former Physical Education teacher. He has not been a goalkeeper like Iker Casillas but he picks up the gauntlet of being the one to lead Spain and the new generation of Spaniards in the best league in the world as he did in his day Pau Gasol. The man with a lot of skill in his hands who dances in the NBA moving his feet to the pace of the jota.