Gasol's charmed beginning

The new Laker's Barcelona roots reveal a man who knew early in life where
he wanted to go (the NBA) and would let nothing stand in his way.

By Chuck Culpepper, Special to The Times February 10, 2008

BARCELONA, Spain -- Not that we tread in some sort of fable with Pau Gasol's
life story here, but you really should see the hospital where he joined the
world on July 6, 1980, just seven weeks after Magic scored 42 at Philadelphia.

Really now, how many hospitals do you know that look like some cross between
Shangri-La and the Hotel del Coronado ?  How many caress the eyes with murals,
mosaics, sculptures or the two soaring palms that tower out front at L'Hospital
Sant Pau ?  How many boast one of the most enchanting views on Earth, back down
the avenue to the Sagrada Familia, plus a striking courtyard with tourists
filing through snapping photographs ?

At how many hospitals do people seem to want to, you know, hang out ?

"One of my friends was working there" as an obstetrician, said Gasol's mother,
Marisa, herself a doctor of internal medicine, "and I went to him to take my
boy.  It's such a beautiful hospital."

And not that we're witnessing some charmed tale here -- a ton of toil fed
Gasol's ascent -- but here's an afternoon metro, clean and energetic.  It sails
underground out of Barcelona through this optimistic, in-the-moment country
(and when did you last see one of those ?), and when it bobs out of the ground
nine stops from town, it's all Catalonian sunshine and distant brown mountains
and Sant Boi de Llobregat.

That's the fairy-tale name of the industrial, 80,000-strong suburb where
Gasol's hands began their two-decade love affair with the basketball.  That's
where the fenced-in schoolyard of his childhood sits in a back corner of town,
beyond the streets with local shops and the bus stops with "Juno" ads.

And that's close to a gloriously eccentric basketball objet d'art that strides
the middle of an intersection and bears Gasol's name, and just across the
street from the colossal Complex Esportiu Municipal Pau Gasol, dedicated by the
city council after the giant's rookie season.

How idyllic, this childhood ?  As the eldest of three sons of a doctor (Marisa)
and a nursing administrator (Agusti), Gasol would walk to Escola Llor, the
envied private school with the metal front gate and the muscular sports
program.  It'd take five minutes, if that.  He might pass through a becoming
neighborhood with orange trees and palms and hedges, tight streets and
nonconformist houses, where a single straggler can rouse half a dozen dog
barks.

He would see life from 6 feet 4 by 15, sprout again toward his avowed 7 feet 1
at 18 and 19 and, with the junior national team, help portend Spain's rise to
global multi-sport bigwig with eminence in soccer, tennis, golf, Olympics,
motorsports, basketball and what-all.  He would learn piano and tackle
Tchaikovsky's "Dance of the Swans" and go to medical school for a year before
basketball shooed all else, and you mean to say that now the whole Catalonian
daydream shifts to ... Los Angeles, global capital of pixie dust ?

It's another dollop of sensation for a stylish, onrushing country, and even in
a sleepy suburb, it has kept a few people up at night.  Tuesday night, no,
Wednesday morning, Irish tavern, only place in Sant Boi showing Lakers-Nets
from New Jersey, your basic 1:30 a.m. tipoff, four middle-aged men who knew
Gasol back then, only customers in the pub.  Even though his 6:30 wake-up
beckoned, Ricard Farres, the director of the immense sports program at Escola
Llor, joined three friends to scrutinize a game Farres found almost surreal
because Kobe Bryant seemed to defer to his former pupil Gasol.

Then halftime came, and the bar had to close.

Keeping track of the local boy making good

"It is hard to follow" because of the curvature of the Earth, Farres said, and
it usually appears only on a pay channel, but the country's renowned sports
dailies do follow.  A major one even put Gasol on page 26, just after 25 pages
of soccer, quite the feat here.  Another, called Sport, put Gasol on the
cover.  Another vowed to expand NBA pages now that Gasol mines Los Angeles
rather than Memphis.

Here they are, Gasol with a team Farres has loved since "Lakers contra Celtics"
of the 1980s, a team everyone recognizes because of Showtime (older people) or
Bryant (younger), and all this just two heady decades-and-change after Pau
turned up at Llor at age 6.

"He was a very normal student, a very normal boy, " Farres began through an
interpreter, Sergi Borras, who teaches English at Llor.  "He wasn't very tall,
probably, as we say here, three fingers taller than the others, but not much.
While he was an introverted guy, we could see he was more mature than the rest
of the students.  The way he spoke.  He seemed like an older boy.  His
reasoning.  Not totally his words, but his reasoning."

His parents stood 6 feet 3 (father) and 6-1 (mother). Both played basketball in
organized leagues.  "I grew up the first few years of my life watching my dad
play with the veteran-tier team, " Gasol said this past week.  "I started
seeing my dad doing it.  He's always been a real role model for me."

Pau warmed to the game at 7, and began playing on Llor's well-tended gray
courts at 9. As this charmed story would have it, he began at a school that
almost considers itself two schools -- one for sports, one for academics -- in
a town with a vast constellation of youth sports, in a rising country ladling
further emphasis.  His height began to distinguish him, but, Farres said, "In
spite of being a very tall player, he wasn't clumsy at all.  He was very
agile.  He was given more respect, more possibilities" by coaches.

Further along, he fell in love with the distant NBA galaxy way off in the
cosmos, even in those dark pre-Internet days of the 1990s when people
communicated with strings and paper cups.  He seemed to know the name of every
player in this NBA. He slapped posters of Americans on his bedroom walls.

"My grandfather used to buy me an NBA magazine every month, " Gasol said.  "I
collected the posters that came in the magazine and put them in my room when I
was 13 or 14.  All the big-time players at the time.  MJ [Michael Jordan],
Penny [Hardaway], Tim Hardaway, even Magic Johnson, Larry Bird. That was
something my grandfather got me started on."

He coursed through school to age 17 at Llor, reaping fine grades, requiring no
curfew and pretty well navigating the tallest-guy-in-school challenge.  He'd
flirt with girls by hiding their things on high ledges so that occasionally you
might hear, "Pau, where's my pencil case ?"  He'd sit at a desk the school
maintenance staff designed for him, one that has lasted at the school ever
since, always going to a tall kid who always knows it first belonged to Gasol.

"I was always very skinny, the tallest in the class, but super skinny, " he
said.  "I had a very good growth, I guess you could say."  Soccer "helped my
coordination, " and "I liked to play midfield, always passing the ball to my
teammates, guys that were faster than me and more skilled with their feet
because they were shorter."

By his early teens, basketball began to lure him out of town.  He'd begun
playing in the next town back toward Barcelona, Cornella. The sports program of
Basquet Cornella dates to 1929, and the booming facility in which it plays has
an immaculate basketball gym, next to the huge tennis center in a country gone
mad for sport.  His coach there, Juanjo Campos, noticed his skinniness and his
cleverness and steered clear of stashing him under the basket.

Coaches often had him directing offenses.

A heady player

"He was very intelligent and very smart, " coach Joan Montes said through an
interpreter, having piloted Gasol from age 15 to 19 after the FC Barcelona
junior team took notice and pried him from Cornella.  "He just showed he could
do everything.  He was in the position 3 in the European team and he was very,
very open, paying attention to everything ... He had a lot of personality, and
he loved to give ideas about strategy and everything."

With the story unusually utopian, of course, "He knew it from the beginning,
what he wanted, " Montes said, and he welcomed all guidance.

Ever upward, he soared from Barcelona's junior team to its first team, playing
three seasons there from 1998-99 through 2000-01.  During that time, he entered
medical school but stopped partly because professional teams don't tend to
schedule their practices around curricula.  Maybe that'll come post-basketball.

"I hope so, " his mother said from Memphis.

By 1999, enchantment starting to overflow, he'd become part of a so-called
"golden generation, " or the "golden boys, " who merely shepherded their
country toward its 21st-century heyday in a sport that ranks second behind
futbol and whose Spanish league ranks second behind the NBA according to many a
savant.  Their 1999 world junior title made a silver medalist of the United
States, and their roster also included future NBA players Juan Carlos Navarro,
Jose Calderon, Jorge Garbajosa and Raul Lopez.

Three years at Barcelona's top-level club, a booming year in 2001 even with
non-booming averages like 12 points and five rebounds, and Gasol found his way
to a crescendo audible worldwide.  It sounded in the coveted mid-winter Copa
del Rey tournament -- separate from the regular season, ongoing this week and
featuring Gasol's brother, Marc -- when Pau Gasol led Barcelona to the title.

Thereby did he also lead eyeballs to himself at age 20.

"I saw his length, I saw his skills, I saw his footwork, " said Walt
Szczerbiak, an American who played in the Spanish league in the 1970s when the
autocrat Generalissimo Francisco Franco still ruled Spain, and has worked as a
type of Spanish-league ambassador since 1986.  "I saw that he took his team as
a young player against men ... 27-, 28-year-old men, who know the game ... In
the final, he played with such poise.  You could see he was special, and even
though he was skinny, he had pretty good constitution."

His lone near-glitch came "when he lifted the cup and almost hit the king of
Spain in the face, " Szczerbiak said.  "Pau picked it up and the king had to
duck back so as not to get hit with the cup."

The 7-foot-5 wingspan, the ball management, the beyond-his-years prowess in a
league Szczerbiak describes as more intense than the NBA because it features
the relegation goblin ... Soon, Americans queried, and after then-Grizzlies
general manager Billy Knight asked his old friend Szczerbiak about Gasol,
Knight soon flew to Spain.

Memphis Grizzlies, or Catalonia's team

"It's the best day of my life, " Gasol said on June 28, 2001, in New York, on
his first steps into the United States, after the
Vancouver-but-moving-to-Memphis Grizzlies traded Shareef Abdur-Rahim to Atlanta
to make Gasol the highest-chosen European player to that date, at No. 3. "All
my life, I want to be in the NBA, " and it had happened "very fast."

So he won rookie of the year, and soon Sant Boi de Llobregat became maybe the
world's foremost pocket of Memphis Grizzlies jerseys, probably surpassing even
Memphis. Gasol became the first All-Star Grizzly.

All that would be enough to make a near-fable, but now this thing stretches on,
as of the Feb. 1 trade that startled even Gasol. Suddenly the Spanish sports
dailies show photos of Gasol and his fellow former Euro-child Bryant touching
hands while running up the court in purple, Bryant looking exhilarated, and
they run headlines of Bryant's remarks about Gasol -- "Es un jugador increible"
-- and Sport ran a cartoon with the HOLLYWOOD sign changed to GASOLLYWOOD, a
caricature of Jack Nicholson in front, expressing joy in a bubble.

"Magic Gasol, " the prominent sports daily Marca blared on page 26, adding a
photo of the news of Gasol's 24 puntos and 12 rebotes and four asistencias
flashing across Times Square. Another story suggested he lent slight
distraction from Clinton vs.  Obama. And then another Gasol child, Marc, 4 1/2
years younger, also risen to 7 feet, poses in the same newspapers with a
deflated basketball or a cardboard likeness of himself.

Marc grants interviews about the Copa del Rey, in which he and his Akasvayu
Girona club reached the quarterfinals, but not about the trade, in which he
went (among other players) from the Lakers to the Grizzlies in American sports'
first swap of brothers.  There's so much hubbub about that the younger Gasol
generates Spain-MVP chatter as the 34-game schedule moves on in an 18-team
league whose top half, Szczerbiak reckons, would be comparable to any NBA team
minus its top three players.

Even if you can't find the Lakers playing the Magic on the swarming La Rambla
boulevard in Barcelona on a Friday night -- the sports bar had closed by tipoff
-- the later night life hours of spring and summer beckon, while on the
playground at Llor, the very mention of the words "Los Angeles" lights
children's eyes.

Ten boys ages 8 or 9 gather around Farres and a visitor just before basketball
practice.  Some attend the school but others do not, filing in just for the
sports.  Nine time zones away, they profess to be new Lakers fans, save for one
in the back who hollers "Denver Nuggets, " proving there's always dissent.

Then one on the right says "Spurs, " proving there are always front-runners.

Then another shouts, "No Memphis !"

So a giant from the crazy-gorgeous city in the effervescent country of Dali and
Picasso and Almodovar winds up co-starring at a Canadian-American game near the
HOLLYWOOD sign while Catalonian children blurt, "No Memphis."  Surely Dr.
Naismith wouldve felt enchanted.