What do you do when you come down from the mountain?
One hour north of where it started for Marc Gasol is the bulging chain of the Pyrenees, rising up to cut a border between France and Spain like a ridgeline along some fabled, snarling and scaled creature’s back. Older than the Alps, bubbling with sulphurous hot springs and waterfalls that seem to fall from the sky, home to the world’s largest solar furnace and a rare genus of small, semi-aquatic Pyrenean shrew that stubbornly, obliviously, grip to existence along its granite rock rivers, the Pyrenees are idyllic and severe.
Their mythology, too, is brutal. Pyrene, the virgin daughter of a king, raped by Hercules on his way to steal some magic cattle from Medusa’s son. She gives birth to a serpent and runs away into the hills, her sobs attracting animals that rip her apart. Later, sober and with his pinched magic cows in tow, Hercules comes across Pyrene’s remains and is suddenly so distraught he weeps and wails her name with such force that it echoes into every crag, bluff and cave, ringing there forever.
Come down from the Pyrenees on the Spanish side, northwest into the autonomous province of Catalonia, track south with the widening rivers where the Ter splits in two. Here the Onyar runs like a bright ribbon by pastel houses snug as Tetris blocks along its sheer banks, reflecting back mosaics of goldenrod and burgundy, robin’s egg blue and lime green on its surface. This is Girona. This is where Gasol started to climb.
Everything is revisionist.
Certainly basketball, with the way a player can be framed by their era or time traveled out of it, to be held against current contemporaries and compared. The biggest changes don’t even need to go back that far, season over season the adjustments bear out like retrograde amnesia. A player’s good, fine or explosive performance the year prior all but scrubbed with a string of bad nights, accusations of sexual assault and domestic abuse against somebody blipped out with one middling game for a struggling team.
Even the numbers, while set, can be angled, assuaged just so to tell a particular kind of story. Stats as bare bones and the rest left to be filled in, a kind of basketball fossil record.
Our brains, too, are unreliable narrators of our own lives. Memories, as you cycle through them, are rewritten a little different each time. Maybe it’s the way the light was hitting someone’s face, the colour of a jacket going from grey to blue, or the feeling of the moment as you were in it, if you were anxious or disappointed in real-time but with every short return your mind makes back there the mood shifts, is smoothed out, and suddenly the scene is a happy one, an exhale instead of a breath held.
There are people in times and places I try not to tread back to that often, for fear of unravelling the already fine filaments they’ve been woven into my memory with in the first place. On the other hand, there are dark roads I take at breakneck speeds regularly, leaning masochistically into the turns of memory there and strengthening them, paving those roads wider every time.
What Marc Gasol was to a Lakers fan, in what turned out to be his (likely) last NBA season, lives mountaintops away from what Gasol meant to someone who watched him burn off the baby fat of his career in Memphis. The big problem in basketball is the same as in life, the way you remember your own tends to form the way forward.
It was Club Basquet Sant Josep where Gasol shrugged on the jersey that would hold the most vital part of him in a wide horizontal striped red and white home, black and white away. He’d played through high school at Lausanne in Memphis, then FC Barcelona for three years, CB Girona was meant to be a stopgap before the NBA Draft, just two years, but something spun tight around his heart, like the ribbon of the Onyar.
When he’s talked about it, which has either been brief because most media, when Gasol played in the NBA, didn’t know, didn’t care, didn’t think beyond the NBA so didn’t ask or because, like the secret little bright spots we all bury deep and are difficult to put to words, he’s been short. But he has said it shaped him.
Gasol’s time in Girona fleshed out his game but drew him more complete as a person, he grew there. When the club, flailing from financial trouble and disinterest, dissolved in 2013, Gasol was already five years into his steady ascendance as a defensive stalwart in the NBA, snug in the familiar rhythm of Memphis. Still, he founded Club Escola Bàsquet Marc Gasol the next year in Girona, in that looming space.
Just youth programs at first, no competitive team. Gasol meant for the club to offer the same formative opportunities it had to him, beyond basketball. Year over year he sketched it wider and eventually brought the league team back, changing the name to take himself out of it just as subtly as he’s always shifted away from the spotlight. Now it’s Bàsquet Girona, and on the club’s website a straightforward mission statement: “A basketball school in Girona”.
I am trying to think of a mortification. Something recent, so that it still has a sting when I wade through the cloudy tendrils of memory to catch it, like a small and ferocious thing whipping its head back around to bite the hand.
In the movie theatre, watching Dune, an ominously quiet stretch of Timothee Chalamet staring into distance, reaching down and over to move my paper shopping bag out of the way of two latecomers and having the three rolls of holiday wrapping paper rip loudly and long through the end of the bag, rip again and again, somehow, each time I tried to adjust the bag. In the dark I looked over to Greg and Dylan for help, for witness, and they were both hunched over and laughing hard, so already that memory’s gone fuzzy bright in how funny.
A horror, then. Being backed into a deep February hot radiator, bare skinned, by an ex who meant me a certain kind of cruel, momentary harm. Or, walking the hallways of a hospital alone, each flickering corridor longer than the last, turning change from coffee over in my palm and a new, suddenly shifting reality of a possible life without my dad over in my head, trying to find the way back to the ICU. Another, in the passenger seat next to Jenner, a car hurtling at us head-on. Or, in the backseat of an Uber when Rachel texted Nick was in an accident.
These are things that still catch and cling. That choke. But even in each reclusive, deeply solitary shroud I can see how time has softened and while each awful instance has been made more exacting, they are also farther away, at arm’s length, something to watch rather than relive.
Gasol in Girona seems to me more of a full circle than a descent down from the peak of a career. As a person who I think it is a reasonable guess to call proud, it couldn’t have been easy being asked to come to California, to the brightest team of all, and watch from the bench as those lights turned garish. Set a desolate cast over an uncertain future.
Where that narrative goes a bit berserk though is when you frame Gasol’s best, or most meaningful minutes being spent on courts that happened to be NBA sanctioned. There’s a tunnel-vision to the ambition of basketball player, or a person who wants to make a job out of playing basketball, in NBA terms. That is, that making it into, and then ascending once in, the NBA as not only a good goal but the only one.
There’s a funny discomfort in the dialogue around an athlete who doesn’t really seem to care about the top in those terms. Who either goes home for the summer to get away, to rest, not to train, or who willingly, readily, cheerfully leaves the league before their time is abruptly revoked or diminished, and they, shuffled to the shoulder of memory, are made to diminish to us as a result of it. Because it’s a rejection of promise, or “promise”, etched out in gilt and grandeur. It’s that rare ability to take a look at the proverbial mountaintop and decide no, the view was actually better from halfway up, or even back down at the bottom.
Gasol also got sick. Spent some of an already callous season straining to catch his breath with Covid. And his family got sick because he got sick. When Gasol went home to Spain this past summer after the Lakers traded him to the Grizzlies and the Grizzlies warmly waived him, aside from playing beside Pau in Tokyo, he stayed there, with the defined and undulating line of the Pyrenees out in front of him like a heartbeat rollicking on a monitor.
The (probably not exactly correct) Google translation of Basquet Girona’s mandate is “a basketball club in Girona and for the whole of Girona”,
The passion to perform this task, and training within, but also beyond the playing field, emphasizing the importance of the values we want to convey to young players so that tomorrow they become great people as well as good athletes.
It turns out that when you come down from the mountain you get the same views you did going up, only now you’ve got all your breath, all that light, time to see where the shadows slip away, time to look.