La alpargata sobre el tejado de zinc

THIS GAME'S THE BEST (George Kark, 1997):

I really enjoyed my time and the people I met in Spain. There were crazy experiences and situations, but they were filled with passionate, good people I will never forget.

Clearly, one of the most emotional periods of my life was the three days following the death of our star player Fernando Martín. His death will be as vivid a memory to me as anything I have ever gone through.

Fernando died in a car accident on his way to a game on a Sunday. But when we showed up at the arena and learned of Fernando's accident, we canceled the game. It felt like a national day of mourning. Fernando was the Spanish basketball equivalent of Michael Jordan, in terms of his popularity within the country. As a person, he was one of the most powerful people I've ever been around.

He was a big man, about six-eight, two fifty. Shoulders wide, waist thin. Women thought he was gorgeous. He always wore a little beard. Dark eyes, black hair, a really attractive man. We'd walk into a room, and everybody would pay attention to Fernando. He had movie-star looks and the reverence of Julius Erving.

His power was in his eyes and the way he carried himself, his demeanor. He appeared fearless. For all that, he was not a great basketball player. But he was a great winner. He loved doing the dirty work. He had played in the NBA for a year in Portland. He was the best player in Spain and Portland brought him over, but it did not work out, and he missed Spain so he went back.

Well, on Monday morning after the accident his coffin was laid out in our stadium. The stadium, called the City of Sport, seats probably eight thousand. We as a team were the first people to view his body. It wasn't pretty because the accident was brutal. It was the first time I met Fernando's mother, who sat there and spoke Spanish to me for quite a while. I guess she did not know that I did not understand Spanish. Fernando's brother, Antonio, was interpreting, telling me that Fernando loved me and thought I was the most exciting coach he'd ever played for. Antonio also was on our team. It was just an incredibly emotional moment. She looked at me and said, "My son is your son."

That night they opened the stadium for the viewing of the body. The mass was around eight o'clock. It took forty-five minutes for the service. The building was packed. After the mass, the crowd stood and gave Fernando a forty-five-minute standing ovation. They stood there and clapped for forty-five minutes straight. It gave me goose bumps.

Then came the public viewing. People filed by the casket until six o'clock in the morning. I was told by the players that Fernando was compared to a James Dean-type figure. He was a rebel in real life, and when he died everybody related to him and respected him.

There were twenty buses of people headed to the cemetery for his funeral, including the Real Madrid soccer team, the Spanish football association, the basketball association, and three or four teams that brought their players and clubs to honor Fernando. The day began with a little religious ceremony in which his body was christened, and then the body had to be taken out to the hearse. But no one had arranged to carry out the casket. And so it was carried out of the building on the shoulders of our players, and it was weird, because they carried it up above their heads, as if they were lifting him up to a higher being.

The buses made about a ten-mile procession to the cemetery. The entire route was lined with people waving, screaming, holding signs. When we got to the cemetery, the entrance had an arch that the buses could not get through. By the time twenty busloads of people had walked from the entrance to the grave site, the casket was already in the ground. I said to Cathy that Fernando was just sitting up there in heaven laughing at all of us wandering through the mud in this huge cemetery looking for his grave site. It was the only thing that was funny about that day.

I told the team to meet after the ceremony at the hotel. I remember sitting with Chechu Biriukov, who was one of Fernando's good friends, and Quique Villalobos and Jose Llorente, who both spoke very good English. The four of us just sat there. They were all crying and telling stories, and Chechu was cussing out Fernando, saying, "Stubborn SOB . . . you shouldn't have been driving so fast." The police said Fernando was going over a hundred miles an hour when he wrecked; his car flipped seven times.

We had a game that night, and I said to the team, "If you do not want to play, you do not have to play." The players said, "If we did not play, Fernando would think we were a bunch of pussies. We've got to play."

For all the bravado, no one felt like playing. We had no preparation because we had been at the funeral.

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