« I understood that you cannot only get the basketball. You have to take the swimming, the polo », he told Mozzart Sport. He says the proposal came from the club, that it never went further than a thought, and that he supports Partizan Belgrade: « The fans there are as close as it is to this arena. »
Chantal read that in the morning, with her mug of coffee, and she was nodding before the sentence was over.
At our place it’s exactly the same. The key to the council sports hall doesn’t open the basketball only: it opens the badminton, the volleyball, the equipment room and the radiator that has its moods. You want the floor on a Saturday night? Then you take all three sets of lines painted on it and the net you have to wind back down. Nobody has ever been handed a hall just for themselves.
She says it’s the first time she has seen the owner of a big club discover what a club president in the second provincial division (Belgium’s Saturday-night amateur leagues) in the Condroz, near Namur, learns on her first Saturday: basketball never comes on its own. For her it comes with the club bar, the drinks tokens, the minibus that starts and the Easter tournament. Over there it came with a pool and a set of swimming caps.
She isn’t judging the man, she understands him. « I’m not jealous, I’m a club president. » She even thinks he was being sensible: when you don’t know who is going to lock the pool door at midnight, you think about it twice. She knows who locks up. It’s her.
The rest of the interview is about a jersey he would like to see on Nikola Jokic’s shoulders, and about the NBA which, he reckons, might not allow it. Chantal says she gets the idea, but it isn’t her department: she has never had to ask permission for a player, only for the heating.
She’s still got the chairs from the under-10s session to fold away, and the key to hand back.
It’s true, we checked: BasketNews.
