On Sunday, after dinner, I called my mother in Indiana. She knows Dwight Howard. Everybody there knows Dwight Howard: eight-time All-Star, Defensive Player of the Year three years running, a ring with the Lakers in 2020, the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. I told her he had just stopped. She asked where.
I said: in Tbilisi, Georgia. Not the Georgia with Atlanta, the other one. Two games with Black Fortress Tbilisi. The first, 12 points on 5 of 8 shooting, 7 rebounds, 3 blocks. The last, on Saturday, an 82-89 defeat to TSU, 10 points, 4 rebounds, 2 assists. Then the club announced it was over.
There was a silence on the line. My mother does that when she’s counting. After the Lakers, in 2022, he went to Taiwan, to a tournament in Dubai, back to Asia, and he tried the BIG3. I explained all this the way I explain it to my U10s on Sunday morning: you play where there’s a basket.
Let me tell you, I know what I’m talking about. In 2000, I arrived in Charleroi with a bag and a one-year contract. A hall with badminton lines, a heating system with moods. Nobody made an announcement when I came, and nobody will when I stop coaching. He, at least, got a press release from his club. That’s already a difference in treatment.
My mother asked, as always, whether anyone had played defence. I said I didn’t know, that the source didn’t say. She reminded me of his NBA numbers: 1,242 games, 11.8 rebounds a game, league leader in blocks twice, in rebounds five times. She said a man like that, you don’t ask who played defence. You know.
I said yes, but he had finished on a seven-point defeat, in a hall I don’t know, with a club press release to say goodbye. Here, when it’s over, you stack the chairs and go home.
She thought about it. Then she said that eighteen seasons in the NBA, followed by more years looking for a basket all over the world, that was someone who loved playing, plain and simple. And that she knew another guy like that, who left for one year.
She said: see?
It’s true, we checked: BasketNews.
