Today, Ricky Rubio (33) prefers to leave basketball on the sidelines.

He goes to the gym daily, he does it in Badalona, ??and he also plays golf. He cultivates his hobbies while taking a break from basketball. The passion of his life has drained him.

Ricky Rubio had started to feel bad in July, during the Spanish team’s training camp in Madrid, when Sergio Scariolo’s team was preparing for the World Cup. In those days, Ricky Rubio’s mind had gone to some “dark place”, as he himself has defined it, and his basketball, as magical as it was efficient, went out.

He didn’t play again.

He did not do it in that World Cup with Spain and neither did he do it in the Cleveland Cavaliers, in the NBA that is now running through the regular phase.

This January 4, Ricky Rubio issued a statement. He did it to talk about the dark place. He said he was leaving Cleveland and the NBA. He returned to Maresme with his wife, Sara Colomé, and their son, little Liam (he will turn four this Saturday), and they have all stayed here.

Esteve Rubio, his father, spoke to La Vanguardia yesterday.

He said that his son is now feeling better:

–Ricky is seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. He is already practically 100%. He is very focused on doing things as a family.

–But will he return to basketball?

–For now, he has broken his contract with Cleveland. He had been in the NBA for twelve years, more than enough time. Today he plays golf and goes to the gym every day, he tries to maintain good physical tone… he has put basketball on hold, but he is 33 years old and does not rule out returning. I estimate he has two or three years of good play left.

–And if I played again, where would I do it?

–I would do it here, close to home, I assure you that.

(…)

Esteve Rubio says that his son’s last crisis had caught everyone off guard.

–I found out everything when I found out that Ricky was leaving the national team. The truth is that he was suffering from a very great depression. He didn’t feel like doing anything.

In reality, this was not Ricky Rubio’s first crisis.

His mind had already gone to a dark place in 2016, when his mother, Tona Vives, died of lung cancer. She was 56 years old.

“My scale of values ??collapsed and then I had to rebuild myself (…) I didn’t consider leaving basketball but I did stop enjoying it. Actually, what I wanted to do was disappear. I would have asked for a wild card, but there isn’t one in life. What I did was give myself over to meditation,” Ricky Rubio told this newspaper in 2019.

–The NBA is very hard – Esteve Rubio, the star’s father, now says –: you play three or four games a week. You finish one and you’re on the plane. You wake up in another city and come, play again. Ricky has been supporting all that weight, but in the end he became depressed and considered it was time to return.

The Rubio family spent the Christmas holidays together in Maresme.

–Except in times of the pandemic, this had not been possible. We had to celebrate the dates separately, or get on a plane and spend these days in the United States. This time it has been different. Although, in reality, what Ricky is most excited about today is his foundation.

The Ricky Rubio Foundation has already turned five years old. The entity operates in conferences, organizes aid programs for children affected by cancer and offers talks to children who are at risk of social exclusion.

“Ricky’s mind has always fascinated me,” says his father, who was a basketball player and coach for Mataró for nine years, and who has trained hundreds of young basketball players. Even then, as a child on the court, he saw him do special things, things that would not occur to a child of that age. He looked at him and thought: ‘Those things are not normal for such a small child.’

–What did you see in him?

–Intuition, the ability to be one step ahead of the rest…

(Anyone who has seen Ricky Rubio playing on a basketball court will understand this.)

–The truth –adds the father– is that I see similar things in his son.

(Yesterday, the Council of Ministers agreed to give Ricky Rubio the Grand Cross of Sports Merit, the highest sports distinction in the State).