Giving Spanish passport to Lorenzo Brown is pure bullshit
A couple of days ago, the Spanish Basketball Federation took the stupid decision to naturalize Lorenzo Brown. The reaction of Rudy Fernandez, the captain of the national team and also the letter of the Basketball Players Association was against it. And this is a great reaction that proves character and dignity.
I will summarise here all the issues of the naturalization of Lorenzo Brown:
- the American guy never played in Spain and doesn’t have any relation with the Spanish culture. While a normal citizen has to wait a couple of years to obtain a Spanish passport and is required to be married or to have lived in Spain or to have a business there, a basketball player receives overnight the same rights. This is not fair, all citizens should be equal and the law has to apply to all of them in the same way.
- Spain is a country that produced hundreds of excellent basketball players. Even if Ricky Rubio cannot play and Chacho Rodriguez is retired from the national team, there are at least 10 national good point guards to replace them. It is a matter of dignity to play with national players in the national team!
- Even if now, Brown will play with Maccabi Tel Aviv and won’t count as a Spanish player in the domestic league of Spain, I bet that next year his new nationality will be a problem. Because the fact that he is naturalized will create a dispute between the teams like Real Madrid, Barca, Baskonia, and Valencia to sign him as a Spanish player and give them an unfair advantage in the domestic league (supposed to involve more local players).
- Even if he won’t play ever in Spain, the naturalization of Brown will steal a place of a European player in the countries where the number of American players is limited by the federations. Now he is not American, he is European, even he doesn’t even know if Berlin is a city in Serbia or the capital of Ireland!
Written by Gratian Cormos, a Romanian journalist, book writer, life coach and mentor currently living in the city of Barcelona, Spain.
If you are interested to collaborate with his website brainbasketball.net, in order to publish articles, interviews or other features related to basketball, contact now Gratian Cormos by Whatsapp or Telegram at this Spanish number: +34 612414486.
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