What We Talk About When We Talk About Steve Nash

"Seven seconds or less" 
(Mike D'Antoni)

Bertolt Brecht said "to improvise you have to know the subject very well" and the protagonist of our history was (and still is) a scientist and the subject is basketball. 
Steve Nash was not simply a basketball player, he was an icon of human resistance.

Seventeen thousand points, ten thousand assists, 191 cm, 80 kg and retired at 41, Nash was born in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1974, from a Welsh mother and an English father. The father was a professional football player who played in South Africa where he had found a good contract and so it is in South Africa of the 80s that Steve grows, a country where apartheid and racial segregation had become unsustainable. For this reason, John, father of Steve, thought that South Africa was not the best place to grow his son and his brothers and then decided to transfer the family to another country of the former Commonwealth, Canada, Victoria in British Columbia, near the city probably, to date, more livable on the planet, Vancouver.

Steve will become a Canadian citizen and in a sound and integrated context grows developing relationship skills that combined with his motor potential, coordination, and absolute dedication will make him one of the most revolutionary players in the history of the game.

If you saw it coming into your home, the first question you would ask is: "he was an NBA player?"
Not only he was an NBA player, Nash was one of the ten players in history to be elected regular season MVP for two consecutive seasons (2005 and 2006) playing a basketball with unique expressive freedom, giving the constant impression of having fun to go so fast up and down on the court and pass the ball with divine touch (he is third in the all-time assists ranking behind the unattainable John Stockton and Jason Kidd).

Like all romantic heroes Nash has never won anything, never played an NBA Finals but this is a totally negligible detail. Its impact, its legacy, has forever marked the development of the game of contemporary basketball. Just think of the three-time NBA champions over the past four years, the Golden State Warriors (with whom he is currently collaborating) and his captain/playmaker, Stephen Curry (also back-to-back MVP); Steph has repeatedly stated that he was inspired by Steve and if you like the Warriors then you will go crazy for the Mike D'Antoni's Phoenix Suns with Nash who has the keys of the game and the absolute freedom to go along with his visions and with a mantra that has become with time, the emblem of the D'Antoni philosophy , "seven seconds or less" that consisted in shoot the ball in the first 7 seconds of the action to get a speed, a spectacular game unique having fun like no team had done before that time. Steve Kerr (at the time General Manager of the Suns) then, on the bench of Golden State, has worked in practice with the "Death Lineup" dominating the NBA in last years. 

Steve Nash was the farthest from the stereotype of the NBA superstar: scornful attitude (on and off the court), thousands of dollars clothes, going around with luxury and sports cars or having lots of girls in every city. Steve was exactly the opposite, not because he was more "good" than the other superstars but because it was just like that: anonymous clothes and as a means of transport in the Big Apple, he has been living in New York for a while, he uses skateboarding.

Nash as a child played hockey very well, lacrosse (an Indian sport that is played with a kind of butterfly net and is of an unspeakable violence) and football. Steve would have been able to play right-footer in a mid-level European Championship without disfiguring, a great friend of Alessandro Del Piero, shareholder of RCD Mallorca in Liga, co-owner of Vancouver Whitecaps in MLS, together with cousin Ezra Holland directed a documentary series of ESPN "30 for 30", called "Into the Wind" on Terry Fox, the runner with a leg prosthesis known for the marathon from one coast to the other of Canada, with the aim of raising funds for the cancer research. With his production company, Meathawk, he also made commercials for Nike, VitaminWater, Toyota and EA Sports. He preferred and still prefers, watching Chelsea-Arsenal than San Antonio Spurs-Toronto Raptors.

So what we talk about when we talk about Steve Nash? Let's talk about the dream of each of us that comes true, of a normal guy that through the immoderate passion for sports, an incredible dedication, a constancy and intensity in training impressive, without having apparently right of citizenship in the NBA, in becomes the MVP twice in a row changing forever the game and the approach of its interpreters.

To quote Marcel Proust in La Prisonnière: "The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is".