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The history of basketball, its development, progress and growth, would not be understood in Europe without the enormous figure of Raimundo Saporta. Educated and intelligent, with an invaluable gift for public relations, he was largely responsible not only for raising the Real Madrid basketball section to unimaginable heights, but also that of this sport throughout the Old Continent.
Right hand of Santiago Bernabéu since 1961, was part of the club’s board of directors for 25 years, 15 of them as vice president. The basketball section was his right eye: under his wing came Pedro Ferrándiz and the glory of the fifties, sixties and seventies: more than 20 Leagues, 18 Cups and 6 European Cups. And extraordinary players like Emiliano, Clifford Luyk, Lolo Sáinz, Wayne Brabender, Walter Szczerbiak, Miles Aiken, Rafael Rullán, Juan Antonio Corbalán (he was also involved in the signings of Di Stefano and Kopa)… A sum and follows of figures who fought face to face for European domination against the Soviet ogre, who fell on more than one occasion before the machinery greased by Saporta.
But before greatness, the beginnings. Hard. Tragic at times. Of Sephardic parents, the great director was born in 1926 in Constantinople, present-day Istanbul (Turkey), to migrate to Paris at the age of three due to the great economic crisis that swept the world in 1929. He grew up in a Europe in tension, the threat of a fascism that advanced across the continent with iron and fire until it reached the gates of the City of Light in 1940. The Jewish blood that ran through the veins of the family pushed the Saportas to move to Spain in 1941. They did it as Spaniards thanks to the 1924 decree of Primo de Rivera, which gave nationality to the descendants of all those Hebrews expelled by the Catholic Monarchs in 1492. The misfortune did not stop with the forced move: his father was killed by a tram the few months after arriving in Madrid.
He was the great promoter of the European Basketball Cup
Travel, suffering, sadness and, finally, peace. And love. Towards his wife, Arlette Politi Treves, and towards basketball. The first, of all life, because both met in Paris; the second, from adolescence, when at the French Lyceum, where he studied, he began to organize the first tournaments that caught the attention of the Colonel Jesús Querejeta Pavón, president of the FEB, who introduced him to the Federation in 1947 when he was already 21 years old (tried before, but lacked legal age) as treasurer. His rise to vice president was almost immediate. He was linked to it for more than 40 years and was the main person in charge of organizing the 1973 Eurobasket in Spain..
With an excellent command of French and a fairly good command of English, and with the ability to greet in up to 40 other languages, Saporta became a basic pillar for any high-level meeting. A quality that took advantage Bernabeu. The European Football Cup (1956) had his stamp as well as the basketball one (1958). Also the Spanish competition with only six teams (or the prestigious Christmas tournament that brought good benefits to the club and huge teams to Madrid). They all started from the same base: confrontations between teams by geographical proximity to lower costs. And they had, in the Spanish case, a barrier known as the Iron Curtain.
The Franco regime prevented travel to the other side of the wall to face the teams of the Warsaw Pact countries. Saporta fought against it. He cost her. Until 1963. That year, Madrid played in Moscow after convincing Fernando Castiella, Foreign Minister at the time, that they could beat enemy ideological. On that occasion, Real fell. A defeat that was avenged two years later when the Whites lifted their second European Cup. It was the first Western European club to seize the continental title from the communist east that had linked six trophies since 1958.
It was not the only mess he solved with the Regime. He interceded with Foreign Minister Gregorio López-Bravo when Bernabéu took off the club’s gold and diamond badge to honor General Moshe Dayan in Tel Aviv in 1973, hero of the Six Day War, at a time when the Franco regime had not recognized Israel and was clearly pro-Arab. And he had to throw in caviar and a book by Dolores Ibarruri (“The Only Way”) to calm Franco down when he traveled to Moscow in the early 1960s to present the continental trophy as an executive member of FIBA. And a lot of diplomacy to explain the visit to don Juan de Borbón when Madrid football went to Geneva to face Servette in 1955.
Diplomacy and style of someone ahead of his time who was linked to sport until his death in 1997 from a kidney problem and who now raises his name to the pantheon of Spanish basketball with his entry into the Hall of Fame.
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