Basketball
González stood 2.29 m (7 ft 6 in), making him the tallest Argentine basketball player in history. He started his career with the youths of Hindú Club de Resistencia at the age of 16 (and already 2.15 m (7 ft 1 in) tall). Subsequently, León Najnudel, then coach of the Argentine national team, recommended the board of Gimnasia y Esgrima La Plata to sign the player for the team's Argentine second division roster. During 1986, González helped Gimnasia achieve promotion to the Argentine first division. The player then signed for Sport Club Cañadense, but saw little action due to an injury that left him out of the fields for 9 months.
In 1988, González was drafted by the Atlanta Hawks in the third round of the NBA Draft, after the American team bought the player's rights from his Argentine team for a 30,000 Argentine australes fee. However, he was unable to adapt to the physical demands of NBA basketball, partly due to a serious knee injury.
Read more about this topic: Jorge Gonzales
Famous quotes containing the word basketball:
“Perhaps basketball and poetry have just a few things in common, but the most important is the possibility of transcendence. The opposite is labor. In writing, every writer knows when he or she is laboring to achieve an effect. You want to get from here to there, but find yourself willing it, forcing it. The equivalent in basketball is aiming your shot, a kind of strained and usually ineffective purposefulness. What you want is to be in some kind of flow, each next moment a discovery.”
—Stephen Dunn (b. 1939)