An American dream back and forth

Sometimes getting what you are looking for can give rise to an uneasy feeling of jumping into the void. A vertigo like the one that journalist Gonzalo Vázquez felt on October 18, 2009 when he left the consular section of the United States embassy in Spain. As he left the building behind, he had in his hands the visa to fulfill a dream—to go cover the NBA—and yet, it seemed like the world was beginning to fade away. At least the one he had known up to that point. In that small moment of anxiety he was aware of the depth of the roots that united him to his surroundings. That it was not easy to make the decision to change your life. A few days later, however, he would find himself sleeping in a Harlem shelter, in doorless rooms with four bunk beds and with a quite different feeling: that of enthusiasm for an adventure that had just begun.

Journey to the center of the NBA(JC) is the book in which Vázquez recounts his experience of more than two years living his particular American dream: with New York as the center of operations, a house near a subway station with a direct line to Madison Square Garden and a NBA accreditation that arrived in silence, but it arrived. That first time in the place he had thought about so many times left him paralyzed until reality hit him. Suddenly, he found himself inside the Clippers locker room, who were visiting the Knicks that day. Suddenly, he found himself shaking hands with Mike D’Antoni, then coach of the New York team. Suddenly, he realized that life, live, happened much faster than through a screen. And that the best trick for doing journalism was still going to the places where things happen and gathering information from the people who are involved in them. A chronicle of a personal and professional adventure through which characters and situations parade that define a sport and a country of enormous contrasts.

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