TREVISO, ITALY — Regrets? He has no regrets.
Well, maybe one.
“In Toronto when I look out of my office on a sunny day I see railway tracks and grey buildings,” said Mauritzio Gherardini, the Toronto Raptors assistant general manager.
“Here, I looked out of my office on a sunny day and saw beautiful girls playing beach volleyball. You see what I gave up.”
No one said an interesting life was without sacrifice.
Gherardini, a unique sort of basketball lifer, has made some sacrifices of his own to become the only European to climb to such a lofty front-office position with an NBA club.
His wife remained in this small Italian city north of Venice, where Gherardini proved himself as one of the sharpest basketball minds in the world while establishing Benetton Treviso as a European basketball powerhouse. His grown children are at university close by.
And he left behind as idyllic a sporting experience as you can find in all of continental Europe, beach volleyball or no.
The Raptors' presence in Treviso is part of NBA Europe Live 2007, a made-in-the-NBA marketing production designed to extend the league's brand internationally.
The Raptors will have trained here for six days before opening their exhibition season with a game against the Boston Celtics in Rome on Saturday. A game against Roma Lottomatica follows on Sunday and then it's off to Madrid for more training and a game against Real Madrid on Oct. 11.
The team arrived in Treviso Saturday morning and got in three practices on the weekend as the club prepares to build on its surprising 47-win season a year ago.
But it's also a chance for the made-in-America members of the team to get a feel for the experiences shared by the seven players on the team who played internationally before the NBA, several of whom either played for Benetton or competed against the club.
“It's a chance for our players to bond in a non-traditional environment,” Raptors president Bryan Colangelo said. “They can see what it's about over here.”
An additional benefit is a first-hand glimpse of the Benetton sports campus, called La Ghirada. In a city of 90,000, where at least half of all the economic activity is someway tied to the multilayered Benetton conglomerate, La Ghirada was the family's “way to build a social link with their community,” Gherardini said.
On a sunny Sunday morning, while the Raptors practised in one of three full-size gymnasiums, there are rugby games being played on a series of emerald green pitches. Later, teenagers are shooting baskets on a pair of regulation-size outdoor courts, on which summer pickup games go well into the night.
Overlooking the courts are the head offices of Verde Sport, the Benetton holding company that operates the three professional clubs – basketball, volleyball and rugby – the organization operates.
Beyond that are the dormitories where athletes recruited from across Europe come to play for the junior clubs, a system that developed Andrea Bargnani from the age of 16 to the stage where he could become the first European taken first overall in the NBA draft.
There's a sports business academy where the top graduate students from across Italy come to study. There's a restaurant and the beach volleyball court, of course, and the offices that house the trophies that Gherardini earned but which he can't take visitors in to see because, “I no longer have the key.”
Gherardini holds the key to the Raptors' international outlook. While it was Colangelo that committed to the strategy, Gherardini, his first front-office hire, has helped make it work.
After his year in Toronto, Gherardini returned to Europe for the summer, but it was no holiday. He left Toronto in July to scout the under-20 European championship in Slovenia; attended the under-19 world championship in Serbia; travelled to Spain and Bulgaria for the under-18 European championship; took in national tournaments in Italy, Greece and Germany and returned to Spain for the European championship before finally coming home to Treviso on Sept. 16 to make the final preparations for the Raptors' arrival on Saturday.
“It was a very busy summer. I was home less than people might think,” Gherardini said. “It's a lot of travelling.”
For a week, at least, he's home and pleased with the opportunity to bring together the two increasingly intertwined aspects of his basketball life.
“It was an emotional moment,” said Gherardini, who left a career in banking to become the general manager of Benetton in 1992.
“To have the success we had here [with Benetton] and then be able to come back with a new team, an NBA team. It's a moment that very few people – no one – has experienced. It was very special.”
