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"Do you consider yourself black?" At first glance the question that Gregg Popovich asked Patty Mills should be easy to answer. The truth, the technician already knew, was more complex.

Two days after the NBA Finals in 2014, Popovich gathered the Spurs in the video room. But LeBron, his rival, did not appear on the screen, but a black man with a beard and freckles. "Does anyone know what day it is today?" Aron Baynes , also Australian, answered because Mills didn't have words. «It's Mabo Day». Eddie Mabo , the great fighter for the rights of indigenous Australians and Mills' great uncle, in the Spurs since 2012.

Those of San Antonio are the team with the most international flavor in the NBA and from time to time Popovich invites its players to share with the costumes an important part of their culture to make a group. For Mills, it was the story of Mabo, which is also his. The infamies that until recently Australia continued to commit with its indigenous people.

Mills' mother is the daughter of a white man and an aboriginal woman, a mestizo from the so-called stolen Generation : until the 1970s, the Australian government separated these children from their parents and sent them to foster homes with white families to erase the indigenous footprint of their lives. She was separated by her mother with two years. «With everything that happened, my mother does not know how to speak her own [indigenous] language well, so I only understand a part of her culture. That is why I have embraced my father's roots, ”the bodyguard explained in Sports Illustrated .

Two flags

When the Spurs won the ring in 2014, Mills celebrated the title with two flags: the Australian, which he shared with Baynes, and that of the Torres Strait Islands, a set of more than 270 islands located between the Cape of York and Papua New Guinea. The region where his father grew up, of Melanesian descent, where Mabo was from and where he started playing basketball.

He celebrated the ring as he saw in his day the athlete Cathy Freeman , who celebrated gold in the 400 meters of the 2000 Sydney Olympics with two flags: the Australian and the aboriginal. So no, the question Popovich asked Mills was not simple.

30 points to the US

Mills likes to say that he is the "defibrillator" of the Spurs, an electric shock that leaves the bench to revive the team. With Australia he is the undisputed holder and the effect is even greater because, within the choral game of the Aussies , he is the man licensed to play free verse. In preparation for the World Cup, Mills already warned the United States with 30 points, 13 of them in the last quarter, including the last 10 of his team. And the tournament is being an extension of that.

Patty Mills is the third highest scorer in the China World Cup with 22.2 points per game (with 61% in percentage of effective shooting), the best among the selections that are still alive. And it has been decisive in the two duels in which Australia has struggled most: against Lithuania, with 23 points and a triple key at the last minute, and against France, with another 30 and the final robbery in the last possession. Australia's main argument is the collective sense with which it already reached the semifinals of the Rio Games, but if there is a player who can break the game within that script and any other, it is Patty Mills.

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  • Gregg Popovich
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