• Even the kitchen Madrid, great champion or too rich?

Lorenzo Alocén Castán

, who died this Tuesday at the age of 84, deserves a broader and more generous mention than that of "author of the famous autocanasta" that -perhaps- allowed Real Madrid to avoid elimination in the 1961-62 European Basketball Cup and thus reach their first European final.

The Aragonese pivot, 1.94 meters tall, was the tallest Spanish player in that 1962 squad led by

Pedro Ferrándiz

, and he reflected well the reality of the post-war generation, tiny and probably malnourished in childhood, with the one in which Hispanic basketball tried to rejoin the top European positions after that distant glory of a silver medal in the first European, in 1935 -in Geneva, also the venue for that 1962 European Cup final-, with a defeat by 24- 18 against Latvia, which gives an idea of ​​how the sport had changed since the 1950s around the world.

The negative feat, if you will, of Alocén was to execute the order of the diabolical Ferrándiz in the last moments of his first leg match in Varese against Ignis, with a tie at 80 and a fight to jump.

The idea: to score in their own basket and lose 80-82 instead of going into overtime and losing by more.

Back then football was still being copied, and playoffs were decided by goal difference, or points.

Ferrándiz was clear: small defeat in Italy, we can recover at the Frontón Fiesta Alegre.

And indeed, with a difference of nearly 20 points in the second leg, there were no problems -and perhaps with an extension in Varese there would have been none- but the fact is that the self-basket changed the rules in Europe, and since then whoever makes a little play like that is eliminated.

When Madrid faced Ignis and, in the final, the Soviet Dinamo Tbilissi, Alocén waited patiently on the bench for the accumulation of fouls by the two Americans on the team,

Wayne Hightower

and

Stan Morrison

, to allow him a few minutes on the pitch. .

But as he demonstrated by proclaiming himself the top scorer in the Spanish league after his return to Helios Zaragoza or by participating in the 1968 Mexico Games, which marked Spain's return to the world elite, Alocén was much more than that.

He was a center - tiny, yes according to today's guidelines - the protagonist of the world renaissance of Spanish basketball.

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