101 Greats of European Basketball

A pioneer gone
too soon
Under the name of Fernando Martin,
there are not many numbers in the
NBA data storage. He played 24 games
with the Portland jersey for a total
146 minutes and had 22 points and
28 rebounds. Looking only at those
numbers, it’s difficult to call the man behind them a
“pioneer in the NBA”, but the case of Fernando Martin
is justified when we look at the year we are talking
about: the 1986-87 season.
Martin, who was born March 25, 1962, in Madrid and
died December 3, 1989, was just the second European
player in the NBA. Nowadays, only the veteran connoisseurs
of European basketball and the NBA know that
the honor of being the first belongs to Georgi Glouchkov
of Bulgaria. In the summer of 1985, Glouchkov
signed a guaranteed contract with the Phoenix Suns for
two years, thus making the history books.
Fernando Martin was the next one but had double
bad luck. First, a constant flurry of injuries prevented
him from playing at his best and, second, he suffered
from a total lack of trust for European players on the
part of his coaches. That is something that many
others like Vlade Divac, Alexander Volkov, Sarunas
Marciulionis and Drazen Petrovic suffered later, too,
even though they got more opportunities to show
their skills.
The signing of Martin by Portland changed the way
the NBA was treated in Spain. Until then, newspapers
published very little content about the league, television
didn’t even air games and the best-known NBA
players were nobodies in Spain. With Fernando Martin,
everything changed.
A star in Damascus in 1979
I remember the name of Fernando Martin well because
I heard it for the first time at the U16 European
Championship 1979, which took place in Damascus,
Syria! The Middle East was then part of FIBA Europe.
Luka Stancic, the Yugoslav head coach, led his team
to victory in the final against Italy by the score of
103-100. However, Stancic talked to me about “some
Fernando Martin,” the big man of the Spanish team
which, coached by Aito Garcia Reneses, won the bronze
medal. In the first game, which Yugoslavia won by only
one point, 89-88, Martin scored 23 points and overwhelmed
all the big men of the Yugoslav team. With
a total 123 points (17.6 average), Martin was the best
Spanish scorer and one of the outstanding players in
the tourney that gave European basketball other greats
such as Antonello Riva (Italy), Valeri Tikhonenko (USSR),
Uwe Blab (Germany), Zoran Cutura (Yugoslavia) and
Andres Jimenez (Spain).
One year later, at the U18 European Championship
in Celje, Slovenia, I could see the enormous potential
of Martin with my own eyes. In the first game
against Israel, he scored 37 points, against Belgium
18, against France 11, against Czechoslovakia 34,
against Bulgaria 25, against the USSR 33. He would
put up 30 points against Bulgaria in the game for the
bronze medal that Spain lost 96-90. He was a dominant
center despite being just 2.05 meters tall. His
broad shoulders, long hands and rebounding abilities
made him play bigger than his height. His phys-
101 greats of european basketball
Fernando Martín
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