Andrés Jiménez, Spain's Silver Medalist from Los Angeles Who Draws His Story

Andrés Jiménez was always the one drawing during team gatherings. While the national team prepared for the 1982 World Championship and the Los Angeles Games, he filled notebooks with caricatures of his teammates, which were eventually published in Nuevo Basket magazine. Four decades later, that hobby has become a book: "My Crazy Basketball Story. The Boy Who Never Stopped Dreaming." That book is the starting point for the twelfth episode of Café y Canastas, José María Santiago's channel.

It's not a conventional biography. It's a graphic novel written and illustrated by Jiménez himself, signed as Jimix, the nickname Fernando Martín gave him for his love of Asterix. It has three parts. The first is autobiographical: the comic books from his grandfather's newsstand in Carmona, his late start in basketball at age 13, and his signing with Cotonificio Badalona under Aíto García Reneses when he was 15. The second is a history of basketball told with humor. The third includes sketches and notes from his Los Angeles '84 diary. Pau Gasol writes the prologue.

In the conversation there's time for the book and everything else. Jiménez reviews a career that included Joventut and had its peak at Barcelona, where he won seven league titles and four Copa del Rey championships and where the club retired his number 4. He also revisits the Olympic final against Michael Jordan's United States, in which he was Spain's leading scorer, and many of the anecdotes that don't fit in a stat sheet. His idea, as he has said himself, was to avoid the epic and explain that this "is about working and overcoming situations."

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For those who grew up with that silver medal generation, the conversation is a return to an era. For those who didn't live through it, it's a great way to discover that behind one of Spain's best power forwards was also a talented artist.