I was disgusted with basketball and everything. It led me to depression and to that heart disease. I can greet him, but to me the same value of this pillar here is him. The worst decision in my career for me was Barcelona, said the former Croatian national basketball team member Mario Kasun (42), who has been absent from the media for a long time, and now told in the Podcast Incubator why he said goodbye to basketball when he was only 28 years old.
In his career, Kasun played for European greats such as Barcelona, Efes Pilsen, Montepaschi and for the NBA team Orlando Magica.
After coming to Barcelona from the NBA league, Kasun quarreled with the then coach Duško Ivanović because he told him that he was not going to the European Championships because of his weight.
– I met wonderful people, but it was perhaps my worst basketball decision. That practically led me to death and stop playing basketball at 28 years old. Everyone told me that Dusko Ivanovic was a fool, a psychopath and an idiot. He is an extraordinary person off the field, but his blinds were lowered on the field – said Kasun, after which he added:
– Dusko Ivanovic told me that I am not in shape and that I go to the hill every morning and run an hour before training. I lost 12 pounds in seven, eight days, I halved. At first he spoke to us in ours, and later only in Spanish.
Kasun says Ivanovic forced him to play injured. Our basketball player crashed in the middle of a game.
– He was making fun of me. He sent me to another team, and then it happened with my heart. Top game in the Canary Islands, I’ve never been better, I feel great, and this one is screaming, it’s *** all on the list. I got some small punches to the chest and it just made my eyes dark and sleepy. They put me on a stretcher and in the hospital, he recalled.
Kasun had to be awake during the operation, and Ivanović asked him to return to training after a week.
“They don’t put you to sleep there, they kill your body.” You have to be awake. Routine surgery, nine o’clock! I fall from fatigue, and he slaps me not to fall asleep – he said and concluded:
– Recovery lasted seven days, Dusko, as much as he loved me, made me come back in a week. Now that I think about it, I’d drive him away at three o’clock