Career Metamorphosis: Pau Gasol, Jack Of All Trades

Pau Gasol is a man of many trades, his flesh and his bones born from an age that required its sons to house the Renaissance in their very souls.  He is a tortured artist, often overlooked and sometimes misunderstood, who in an effort to support his life's work has had to delve into many laborious occupations, all the while stretching and pulling at his own bone structure and skin, until it reached the height of seven feet, in order to bear his screaming genius.

Pau mastered his up and upper maneuver, not by watching Kevin McHale, but by working  long hours on the decks of tiny fishing ships off the coast of the Iberian Peninsula, casting the nets of human curiosity into the depths of  the sea, hoisting from out of the pure waters the silver-scaled fish that when slit down their bellies, gutted, and dried in the sun reveal the worth of all human endeavors: every beat of our hearts is but a means to an end, or a crab scuttling in its cage.  

With his jumphook, Pau reaches across the stern of his chest and shoulders to play the world's lone violin.  The sound of the ball through the net is that of resin and horse hair weeping with the pain of being mortal.  What other musician has filled so many seats in countless arenas by plucking the octaves of our brains?  This ability to personify the human experience through music was also first learned on the deck of a tiny fishing boat, when, in the eye of the moon, Pau would pluck and fiddle away the night hours, as all the other fishermen clapped and stomped their hands, rattling their bones like tambourines.

But Pau is not always feeding the world with fish or playing its anthem with a violin.  There are times when he disappears like a magician's assistant, and it is unclear if he knew what the magician had in store, whether the sawing in half of his body was done voluntarily or at the behest of his boss' ego and its need to hear the crowd roar and chant Kobe!  Kobe!  Kobe! when it was Pau's torso torn in half that gave meaning to rabbits hopping out of hats.