Ron Mathews is a basketball coach from the
US currently living in the UK. Ron has been playing ball for the majority of
his life; he went from playing in High School to College to Semi-Pro in Portugal;
Portugal is one of four places Ron has lived, the other three places include America
where he was born, Mexico where he lived for a few years, and now
England where he currently lives.
Ron aged 49, first
started playing basketball when he was eight and he’s loved it ever since …’I
started playing for a peewee team in my neighborhood, as I grew older I began to
progress in the sport and then gradually moved on to play for better teams’. When
Ron used to play basketball he used play point guard. When he was younger he
grew up watching NBA players like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Dominique Wilkins and
Michael Jordan, ‘These guys have been a real inspiration to me’. Ron’s current favorite team is Miami Heat; his
favorite player is LeBron James.
I
asked Ron if he’s always wanted to go into a career that involves basketball
and he said no, he said that when he was about eleven he wanted to be a rapper
so he started rapping, he said that that phase lasted for about three to four
years, realizing he wasn’t a good rapper he decided to stop and pursuit a career
in basketball. ‘Being a basketball coach is one of the most rewarding things
I’ve ever done; I love the proud feeling I get when you’ve been working with a
group of guys for a while and then when you finally see them on the court in a
game and they win, I just love that feeling ’.
There
are many injuries that you can get from basketball; Ron said ‘Over the many
years that I have been playing for I have never had a serious injury like
getting a broken leg or arm, I guess I’ve been lucky in a way’. Ron’s injuries
have been to the kind that will heal up over a few weeks; he’s had tendinitis
in his leg which you get from jumping too
much or from frequently scooping and bending, it can be hard on the muscle,
Ron has suffered from back and shoulder pains, shoulder pains occur when you repetitively shoot over and over.
I
asked him ‘if you were to some up basketball using
one positive word, what word would you use?’ he simply said ‘Great’.
