There are those who go through this life leaving a mark. Javier Imbroda Ortiz (Melilla, January 8, 1961) is one of them. Imbroda has lived to the limit, he has taken advantage of every day of his existence and has squeezed it to the fullest Until he became the Minister of Education and Sports of the Junta de Andalucía, at the hands of Ciudadanos, a party in which he landed by parachute and as a hook pennant in Malaga as a nod to the disenchanted voters of the wide spectrum of the center-right.
Imbroda was a person molded to himself, made to measure. Teacher, coach, writer, businessman, patron, columnist in La Opinion de Málaga, politician… Many lives in just one for a man who dominates, with a skilful language, an impeccable speech and an extraordinary power of motivation, oratory like few others. And that he has managed to convince, beyond the very leader of Ciudadanos, Albert Rivera, to be head of the list in Malaga in the last elections to the Board, thousands of Malaga voters who have promoted him to a position of maximum relevance in Andalusian landscape.
Javier arrived in Malaga in the mid-1980s, still a pipiolo. And to teach at the Colegio Hermanos Maristas, on Malaga’s Calle Victoria, a job he had to develop and reconcile with that of coach of basketball of the school team. It was Damián Caneda, a former Popular Party senator, who recruited him, amazed at how the team that Imbroda directed at the time, La Salle, had defeated Maristas in the Andalusian Championship.
He immediately connected with everyone. Imbroda taught his subjects during school hours and in the afternoons-night he was in charge of directing a team born in a schoolyard who signed one of those machadas that they like so much to take to the big screen. The history of Maristas has not starred in any film, but he could have. Led by Javier Imbroda, with Pedro Ramírez as assistant, Mayoral Maristas gradually overcame obstacles and promoted to the highest category of Spanish basketball in the summer of 1988.
Imbroda soon commanded a project that in 1992 became the current Unicaja, thanks to the merger between Caja de Ronda and Mayoral Maristas, in which he remained as head coach. A wonderful adventure in which Malaga reached the elite in the national basketball, with the runner-up in the ACB League in 1994/95, and their first participation in the former European Cup a year later. The Melillan climbed at the speed of light, and even the newly created Lithuanian basketball team hired him as an assistant coach, hanging an Olympic bronze medal at the 1992 Barcelona Games.
His departure from Unicaja was not easy. Imbroda is, to date, the third coach who has directed the most games in the club’s history: 281. In 1998 changed Malaga for the eternal rival, the Caja San Fernando de Sevilla, where he trained until 2001, also with tremendous success: he was runner-up in the League and Cup in 1999. His progress took him to the bench for the Spanish basketball team. Imbroda reached a peak that took him to the 2000 Sydney Games and to direct Europeans (bronze medal in Turkey 2001) and World Cups, with 133 games directed in the national team, to later coach Real Madrid in the 2002/03 academic year.
They say, especially in sports, that you can also die of success. Maybe something like that happened to Javier. His later projects in Valladolid or Menorca did not come to fruition. On the contrary, some even led to some tension with a lifelong friend like Nacho Rodríguez, a point guard with whom he grew up at Maristas and later at Unicaja. Javier has never left the courts. When he has been asked until recently, he always remembers that his profession is that: coaching basketball teams. He has put aside exotic proposals to lead national teams from the East and, little by little, the adopted “Malagueño” began to enter other paths.
Master in Senior Business Management at the International Institute of San Telmo and Doctor in Educational Sciences at the University of Malaga, Javier developed other concerns, within the business world, for example. inveterate communicatorImbroda is a fan of what is now called coaching. He has written the books ‘If you fear loneliness, don’t be a coach’ (Pearson Education, 2004) and ‘Train to direct’ (Alienta Editorial, 2018).
Group manager, innate leader, in 2010 this restless Malaga went one step further by creating the Javier Imbroda Foundation with the ‘Medac’ project as an active tool for educate in values. The foundation carries out invaluable work in areas at risk of poverty and social exclusion in Malaga, with education, talks, camps and bags with snacks for children with fewer economic resources. And he even defied time to put on his tracksuit again, since he led the Medacbasket basketball team in its creation, which competed in the First National and the EBA League, attracting young players so that they could also continue their studies in High School or in access to university.
Parallel to the creation of his Foundation, and with investments in various companies in the health sector, Damián Caneda once again crossed his path. And in 2011 he recruited him to be the visible area of the Sports Area of the Malaga City Council managing the public company ‘Málaga Deporte y Eventos’, in which he worked for a cycle of four years, during that legislature.
It was four years in which managed, not without some controversy, giving entry to private companies in the public sector, and in which he had numerous scuffles, criticism and the logical battles between those who manage the public and clubs, organizations and athletes in disagreement with his management at the head of the body He was blamed for spending little time in his office at the Palacio de los Deportes . His great achievement was signing the celebration of the Copa del Rey basketball at the Martín Carpena in 2014 or the Transplanted Games. The opening of gyms with private participation and public capital and the privatization of certain services was also one of the great battle horses of that legislature.
A columnist for La Opinion de Málaga for more than a year, in his personal life, Javier married Pilar (Piluca), a native of Melilla, like him. Their children were born from that union, both from Malaga. The couple broke up years later and Imbroda remarried for the second time with Salvadora from Almería.
Prostate cancer
Suddenly, the man from Malaga did not feel at peace with his body. He had severe discomfort when he had to urinate. And that surprised him, because, as he tells in private, he had rarely visited a hospital and almost never had to take medicine. and what discovered after several check-ups in November 2016 was that he suffered from Cancer prostate. A very damaging tumor that was close to taking away the many lives that Javier has lived in just one. The fight was titanic, requiring several surgeries, a long process of drugs and radiotherapy. He saw himself more outside than inside this world, but finally, in December 2017, he was able to write a public letter that quickly went viral on social networks in which he explained his battle against cancer, resolved with an unappealable victory. He had won the most important game of his. And he wanted to keep playing hard, like he always had.
Without ever forgetting his basketball roots, the man from Malaga opted to preside over the Association of Basketball Clubs (ACB), a unique body, full of internal struggles and in whose vote he needed the support of three quarters of the 18 clubs in the League. Imbroda beat all his rivals on that road, but was left without the required majority. After a few months of many kilometers, visiting and interviewing all the clubs, his victory without his award caused him discomfort and turned the page to the world of basketball to look, directly and definitively, at politics.
His jump was to Ciudadanos, a party that connected with his ideas, although different from the one that worked in the Malaga City Council (Popular Party) and with which his brother Juan José presides over the Autonomous City of Melilla. It was Juan José himself who asked him not to attend the elections with Ciudadanos, but Javier was clear about his fate. After just a few months of campaigning, with the approval of the apparatus then led by Albert Rivera, Ciudadanos once again outperformed in the last elections and he won his record parliamentary Andalusian.
In the government team formed by the orange formation and the Popular Party, Javier Imbroda from Malaga was one of the strong men with skills as important and transcendent in this 21st century as Education and Sports. From positions of responsibility in the Junta de Andalucía, he tried to unite that handful of lives that he lives in one with that of millions of Andalusians and Malagans who expect a lot from Javier Imbroda, that teacher who from a schoolyard made everyone dream Malaga basketball.