While the Wolves are off in China, I stopped in Salt Lake City on my way home from training camp in San Diego for Ricky Rubio's first game in a Utah uniform on Monday night.
It's strange to see him wearing Jazz green, gold and blue, with the number 3 instead of 9.
It's stranger still to see him what he calls now "grown up." From a distance in the Jazz's practice gym, I barely recognized him: Muscular, particularly through the arms, his hair grown out and often gathered in a man bun, a full beard instead of the wispy one he usually sported in Minnesota.
Appropriate, I guess, that he looks like a mountain man now that he looks out at the Wasatch Range everywhere he goes.
"I can go in a cave and spend days there now," he said, smiling.
He also has a full sleeve tattoo down his right arm of what appears to me to be a lioness and her cub.
"Life is short," he said, "so you've got to change."
JERRY ZGODA
