You may all remember Sofoclis Schortsanitis, the big Greek center who destroyed the USA paint with pick-and-roll plays in last year´s world championship. You may have remarked that his playing time with his team Olympiacos has dramatically decreased this year. But there are some news on him.
In fact, according to the different Greek newsportals, Olympiacos decided to stop paying Sofo but did not release him. The deal, which is unilaterally decided by the club states that Schortsanitis will not get paid but he will still belong to the club. His contract, which runs untill 2010 will not be ended.
What happened? Olympiacos wanted Sofo to move to Switzerland to a hospital to cure his weight problems. Schortsanitis sais that he will only accept if he will get free after this season. Which has been refused by the board of his team. So the next move was to stop him paying.
Who is now in the right situation is difficult to say. One the one hand, you have a clearly overweight player who refused to stay under 150 (!!!) kg and on the other hand, you have a team whose employee refuses to accept an imposed medical therapy. Nobody is winning at the moment, as Sofo cannot destroy Olympiacos´opponents and he is not getting paid anymore.
As Christmas is approaching and Schortsanitis will probably not stay with water and bread only, the situation will probably worsen over the holiday period. Come on, we just want to see actions like this.
[youtube 3Ulu6IKRGqo nolink]
Crazy situation.
But I understand both sides: Sofo’s mass in one of his weapon….and on the other hand, hard to believe a pro baller can endure a season with this weight.
Sofo himself stated on his website http://www.bigsofo.gr that he never refused to go to the special clinic in Switzerland. He also did not link the stay in the clinic with a release of his contract with Olympiacos.
Hey guys – ClipperSteve here. Obviously we’ve got a vested interest in Sofo at ClipsNation. Can anyone give me more from Sofo’s post from Dec. 22 on his website? It’s not translated into English on the site, and unfortunately I only speak French and German, but not Greek.
Does anyone know if he’s actually hurt, or just overweight?
[...] e porta sfiga fra i tanti nel mondo della pallacanestro) o Big Sofo, è stato mandato a perdere un pò di peso dal suo team! Per fotuna che ci pensa Big Baby a tenere alto il buon nome della categoria dei [...]