EL MASNOU, Spain – Ricky Rubio is steering his BMW through the winding, hilly streets in this beach town along the Mediterranean, a beautiful woman named Anna tucked into the passenger seat. He bought himself a small house in his childhood hometown -- just two doors away from Anna's, to be close to her. Over a lunch of cannelloni and fish near the water, they celebrated her birthday Thursday.

"Here, people know me as her grandson," Rubio says. "They don't know me as much as the basketball player. I still like that."

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Anna's 74th birthday falls on the day the Catholic Church celebrates the feast of Saint Anne, and she's smiling so brightly as Ricky tells the story, twisting and turning through the narrow town streets. After dropping his grandmother home, Rubio heads to a recreation center in the neighboring town of Alella, where a photographer is waiting to use Europe's best young basketball player in a photo shoot to promote a charity benefiting mentally disabled children.

"Mira…mira," Rubio says to a special-needs boy, whom the photographer is trying to inspire to smile for a picture. Rubio starts holding a basketball out to the boy, waving it in the air, and now the child laughs and laughs and laughs.

"Bueno, bueno," the women watching coo.

Beneath Rubio's floppy hair, scruffy beard, and a sunny Spanish sky, he's wearing a blue polo, shorts, and sandals. The scars on his left knee are unmistakable, five inches where the surgeons cut into him to repair a torn anterior cruciate ligament and and a torn small lateral collateral ligament that ended his magnificent rookie NBA season too soon in March with the Minnesota Timberwolves. The team's trainer, Greg Farnam, has been here conducting Rubio's rehabilitation during the point guard's trip home to Spain. Next week, Rubio returns to Colorado for his every six-week examination with the surgeon.

"I hope by September I can start running again," Rubio says.

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He is forever grateful to return to El Masnou, where his parents live in an apartment overlooking the sea. Life here always seemed a little slower than a few miles down the road in Barcelona, where Rubio played his first professional game as the boy wonder of 14 years old.

Though he came back here and sat courtside this week in Barcelona as Spain played Team USA in a likely precursor to the London Olympic gold-medal game, it turned into one more excruciating exercise in these moments of rehabilitation. From Timberwolves teammate Kevin Love to Rubio's brotherhood with the Spanish national team, the exhibition on Tuesday night made Rubio understand all too well again that he wouldn't get a chance to chase gold in London with the world's best players.

"Hard watching basketball and not being part of it, especially a game like that this week," Rubio says."I felt like somebody was going to have to come grab me, because I'm going to jump out there at any time and try to play.

"But in my mind, there's a goal, and the goal is recovering 100 percent and making sure I'm never going to get hurt again in that knee."

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Four years ago, Rubio was the youngest Olympic basketball player in history at 17 years old, a Spanish ACB league legend holding his own with Chris Paul and Deron Williams and Jason Kidd. Before Rubio left his house for Team USA's 100-78 victory on Tuesday, he found himself drifting back to that Beijing day while watching a Spanish TV replay of the 2008 gold-medal game, when he never did get the full chance to do his part and complete that upset victory against the Americans.

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