Words in memory of the late Chaim Ohayon / Attorney Ohad Greenwald

If Haim Ohayon had a Wikipedia page, it would surely be filled with fascinating details. There has never been another entrepreneur with such output or range of businesses in Israel.

He established a futuristic biotechnology company specializing in genetics, built magnificent hotels, launched a world-class brewery, founded settlements, and even transformed a failing team into the national basketball champions. But what's truly special is that all these initiatives weren't just meant to make money, but were infused with a deep, uncompromising ideology of wanting to develop the North. If the Negev had Ben Gurion, it wouldn't be exaggerated to say that the Galilee had Haim Ohayon.

But if you don't live in the Galilee, or aren't a basketball enthusiast, you probably haven't heard of Haim Ohayon. You haven't heard of him for the same reason he ensured no Wikipedia article was written about him: he never made himself the story. Every time I asked to write about him, he tried to make me give up. "You have plenty of others to talk to," he would say, "let me do instead of chatting."

And despite all the things he constantly did, he never stopped dreaming. For instance, he had a plan, a vision, called "Land of the Galilee and Golan" – he thought it would be appropriate to distinguish the Galilee from the rest of the country, just as Tuscany is distinguished from Italy; and to turn the Galilee into a blue-and-white Tuscany, he planned to take Mahanaim Airport and transform it into an international airport, open a duty-free shop at the entrance to the Hula Valley, issue a credit card exclusively for purchases in the North, establish a new university in the Galilee, and bring the train there.

A few years ago, I joined him for a tour in the North. We met at some landmark between Rosh Pina and Kiryat Shmona, near Road 90, which was actually a point of nothingness, a huge area full of mud and boards and concrete that had begun to take shape into some kind of embryonic structures. When I finally arrived, Haim came out to me with a huge smile: "Welcome to the Galilee's new boutique hotel."

After describing the rooms, spa, and meeting rooms he designated for "congresses" ("Many companies and organizations will come, from Israel and around the world, to hold training sessions and conferences here. Tel Aviv? Only here will people be able to both work pleasantly and enjoy nature and attractions"), he pointed to some rocky grass area, which was a few hundred meters away. "There the real 'Northern Market' will be established, purely with agricultural produce from local farmers," he enthused, "and next to it will be a giant hot air balloon, from which people will see the most beautiful view in the world." I thought to myself, I too, like him, am a walking fantasy.

Haim Ohayon dreamed in business and also dreamed in philanthropy. We met in the middle of the first decade of the 2000s, a few years after he acquired Hapoel Galil Elyon, which was facing bankruptcy. He was the one who made Oded Katash a coach when he was barely 30; he was the one who vowed to base his roster on young, hungry Israelis, contrary to the flood of foreigners and naturalized players that filled the rest of the sport, and invested a fortune in the youth department; he led the historic revolt that led to the cancellation of the series determination system, and installed a Final Four instead. Shimon Mizrachi threatened to take Maccabi and withdraw from the league, but Ohayon didn't blink.

"I have a dream," explained the Martin Luther King of Israeli basketball at the time, "not that I will win the championship, but a dream that I can dream of winning a title. True, in no league in the world is the championship decided by a Final Four but by a series, but in no league in the world is there one team whose budget is several times larger than the budget of all other teams in the league combined. I want," he said, "to at least be able to imagine the promised land. After all, what do we, the sports people, ultimately sell to fans and advertisers? A dream. A chance. In the 39 years between 1969 and 2008, Maccabi won 38 championships, and Israeli basketball apart from Maccabi stopped being interesting and reached a low point. We need to bring back the ability to dream." In retrospect, the Final Four really injected life into Israeli basketball and saved it from total collapse. In 2010, Ohayon realized another dream when his Galil/Gilboa and Katash won the championship after a victory in the final against Pini Gershon's Maccabi.

And in the decade that has passed since, Haim continued to create and build the Galilee and fantasize and dream – not just in sports, in everything. I had already left sports journalism, but although I distanced myself from basketball, I continued to feel close, of all people, to him; even though we corresponded and spoke rarely, I felt that one could always turn to Haim, on almost any matter, and that he would gladly assist. It wasn't something logical, just a feeling. But that's how it was.

In those years, I chose to distance myself somewhat from the basketball world, but I happened to watch the decisive games of the past season. Last summer, after 15 years in which the league saw no fewer than five champions other than Maccabi (one of them, Hapoel Jerusalem, won the championship twice) and many new businessmen flowed into the sport – a direct result of the possibility of dreaming of victory – Ohayon, the head of the opposition, agreed to give up the Final Four and replace it with series again. But at the end of this season, Haim almost laughed last, because three weeks ago his small team did the unthinkable, advanced to the final against Maccabi, beat them in the second game and forced a third and decisive game, until they collapsed in the final minutes, just before recreating the 2010 sensation (to the power of three). Through the television, I looked for Haim in his usual place near the team bench and didn't find him. It seemed strange to me, but I didn't ask him anything.

The night before last, I saw that the Ohayon family was appealing to the public and requesting a donation of blood platelets for Haim. Then I understood. But before I managed to travel for a test at the hospital, they announced that Haim had passed away.

It's a bit strange that Haim's death is so shocking to me. We weren't close friends. We weren't in close contact. Many years separated us. But the fact is that I'm sitting in the middle of the day writing about him, almost five years after I wrote a text of more than a few lines for the last time, on any subject, and the fact is that my heart is broken.

My personal distance from basketball in particular and the sports world in general, which was a big part of my identity and also my main source of income for quite a few years, was only broken in recent years by "The Last Dance" – Netflix's excellent series about the last season of Michael Jordan's Bulls dynasty. In recent weeks, perhaps inspired by watching the series of Maccabi against the Galilee, I watched it for the third time. And when I reached again the episode where the whole world wants to "be like Mike," I remember thinking to myself that if anything, I would want to be like Haim. The most dreaming but most fulfilling, the most brilliant but most modest, the biggest than life but still the most human. Someone who, despite all the enormous things he did, never took himself too seriously.

I didn't make it to the funeral, but I will go to the shiva. On the way from Tel Aviv to Moshav Kanaf, a beautiful settlement in the Galilee that he was one of the founders of and where he was also buried, I will again pass on Road 90, and pass by the Galileon – the fresh construction site where I met Haim at the time, not too many years ago, which of course turned from vision to reality and is already considered one of the most magnificent boutique hotels in the country and a favorite among congress organizers, as Haim planned. And if possible, I will stop a few hundred meters from there, exactly at the point that Haim pointed to, and in his honor I will board the hot air balloon, which floats exactly as he promised, and I will look at the landscape he loved, the most beautiful landscape in the world.

Woe for those who are gone and not forgotten.