In my opinion, Club Sport Emelec is the sports entity in the country that gives the most recognition to those who wrote its history, full of great achievements since June 1925, when a football team with that name was founded between the workers and employees of Empresa Eléctrica del Ecuador, part of the multinational a company authorized to provide public and private lighting in Guayaquil. The great adoration of the Emelecists is reserved for George Capwell.

This American, who arrived in Guayaquil in 1926, gave legal life to that group of company workers, turned Emelec into the most powerful and best organized club in Ecuador, gave it headquarters, a basketball court, a ring boxing, a baseball field, its own stadium with bleachers and grass, enabled the return of football and led it to the first official title in history in 1946, the same day it said goodbye to the city for the first time. that he always considered his own, on the way to Panama.

30 years ago (1993) Emelec won one of its fourteen national football titles. The leaders of the time, the coach and the players who won the crown met in Capwell this Monday (4pm) to celebrate the award of three decades ago with a football match, reception and crystal raising. This celebration reminds me of the first dinner of memory that Nassib Neme scheduled to celebrate the reopening of Capwell, a place that had been abandoned since 1959, when football was played in the recently opened Modelo Guayaquil stadium. Every now and then his rusty door rang for a meeting.

His gallery on Calle Quito, where my gallada and I sat to see Pelé, Julinho, Djalma Santos, Zizinho, Enrique Cantos, dull Mendez, doll Coll, Carlos Alberto Raffo, Simón and Clímaco Cañarte, no longer existed. From there, we were moved by the inflated pictures of Enrique Romo, Alfredo Bonnard, Hugo Mejía, Pablo Ansaldo, Cipriano Yulee and the Argentinian Miguel Ángel Rugil, lion from wembley. As today’s electricians would know, that bleach reached the middle of what is now Quito Avenue. They demolished it in order to widen the aforementioned avenue and facilitate traffic towards the recently opened seaport.

Considering the neglect into which the old stadium has sunk, among some leaders there has been an intention to sell it so that those interested can build a supermarket. When all the papers were ready and the notary calculated his fees, the emelecista wearing the light blue uniform and leading the first team, Otón Chávez Pazmiño, appeared with documents in hand to show that Capwell’s lands were a municipal donation and therefore non-transferable. If the destination changed, Capwell was to return to the city.

In 1989, Nassib Neme began his efforts to revive this stadium so full of history. He received it in 1991. In order to reopen it, he organized a meeting of the club’s former stars. I have fond memories of that event. On the green grass, I hugged Humberto Suárez Rizzo, who played ten of the eleven positions and was twice Asoguayas champion in 1956 and 1957 and national champion in 1957.

Humberto spoke to a tall and well-built veteran. I extended my hand out of politeness, but I didn’t know who it was. “Do you know who he is?” he asked. monkey Suarez. I answered no. “This is the great Felix tarzan Torres,” he told me. Torres was an outstanding goalkeeper from the blue past. Then I hugged Juanito Moscol, my schoolmate, and Walter Arellano, both from Vicente. That night I also met Marino Alcívar, the incomparable Half turn kingthe author of the first goal in the history of the Capwell Stadium, a kind, simple and admirable character.

One of the chapters I remember most from those celebrations was the invitation that my friend Washington Rivadeneira (River) and I received from crack from the time of Ballet Azul and dear friend: Raúl Argüello. In his residence, we enjoyed the attention of Rosita Arias de Argüello and the company of Jorge Caruso — the Argentinian, the unforgettable midfielder of the two-time champion Emelec in 1956-1957. —, Jaime Ubilla, Rómulo Gómez, José Vicente Balseca and Cipriano Yulee, each with an exciting story or holiday anecdote. It was an unforgettable evening.

In 2017 I was also invited to the Remembrance Dinner, the night before the second and final re-opening of that architectural and functional gem that is the new Capwell. In a room located on the ground floor of the San Martín tribune, I held a wonderful meeting of evocations with Argüella, cucho Gomez, Galo Pulido, Raul, Carol Farah, Pepe Viche Balseca, the master Raymondi, Bolívar Merizalde, Rafael Pulga Guerrero and Rubén Beninca, among many others cracks. Thanks to YouTube, these days I was able to enjoy a colloquium on the history of sports organized by the University of Isabel I de Castilla, Burgos (Spain), directed by David Mota Zurd, coordinator of the study of history, geography and art history of the said house of study. Juan Antonio Simón, doctor of humanities with a thesis on the history of Spanish sports and professor at the European University in Madrid, participated in this academic act; and Fernando Arrechea, doctor of sports sciences, master of contemporary history, director of the magazine Football notebooks and secretary of the Center for Statistics and History of Spanish Football (Cihefe).

For David Mota, the history of sports in Spain is “the territory of the pioneers. A vast unexplored space that is still struggling to gain legitimacy and roots. Rigorous research such as those of the authors following us draw a map of a phenomenon with very broad social roots that, surprisingly, hardly attracted the attention of professional historians in our country. For this reason, and unlike other countries in our environment, it is still necessary to justify the choice of this topic, point out its relevance and refute its apparent banality”.

In Ecuador, disdain for history is widespread, with the rare existence of ‘historians’ who hate anything that has the flavor of the past. They are ‘presentist’ and ‘pragmatic’. Everything that existed before they realized that there was life around them is the subject of furious denial. If in Spain there is still room for the fight to give importance to the history of sports, what can we say about our country?

According to David Mota, “to undertake research into the history of sport and to do so with rigor and analytical will is likened to obtaining a sporting record. It implies decision, courage, cheerfulness of judgment and solid preparation on which the theses will be supported”. In the second part of his message, Mota says: “Despite the temptation that sport offers for chronicles and anecdotes, the function of academic analysis is precisely the interpretation, the study of society and its people through a social phenomenon of unquestionable resonance such as football or the Olympic Games”. (OR)