Something strange must have happened in the mental processes during the development of the generations. Mine has inherited from its predecessors the cult of education, enlightenment and memory, three aspects of vital development that are now completely out of use. We guys from Buenos Aires read books, magazines and newspapers; my father bought various and sports magazines. So I was able to browse the collections Selections, Bohemia, O’Cruzeiro, Rico Tipo, Life in Spanish, El Gráfico, and the indispensable children’s publications Peneca, Pif Paf and many others.

In 1947, a memorable team arrived in Guayaquil, Sporting Tabaco, from Lima. I never forgot the name of the Peruvian goalkeeper: Garagate. A long time ago, looking through newspapers from 1947, I found photos and information about the arrival of the southern team and there was Garagate. Then I realized that at the age of 5 I was already somewhat fluent in reading.

Today’s sports journalism is mostly at a distance from my three or four generations. His understanding of sports is rooted in marketing, the transfer business, the role of a representative and businessman, the sale of T-shirts, and the big business of television. In his mind, there is no room for sports as a school of civic education, protagonist ethics, love for currency, professional responsibility, the duty to respond to those who pay the ticket through the show, the aesthetics of a good game.

Everything is hidden in this money fair for millions, in disrespecting the public, in fixing the results (in 2020 we saw a key game of the national tournament between two teams that agreed not to attack each other), the refusal to go in search of victory by grabbing in their own port , in the vicious use of resources inside or outside the regulations, in the never gratuitous deification of mediocrity and a furious disdain for anything that has to do with the past.

All his pedestrian ‘philosophy’ is nested in these concepts: the only thing that counts is the result; love for a shirt does not exist, what is privileged is love for bills; the old journalists knew nothing about tactics; players from the past could not play today’s football; now it’s not worth knowing how to play, you need to know how to run; the technician who counts is the balanced one, i.e. the one who never takes risks; Guardiola is an idiot, Mourinho is the smartest; football did not exist before I was born; journalists who insist on talking about the past are romantics and delusional, not to say idiots. All this is happening in Ecuador, because I have no news that these freaks exist in other countries.

gravediggers of history

That small group that flooded the radio booths and television studios (this does not happen in the newsrooms of print media) today are effective agents of chaos, distorters of reality and professional gravediggers of history and traditional values. Our age, blinded by the skills of technology and indifferent to reflection and study of the past, loses the meaning of the symbols and realities that make up its present.

“The present tense and the past tense – said TS Eliot, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature – are present in the future tense. And the future in the contained past. True, there is no more persistent destroyer than time. But it is also true that memory in us keeps alive what does not deserve to be destroyed. For Luis Buñuel, the film director, “our memory is our coherence, our reason, our action and our feeling. We are nothing without her.”

Christine is called the main character and the narrator in the novel Before I Sleep, by the British Steven J. Watson. “When I sleep, my mind will erase everything I did today. I will wake up tomorrow as I did this morning: thinking that I am still a child, thinking that a life of possibilities is ahead of me. Christine has recurrent memory loss, forgetting all knowledge of her past day by day. This is why he wakes up every morning not knowing where he is or how he got there. Watson says he realized that memories are the root of who we are. “I was struck by how fundamental the ability to recall our experiences is to our sense of self, how unsettling it is to be stuck in time, without knowledge of one’s own past.”

What do the visible representatives of the Idiot Generation, as the Argentinian writer Agustín Laje calls them in the title of his book, want? Simple: they want us to forget everything beautiful that we saw in our childhood and youth. Let’s tear down all the memories that live in our minds of the days of the old Capwell Stadium or Modelo. To change the admiration for the old Clásicos from the Shipyard, throw them away and replace them with the imitation that Díaz is trying (they will renew his contract and will play until 2070), Leguizamón, Piñatares, Villalba, Portocarrero, Preciado.

Classic cemented greatness in the prowess of Barcelona’s Pibe Sánchez and Juan Benítez and Emelec’s Eladia Leiss and Chompi Enriques; in the hands of Enrique Romo and Tarzán Torres; in the elegance of Jorge Cantos and Jorge Caruso; in the duels of Loco Balseca and Pollo Macías and the exciting goals of Cholo Chuchuca and Flaco Raffo. The spectacle of the Five Wise Men facing the Iron Curtain will never be seen again. Stars like Nivaldo, Helinho, Maggereger, Reinaldi, Tiriza, Magri, Moacyr, Pepe Páes, Toninho Vieira, Beninca, Trobbiani, Insúa will never come to our football. The days before yesterday were the times when every football player in the classics risked his life because a silk T-shirt or jersey was the “holy mantle”.

The absurdity of DT

For Edgardo Martoli, an Argentinian writer and journalist, “easy and disproportionate earnings have twisted the codes: now players, national team members and leaders are rich, and clubs are poor or in debt. Technical directors have become more relevant figures than crackers, something as absurd as the fact that in Formula 1 the chief mechanic of the Mercedes Benz team was better paid than Lewis Hamilton or that in boxing Angelo Dundee received more than Cassius Clay for each fight. Football, on the other hand, which could be choreographed as a dance, because it is a collective sport, renounces skill, genius, talent and beauty, to become a stain, a pile, a business without class and in open lie like a gangrenous wound, which is nothing other than the death of body tissue (football player) as a result of lack of blood (talent) or serious bacterial infection (leaders, etc.)”.

And I’m talking about Ecuadorian football. Because I maintain a passion for well-played football, just as I have seen it since I first went to the stadium. And I enjoyed the pleasure of watching Messi, Iniesta and Xavi’s Barcelona yesterday and Bernardo Silva’s Manchester City today. It all has an ingredient of beauty and genius that I have enjoyed for 71 years. (OR)