They joined the cause of saving football and sports in Guayaquil, who were hospitalized in intensive care, connected to a mechanical ventilator, seven intravenous injections in their emaciated arms and the prognosis of death. I, who do not accept rumours, know that professional football is fighting for survival – despite the fact that Barcelona and Emelec are in favor of euthanasia – but that the sport in our city ceased to exist a long time ago and only for commercial reasons. it seems to be active.

Scenarios are reconstructed, for whom, if there is no sport? Decades ago, the popular senior provincial championships in basketball and baseball, which Voltaire Paladines Polo Coliseum and Yeyo Úraga Coliseum housed at full capacity, disappeared. Modelo Sport is called a construction emporium that also manages the premises that belonged to the defunct Sports Federation of Guayas, and today are nothing more than a mausoleum of the country’s former first sports power. Who are the partners of this happy company and how much capital was it created and operating? We want to know all those details soon.

Do you know who are the propagators of the ‘successful model’ of Fedeguayas? Precisely a group of new journalists, “people of little sense or reason” (which is one of the definitions of the word mamerto in Cuba, Panama, Bolivia and Ecuador, according to the Dictionary of Americanisms of the Association of Spanish Language Academies. In Mexico, this is what a conceited person is called. In Colombia, mamerto is a member Communist parties of that country.In Argentina and Uruguay a person who has a habit of drinking alcoholic beverages).

Did the Mamerts decide to build a separate room? They are tired because the so-called “old guard” of sports journalism resents them when they talk nonsense about football. “They have no patience with us,” they said, making faces of exasperated boys. It doesn’t take much to explain why they would want to leave the programs that put them on the air.

After a recent show, I contacted one of them and recommended that he read, study, research, go to the City Library, be curious, better use the Internet to gain knowledge for the benefit of his audience, because journalism also educates (or should). He replied: “Don’t call me again. You are from the old guard and your stories are only of interest to you who are outdated. If you want to learn about football, listen to us.” And he hung up on me. He didn’t notice my wide eyes: we were talking on the phone.

Fernando Vásquez Rodríguez, a professor at the Javeriana University in Bogotá, an expert in semiotics, communication strategies and reading and writing processes, published an article entitled ‘Bearing at ignorance’ in July 2022. He states that “it is convenient to brag about being ignorant. And politicians and influential persons social, show their flagrant deficiencies in knowledge or, most seriously, trivialize those who dare to correct them. And if their ‘mistakes’ lead them to a compromising situation, they get out of the dead end with some tasteless joke or treat their behavior as a minor slip. “This cry for ignorance also affects new generations.”

The words of my interlocutor filled me with doubts. Does the story have any value or will it be lyrical mania? Should we write only about the present? Is it true that the sport in Guayaquil was born when their umbilical cord was cut? They have repeated this so many times that I am tempted to burn my rich archive gathered over 60 years of research and 15 books I have edited on the history of sports in Guayaquil. It would be very painful.

Phil Graham, who was the editor of the magazine The Washington Post, assured that journalism is the first draft of history. What did he mean? As the decades pass where the news has a daily record, over time it almost inevitably turns certain media outlets into recipients of facts. In the case of written media, it turns them into sacred papers, every time we have to go in search of data from the past we look in newspaper archives, in archives, for testimony that allows us to assume or that supports an interpretation.

Let’s think about some ‘truths’ that this small group (mamertos) broadcast to the general public. First: history is waste and should go in the trash. I will rather accept the quote about the value of the past by the French Margarita Yourcenar: “When talking about love for the past, one should be careful, because it is about love for life.” Life is more in the past than in the present. The present is always a short moment, although its fullness seems eternal. When you love life, you love the past because it is the present as it has survived in human memory.”

And that of Julio Estrade Icaza, who wrote: “No matter how much we know what we are today, we will never be able to predict what we will be if we do not know what we were.” That there is no valid extrapolation without a firm grip on the past, in undeniable facts, without a course given by observed collective action that authorizes the setting of a route for the future. And a real story, not a fictional one, gives us a starting point and a guideline.”

You will say whether Yourcenar and Estrada can intellectually compete with the journalists who expose the story, but I give them enough credit to accept them without question. There is another idiotic thesis: “Ecuadorian football was born in 1957, when the national championship began to be played.” According to this nonsense, there used to be competitions in parks and the so-called footballers had to dodge trees to score a goal.

Therefore, it is not true that football arrived in Guayaquil in 1899; that the first match was played in 1900; that the first championship was held in 1908; that in 1920 the Centenario and the crew of the English ship Weymouth played; that in 1921 the sailors of the Cambrian faced the Centenary and North America; that in 1923 the Cambrian Shield dispute was inaugurated, which lasted until 1931; that in 1925 the first foreigner hired as a football teacher arrived: Mr. Herbert Dainty, British; that in 1925 Manuel Seminario joined FIFA and that in 1927 he was appointed advisor and prosecutor of the highest entity in world football. How to achieve this if there was no football in Ecuador?

What sport did Alfonso Suárez Rizzo, Enrique play Muscovite Alvarez and Jorge Chompi Henriques, born in the stadiums of Buenos Aires and engaged in Cuba, Chile, Argentina and Colombia? Wasn’t George Capwell the stadium that opened in 1945? Wasn’t Capwell the venue for the America’s Cup in 1947? Where were the trees at Capwell, the stadium where Alberto Spencer appeared in 1954? Wasn’t Astillero Classic born in 1948? How was this historic event possible if football was not born in Guayaquil?

I hope that the ‘geniuses’ who denied all of the above will clarify this in the new program they will supposedly establish. I will be careful to continue learning from them. (OR)