Domingos and She
This here ball helped me a lot. She or her sisters, right? It’s a family to whom I owe a debt of gratitude. In my time on earth, she was the key. Because without her nobody plays at all. I started out in Bangu club’s factory. Working, working, until I met my friend here. And I was very happy with her.
I’ve seen the world, traveled a lot, had many women. Women are a pleasure too, right?
From an interview by Roberto Moura
Goal by Atilio
It was 1939. Nacional from Montevideo and Boca Juniors from Buenos Aires were tied at two goals apiece and time was running out. Nacional was on the attack; Boca, in retreat, was holding them off. Then Atilio García got the ball, faced the jungle of legs, and opened up a path on the right, gobbling up the field, adversary by adversary.
Atilio was used to getting kicked. They would go after him with everything they had; his legs were a map of scars. That afternoon on the way to the goal, he was tackled hard by Angeletti and Suárez and had the pleasure of eluding them both twice. Valussi tore his shirt, grabbed him by the arm, and kicked him, and hefty Ibáñez blocked his path when he was running full tilt. But Atilio was unstoppable. The ball was part of his body and his body was a tornado, knocking over players as if they were rag dolls, until at last Atilio let the ball go with a terrifying smash that nearly burst the net.
The air smelled of gunpowder. Boca players surrounded the referee, demanding he disallow the goal because of the fouls they had committed. He paid them no heed, and the players left the field, indignant.
The Perfect Kiss Would Like to Be Unique
Quite a few Argentines swear, hand over heart, that Enrique García was the one. Known as “Bandyleg,” García played left wing for the club Racing. Just as many Uruguayans swear, fingers crossed on their lips, that it was Pedro Lago, “Muleteer,” a striker for Peñarol. It was one or the other, or perhaps both.
Half a century ago, or a little more, Lago or García scored a perfect goal, one that left his adversaries paralyzed with rage and admiration. Then he plucked the ball from the back of the net and with it under his arm he retraced his path, step by step, dragging his feet. That’s right, raising lots of dust to erase his footsteps, so that no one could copy the play.
The Machine
In the early 1940s, the Argentine club River Plate had one of the best soccer teams of all time.
“Some go in, others come out, everyone moves up, everyone falls back,” explained Carlos Peucelle, one of the parents of this brood. The players traded places in a permanent rotation, defenders attacked, attackers defended: “On the blackboard and on the field,” Peucelle liked to say, “our tactical plan is not the traditional 1–2–3–5. It’s 1–10.”
Even though everyone did everything on that River team, the forward line was the best. Muñoz, Moreno, Pedernera, Labruna, and Loustau played only eighteen matches together, but they made history and they still make for conversation. These five played by ear, whistling to each other to make their way upfield and to call to the ball, which followed like a happy dog and never lost its way.
People called that legendary team “The Machine” because of its precision plays. Dubious praise: these strikers had so much fun playing they’d forget to shoot at the goal. They had nothing in common with the mechanical coldness of a machine. Fans were fairer when they called them the “Knights of Anguish,” because those bastards made their devotees sweat bullets before allowing them the relief of a goal.
Moreno
They called him “El Charro” because he looked like a Mexican movie star, but he was from the countryside upriver of Buenos Aires.
José Manuel Moreno, the most popular player on River’s “Machine,” loved to confound his opponents. His pirate legs would strike out one way but go another, his bandit head would promise a shot at one goalpost and drive it at the other.
Whenever an opponent flattened him with a kick, Moreno would get up by himself and without complaint, and no matter how badly he was hurt he would keep on playing. He was proud, a swaggerer and a scrapper who could punch out the entire enemy stands and his own as well, since his fans, though they adored him, had the nasty habit of insulting him every time River lost.
Lover of good music and good friends, man of the Buenos Aires night, Moreno used to meet the dawn tangled in someone’s tresses or propped up on his elbows on the counter of some café.
“The tango,” he liked to say, “is the best way to train: you maintain a rhythm, then change it when you stride forward, you learn the patterns, you work on your waist and your legs.”
On Sundays at midday before each match, he would devour a big bowl of chicken stew and drain several bottles of red wine. Those in charge at River ordered him to give up his rowdy ways, unbecoming of a professional athlete. He did his best. For an entire week he slept at night and drank nothing but milk. Then he played the worst match of his life. When he went back to carousing, the club suspended him. His teammates went on strike in solidarity with this incorrigible Bohemian, and River had to play nine matches with replacements.
Let’s hear it for partying: Moreno had one of the longest careers in the history of soccer. He played for twenty years in first-division clubs in Argentina, Mexico, Chile, Uruguay, and Colombia. When he returned from Mexico in 1946, River’s fans were so anxious to see his daring thrusts and feints that they overflowed the stadium. His devotees knocked down the fences and invaded the playing field. He scored three goals and they carried him off on their shoulders. In 1952 Nacional in Montevideo made him a juicy offer, but he chose instead to play for another Uruguayan side, Defensor, a small club that could pay him little or nothing, because he had friends there. That year, Moreno stopped Defensor’s decline.
In 1961 after retiring, he became coach of Medellín in Colombia. Medellín was losing a match against Boca Juniors from Argentina, and the players could not make any headway toward the goal. So Moreno, who was then forty-five, got out of his street clothes, took the field, and scored two goals. Medellín won.
Pedernera
“The penalty kick I blocked is going down in the history of Leticia,” a young Argentine wrote in a letter from Colombia. His name was Ernesto Guevara and he was not yet “Che.” In 1952 he was bumming around Latin America. On the banks of the Amazon, in Leticia, he coached a soccer team. Guevara called his traveling buddy “Pedernerita.” He had no better way of praising him.
Adolfo Pedernera had been the fulcrum of River’s “Machine.” This one-man orchestra played every position, from one end of the forward line to the other. From the back he would create plays, thread the ball through the eye of a needle, change the pace, launch surprise breakaways; up front he would blow goalkeepers away.
The urge to play tickled him all over. He never wanted matches to end. When night fell, stadium employees would try in vain to get him to stop practicing. They wanted to pull him away from soccer but they couldn’t: the game refused to him let go.