2024-04-27 03:01:00
“I was 12 years old and I believed Gordo Muñoz,” remembers the journalist and writer Marcelo Izquierdo. The dictatorship had brainwashed me. I didn’t know that thousands of people were murdered, tortured and disappeared in the country. And the official propaganda had awakened in me a nationalist feeling that I was proud of.” Izquierdo was a teenager in the 70s for whom the most important thing was soccer. Above all, Racing. He tells it in his new book, San Diego – the worst team in the neighborhood (Al Arco Editions). Intimate text in which he gives a glimpse of how soccer passed through him while at the same time he went through life: the neighborhood, his friends, the soccer team (San Diego) that was formed in the streets of Devoto and that lasted until the beginning of the 2000, when its members, now adults, got together to play on the fields of Atlanta, in Villa Crespo. Meanwhile, there were kids who “sold” themselves to other better teams or moved from the neighborhood; the school, the first girlfriends, the teachers, the family, the relatives who left, the dictatorship and the Malvinas.
Izquierdo faces his memories through 85 intimate stories that read like a novel. Added to the facts is the look of someone who now, in his mid-50s, has a career in journalism and another as a writer that leaves him more than well off. They tell of his previous books, Jailers (from 2014, about the Lamadrid club) and the formidable Tita, 100 years of the mother of the Academy, biography of Tita Matiussi, Racing’s most famous fan.
San Diego, Izquierdo explains, was a team of friends who generally played poorly. They started on the sidewalks, then they added the streets when there were not so many cars passing by and then they chose their stable field on the grass bordering General Paz Avenue. He wasn’t one of the best. Although to encourage him they called him “the White Pelé”. He once tried to play in a club. He tried himself in River, Chacarita and his beloved General Lamadrid but he didn’t stay. He thought he had better luck in Estudiantes de Buenos Aires. But he had to stop shortly after entering due to the mistreatment of a group of classmates who targeted him for being the new and the youngest. When he was pushed off a stand during practice, he ended up in the club’s infirmary and did not return.
“Adolescence threw the dictatorship in my face,” he writes in a chapter in which he tells of the economic blow that his family suffered then, who to escape opened a kiosk where he would work with his brothers while the friends bar was closed. divided between the awakening of rock, first loves and, always, football. He could have been from Independiente because of an uncle, but he leaned towards Racing even though those were the worst sporting years of the Academy. They were times of The graphic, the magazine that he loved to read and that his uncle Lolo bought. “It was the time when Independiente raised Libertadores after Libertadores and the Academy began the debacle that would end with relegation in ’83,” he says.
During those years he also started secondary school. Climate rarefied by the dictatorship. Short, neat hair, above the collar of the shirt. “Everyone is formed, everyone is quiet, everyone is scared. “Discipline above all.” And the sexual debut together with his friends, when they went to see Olga, a prostitute who served them one by one in a hotel in Almagro. What followed was a tenuous rebellion, consistent with the time when the dictatorship sent the kids to the Malvinas. Democracy returned and with it the recitals in Obras and the celebration of the ’86 World Cup: “Maradona was the God who guided Argentina to Heaven.”
There is an epilogue left for the end in which we realize what happened to the lives of each of the characters that fill the pages of the book. “My old Beba is still alive and well. My mother is today the honorary president of the team,” she updates. She also says that San Carlos now plays through WhatsApp messages. There are twenty members of the group called “San Diego hails you.” This chapter is great because at that point, the reader already feels part of the story. And, why not, also part of San Diego.