the kid who became a man and who made us happy like no other

20 years and coins have passed since any given day, let’s say October 16, 2004. And let’s locate that day in a place on the map where that episode, then barely anecdotal and for the privacy of the family album, would become the Zero Cairn of a planetary legend. It happened, perhaps not coincidentally, in Cataloniaa land in love with autonomy, a registered trademark of Catalan rebellion. A simple soccer match, a minor, domestic classic, but one that settles pride that comes from the cradle, between the Barça and the Espanyol of the city of Barcelona.

The seventh round of the Spanish League was played at the Montjuïc Olympic stadium: its first official match in the first division. He was on the field for just 8 minutes with the colors of his Barcelona, ​​second homeland, second land, first football home, future region of ingratitude and disloyalty. The Dutch coach Frank Rijkaard He threw him into the field, perhaps so that he could begin to walk the long path between childhood dreams and the arrogance of reality.

The jacket and pants seemed baggy for that skinny guy with the number 30 on his back.. A lot of fabric and little body. It was impossible to know then that he had plenty of heart and was already incubating a cyclopean talent that would be dwarfed by any size he wore from then on. I had my passport to Olympus already stamped. This is how it all would begin, the revisionists of the most colossal sporting events in history will one day say.

Gardel would have said – rather than saying it, he sang it like the gods – that in the nascent 20th century “twenty years is nothing.” In the country of withered foreheads, where we are always coming back and always starting, not from scratch, but from less zero, there was a goblin who would not return. And he would not do it to deny his Argentine genes: he was one of the many who built borders outside himself, but always spying out of the corner of his eye on the issues of his family, his people, his country. Chances are, even he wouldn’t know what he was doing. Or at least what it would do: it was impossible for anyone to predict then that there was a genie in that lamp that anyone would ever dare to uncover. Until he would do it himself, over and over again. And another one.

From then on, they would govern their country Nestor Kirchner, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, Mauricio Macri, Alberto Fernandez y Javier Miley. He did not pay homage to any of them nor did he marry politically with any of them. At most, much later, he once complied with an inevitable protocol. And in another, with some skillful bullfighter and a lot of stainless crack, he would make a phenomenal ¡oooooooo! at the foot of a plane and he would hide that trophy that he had dreamed of so much and that politics and politicians coveted so much. They all needed him, but he didn’t need any of them.

Shortly after that October day two decades ago, the fire, apathy and negligence became the grave of a lot of kids, some only 17 years old, like him, that October 16: Cro-Magnon It burned much hotter than a dance club. There were 194 dead, almost 1,500 injured. A disaster. That kid found out from the newspapers. Above all, he read, or was told about, the sporting exploits of Manu Ginobili in basketball and Luciana Aymar con The Lionesses in hockey. Could he have dreamed of such glory?

Inflation had already been a roller coaster that crushed society’s savings and dreams. Wounds that do not close and still bleed: in 2004, when he stepped on the grass at the Montjuic Olympic Stadium, it was 6.1% and in 2023, it would reach 211.14%. Poverty would become a disease without a cure like those malignant tumors that do not stop growing: in 2004, three years after the country imploded in the worst of the outbreaks, it stood at 44.7% of the population; Perhaps his feet had flown towards Catalan lands so as not to be trapped in the web of those statistics that threatened his family lineage in the suburbs of Rosario.

In 2024, when no one from now on will know how many generations will have to think about deprivation in the future, poverty rises to 52.9% of Argentines. However, he, who always knew where he stood, would think about the horror of such a percentage. During the pandemic, through his Foundation, he donated 30 respirators to the city of Rosario, when death devastated his city and his country with hundreds of daily losses. The Creole bureaucracy said that there were “poorly presented papers” and their solidarity was left unused in some warehouse where unfulfilled Argentine dreams and promises are piled up. Meanwhile, the dollar multiplied at the speed of light: on December 31, 2004 it was trading at $2.99. And today, two decades later, it is between the range of $1,100 and $1,200. It multiplied perhaps like his own fortune.

20 years ago, the traditional platform Clarion paper shared its space with digital editions for eight years. E-mail was the last frontier of advanced technology. had not arrived WhatsApp. They didn’t know each other Twitter in Tik Tok. Y Facebook He had just appeared in society. Intelligence was a gift from others or one’s own, never artificial. There was no Argentine Pope. A goat was that little animal that, in the literary imagination, grazed in the meadows of Heidi and his grandfather, under the inspiration of the writer Johanna Spyri. In reality it was just a mountain animal, much in demand for its cheeses and often to enjoy its meats, those grilled goats in the mountains of Córdoba and San Luis. No one would believe that his name in English (goat) would end up being a designation of origin for that kid from October 16, 2004: GOAT (Greatest Of All Timesthe best of all time).

So much football, so much glory, would generate the other side of universal admiration: a small, but noisy, football club. haters (haters) who took advantage of his failures, who had them and in series, with the shirt he always wanted to wear the most. That of his country, that of his language, which despite those two decades lived there did not take on even a hint of traditional tone or phrases of “Spanish from Spain.” He continued speaking “in Rosarino.” Better: almost in the “rosarigasino” of Negro Olmedo.

In Spain, those haters were grouped in The Chiringuitoa local TV program tailored to the Florentino Perezthe hyper-millionaire president of Real Madrid, who does not stop bleeding from the 26 goals that this character scored for the White House of football since he was a child. Don Florentino has almost always suffered them in silence, unlike his devastated lapdogs. Edu Aguirre, Tomas Roncero y Jose Luis Sanchezwho should have shown their faces. And maybe not only that.

Some known bad copies multiplied in these lands. More so; There are those who don’t even give up now. Last week an impertinent person at the microphone mistook criticism for nonsense. And he went alone to the corner of ridicule. When a reporter announced that our character was returning to play in the country after 330 days, he corrected him on the air: “We say that a great ticket seller and a former soccer player are coming to the country.”. Gee. Who then will be the one to usurp his name and break one record after another?

Twenty years. That kid became a man. Very young to enjoy life, mature for football and, yet, he retains the same anxiety to jump onto the fields as on October 16, 2004. In all this time, Argentine football lost Maradona (his idol since he was a child) and Flaco Menottia beacon of wisdom that I enjoyed watching him play. The country said goodbye to universal luminaries like him, in other disciplines: the Black Fontanarrosa (2007); Mercedes Sosa (2009); Maria Elena Walsh (2011); los Luthiers Daniel Rabinovich (2015) y Marcos Mundstock (2020); already Cinchona (2020), the father of Mafalda.

When he debuted in first class, his “little blue room” of the National Team, those little bastards who still can’t believe they are playing alongside him, were babies: Nico Paz He had been born a month ago; Grenache3 months ago; Enzo Fernandez y Thiago Almadathey were 3 years old and Julian Alvarez only 4.

Jorge Valdanowho knows about football and life, defined it better than anyone: “He was born a genius and became a wise man.” He has already won more than a hundred trophies, individual and collective, all relevant, some more than others. Nobody did that much. Nobody got that far. Nobody made us as happy as on that December 18, 2022. He is the biggest winner in history. And the most loved, from the majestic urban complexes of the big cities to the most remote deserts of impoverished countries. He comes from scoring two hat-tricks in five days in official matches. What haven’t we mentioned in the entire note? Does anyone think it is necessary to say who it is?