Joaquim Oller, 65 years old, economist, who has worked all his life in his family’s company, does not want to be compared to a guardian angel. “I am a normal person, with virtues and flaws”. Let each reader judge this man without children, but “with two brothers, two sisters and thirteen wonderful nephews”. In September 2021, he took pity on a young Senegalese who was collecting scrap metal in Sarrià.
The first thing that caught the attention of Modou Lo, who was then 21 years old, was his athletic build and wingspan (he is more than two meters tall). The second, his sad pose. He never smiled. He had arrived in the Canary Islands a year earlier, on a shepherd. He was in Málaga and Bilbao until he ended up in Barcelona, ??where by working from sun to sun, from eight in the morning to eight in the evening, he can get “about 30 euros”.
Four years after his arrival in Spain, he has finally managed to regularize his situation and obtain papers. Today he continues to live off scrap metal, but two weeks ago he made his debut as a goalkeeper in a football team in Group 13 of Quarta Catalana, Penya Blaugrana Ramon Llorens, from Rubí. “At first it was hard to see him smile, although he is increasingly happy with us. And we with him”, affirms Sergi Monterde.
Sergi is the sports coordinator of the organization, which has twelve teams in all categories, including children’s. The first squad plays in Tercera Catalana, and the second, with which Modou has already made his debut (they lost 4-2 in the derby against Olímpic Can Fatjó, from Rubí) in Quarta. The idea is that gradually gaining experience and confidence in this competition to make the jump to
At the beginning, Àlex Morales, the coach, asked him to put on his batteries. And Modou put them on. He braved the ocean without knowing how to swim. He lives off scrap metal and saves a little each month to send to his mother and four siblings. He is a railway worker by day and a footballer by night. If he can do all that, he can put the batteries on. For the team, for him and, above all, for Joaquim, the first person who helped him without asking for anything in return. Why did he do it? Because he has thirteen nephews, because he is passionate about basketball (he tried his luck at this sport when he was young, but he is only 1.80 m tall and short-sighted) and because he remembered a 25-year-old who traveled through Morocco and the Atlas with a Ford Fiesta. “I got lost many times. People who didn’t know me at all let me sleep in their houses and their hospitality taught me the meaning of life: helping others”.
He says he is not a saint, but also that “we are here to lend a helping hand to those in need”. This he did when he began to weave a network of solidarity for Modou. One of his threads reached La Vanguardia, which published a chronicle on September 20, 2021. Twenty basketball clubs (from Catalonia, but also from Madrid and Ourense) were interested in him, in addition to a handball club from Pontevedra.
Modou’s story captivated even Dani Garrido, from Ser, who opened a Carrusel Deportivo with him. A journalist from the ACB, whom we will call P. because of his wish, sent him two huge boxes of clothes and sports shoes. But P. also punctured the bubble: “At his age and without experience in a sport as technical as basketball, he would need a miracle.” Well, the miracle has arrived. But not in basketball, but in football.
“If one ball doesn’t work, let’s try another.” An incorrigible optimist, Joaquim continues to believe that Modou is a diamond in the rough. It helped him to regularize his situation (the La Vanguardia article was a grain of sand to obtain the papers). He also took him to the Marcet football academy, run by the family of a Spanish legend, Javier Marcet (1928-2016), where even promising youngsters from North Korea have trained.
What Joaquim does not want to be said, but the school confirms, is that he paid for a course that is not cheap. In nine out of ten cases the result would have been a fiasco, but… But miracles do exist. Modou shone so brightly in goal that, when the course ended, a small, great team from Rubí knocked on his door: Penya Blaugrana Ramon Llorens. Fate winked at him.
This club is named after Barça’s shortest goalkeeper, Ramon Llorens (1906-1985), 1.64 meters tall. At 2.06, Modou could be the tallest in Spain and one of the tallest in Europe. “He still has a lot to learn, but his progress is very good”, explains the club, which also defends sport as a way of social integration. And in this competition Modou has already won. He smiles a lot.
No training is missing. On nights when there is no session, it is exercised at your own expense. “When I’m curled up on the couch, he puts the batteries in, after hours and hours of looking for junk,” says Joaquim. “We are a modest club”, they repeat to Rubí, despite the fact that teams like this embody the best of the sport, because they teach players who can be 1.64 or 2 meters to be giants.
