And who the hell cuts your hair? An epileptic?
The whites do not know how to put it
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Guachupita has an enchanting name and fierce entrails.
The neighborhood is dense, and there are shootings and drug trafficking, a wasp’s nest of souls that cohabit in austere houses, under tarpaulins and sheet metal roofs, and is squeezed a step away from the Ozama, the river that bathes Santo Domingo.
(…)
In Santo Domingo, baseball is played, but Rodolfo Feliz preferred basketball, and so every Sunday he would grab the car, leave Guachupita and go to the malecón, to play 3×3 games.
Sometimes he took Andrés, the third of his six children, who followed him in amazement.
And although Andrés was barely three years old, even then, seeing his father score, his eyes would widen.
That tells me:
“Basketball kept me from the bad,” Andrés Feliz (25) tells me.
And he says yes with his head.
Well, today he is a recognized basketball player, a basketball professional, and he earns well, and supports his family in Badalona (his wife, Lisa, and little Drelen, who is already thirteen months old) and helps his family in Guachupita, parents and sisters and brothers, and when he returns to the neighborhood, in the summer months, he brings them slippers, socks and T-shirts, everything he has left over.
Because I only have two feet. I don’t need so many slippers. And if I can give a smile and help others have the opportunity that I had…
–And when you return to Guachupita, do you play basketball?
–Sure, with friends. And someone puts on the shirt with my name, the one from the University of Illinois, or the one from Joventut, or the one from the Dominican team.
(A month ago, the Dominicans won the pass to the World Cup next summer: they did it after defeating the runner-up, Argentina, in Mar del Plata, in the last game of the tie, with Andrés Feliz in a leading role: eleven points ).
And I ask:
–And how were you able to get ahead, a professional basketball player, graduated in Sociology in Illinois, cannon fodder in your neighborhood?
I really liked basketball. And also study.
And he remembers himself on the concrete field of his school, the Rafael Leónidas Solano club, shooting a basket by himself, before the others arrived and also afterwards, before the lights went out.
–As a child it was like this: me with my cheap ball, rompededos, we called it.
–¿…?
-It was made of very poor material, and as it was thrown away it became deformed. But I didn’t always have the clue to myself or my friends. When the older ones came, they took over the field and no longer let us enter.
–And was there trash talking?
–Much more than in professional matches! Before the games started, on the way to the field, we told each other everything. We played to 16 points. And if the score was 8-0, KO, final. Sometimes the matches lasted three minutes. Or less. And there were no referees. We decided ourselves.
–And what happened to the friends, those friends from the neighborhood, or basketball?
-Some died. Others ended up in jail. I have already told you that basketball rescued me. Basketball, and my parents, Rodolfo, who repairs air conditioners or washing machines, and Teresa Sarita, a housewife. They all strove to guide me on the right path and prevented me from doing anything wrong.
(He emphasizes to me: “You don’t know how much I thank Teresa Durán and Fran Parreño, my first coaches, for betting on me; name them, please”).
–And what about other Dominican basketball players, like Chicho Sibilio, who triumphed in Spain, or Luis Felipe López, who was a star in the NBA?
-I heard about them, but I did not have the opportunity to see them play. Although Luis Felipe López belongs to a more recent era, at home we did not have satellite television. Later, as a teenager, he already knew his stories.
Today I see Andrés Feliz play, Joventut’s starting point guard, and when that happens, I understand his courageous vocation, his sense of fight.
