Luis Suárez belongs to the category of explained players. They are part of the hierarchy of idols in the history of the club, but we did not see them play and there are not enough whole matches filmed to get an idea. It does not matter. The history of art also works through oral transmission and, when Suárez played, the most reliable witnesses explain that he was an artist. For a long time, flamenco lovers divided the world between those who had heard Silverio sing and those who had not. It was a face-to-face frontier and a survival resource prior to the abundance of recordings that came after.
Football imitates flamenco and Suárez belongs to a tradition in which we had to rely on those who saw him sing – I mean, play. Elegant, fast, creative, decisive and intelligent are adjectives that have accompanied him in the construction of a myth that we couldn’t quite believe because the Suárez we knew was a bald gentleman, discreet and quiet enough to negotiate attacks cordial radio broadcasts dedicated to him by José María García or always being sensible to the transmissions of Being. We also knew that Josep Maria Minguella had seen him play and that, when he talked about it, his eyes lit up.
The players explained are important: they hold together the sentimental education of a fan. Kubala, for example, represents this phenomenon and although we have recovered accelerated images of NO-DO, the most accurate testimony remains the song by Joan Manuel Serrat. We also know that Suárez had to live with the personalisms and vanities that are typically cool, that he seduced the Italian fans and that Barça had to sell him because he was ruined. The episode reminds us of other moments in history and makes us think that one day it will be up to us to become the minguelles who will tell the young people who Leo Messi was. The difference, however, will be technological: the players of the future will be able to inject a hologram to become an even more Messi than the real one.
Things I know about Suárez: that he won the Ballon d’Or as a Barça player the same year I was born. That Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, who saw him play, defined him with one of those phrases that try to imitate the aesthetic impact that a footballer produces on you: “el precozmente mágico Luisito Suárez”.
The diminutive is important. Many Barcelona fans called him Luisito, it is not known whether for anatomical reasons or because of familiarity. Iniesta, who is the most Suárez-like player we have ever seen, we never called him Andresito. The problem is that, many years later, in a drunken state of trebles and tridents, Andoni Zubizarreta signed Luis Suárez, the great Uruguayan striker. The homonymous coincidence should have imposed the hierarchy of experience. But, thanks to the emphatic juggling of Gerard Romero (among others) and the enthusiasm that the striker’s goal-scoring voraciousness aroused, Luisito was also told, it is not known whether to forget the past or, on the contrary, as a tribute to the continuity of memory.
Today everything we will explain in the newspaper about Suárez will be true. But if you really want to know who it was, don’t go looking for speed-up and glitchy footage on YouTube, walk up to one of the many coolies who watched him play and let them tell you who it was with the charm, sadly threatened, from the oral tradition.
