Some scientists who specialize in studying the human brain confirm that our memory performs functions and has characteristics similar to a computer hard disk: it stores information that remains constant until it reaches its capacity. This is why, on many occasions, we accurately remember data from the distant past at the expense of things we saw or happened to us a short time ago.
In keeping with this theory, which is probably inaccurate and perhaps downright false, I agree with those who claim that many of us have up to decades of favorites when it comes to remembering.
In my case, it’s the 1970s. This time reference is used these days, oddly and in many cases, by people who were born much later. This does not mean that this detracts from every person’s right to think anything about any topic. Anyway, it bothers me a little that they want to tell me, without living it, the time I had to live.
Perhaps for this reason, and because I am convinced that not all the good ones play on one team and not all the bad ones on another team – there was a great compromise between them to avoid quarrels during the 1978 World Cup -, when it comes to speaking from those years, my head indicates an eloquent preference for sporting matters. .
Maybe that’s why, even though I have a hard time spotting almost all the substitutes and a few regulars every time I go onto the field these days, I’ll never erase some of the signs from when I was a football-loving teenager. Billy’s replacement goalkeeper at Cologne was ConstantineThat No. 2 on the All Boys list was Panizo, or that Sabella was a substitute for Beto Alonso or that Modri was the title of scorer of Patronato’s only goal for the Bombonera in Nacional 77. I also could not understand how Di Marta, the talented and deaf midfielder, was sent off. In Timperley’s team, one day due to verbal abuse.
I can never forget the famous international series sequence in the same year: 5 vs 1 against Hungary (Diego’s debut for the Blue and White), 3 vs 1 against Poland, 3rd place in the 1974 World Cup, 1 vs 3 against West Germany. , champion of the same tournament, 1 to 1 with England under Keegan, 1 to 1 with Scotland under Dalglish, 0 to 0 against Platini’s France, 1 to 0 against Yugoslavia, and 2 to 0 against the German Democratic Republic, on Jorge Carrascosa’s farewell night, great Target included.
Crazy times when my cousin Fernando and I were able to go together to the Boca stadium to watch almost all those matches in Bondi, when we were 14 and got tickets at the same Bombonera stadium an hour before the match. You and I both know that those were not the calmest days to cross the city from the northern suburbs to the southern tip of the capital without an accompanying adult. Perhaps restoring a certain ritual is more of an additional debt than football owes to our children in a time of democracy.
Crazy times when we played 8 friendly matches with European teams in one year, while during the four years of Lionel Scaloni’s leadership, we barely managed to play one match with Germany and one with Estonia.
This, the prestige, the organization and the creation of an idea of football that went beyond results considered unsatisfactory and frequent complaints at the end of almost every match, was the first legacy that Cesar Luis Menotti left to the whole of football. Regardless of the playful and humane taste of each individual, that no one is perfect and that Flacco was clearly a touchstone, he knew how to build a logic of respect for the chosen team that has been preserved up to the present time, except for some chaos that Scaloni has managed us, with the participation of Menotti. Since the vengeful attitude given to him by Claudio Tapia just over four years ago.
And pausing for a moment on Flaco’s recent death meant looking out my bedroom window again from where you could see the arch of the Atalaya Football Stadium, where the ashes of my grandfather Diego, which I swore were buried. On the edge of the rugby field in the early 1950s, while in Asmopol, he said that Che Guevara used to relieve the effects of the asthma that accompanied him throughout his life, but it did not prevent him from playing rugby in a club far from any glimpse of civilization and hidden from his father, who forbade him from doing so while he did so in the SIC. . “He was stubborn inside and wearing earmuffs,” Diego said.
Life wanted me to return to that place 50 years later: We lived with my middle-income family in that club where my mother Jacqueline chilled while she was growing in her belly.
Since self-reference is a direct descendant of memory, I will not apologize this time for an unforgivable misstep into old-school journalism.
Cesar was one of many inheritances I received from my grandfather Diego. His dear friend, the companion at endless boys’ dinners on Wednesdays (a chair in a football position that resembles a Fontanarrosa Galans table), was among the icons of the 1970s, the one whose friendship lasted until the last day.
I also met all the others through him at coffee tables or in intimate post-match conversations that ended over various disagreements, generally triggered by his proverbial intolerance towards my beloved parents. Anyway, he gave me Lully Rotman and Hugo Porta. To Guillermo Vilas and Alberto Demede. Extraordinary phenomena in times when you can complete an entire year’s worth of El Grafico covers, the kind I jealously keep in properly labeled boxes.
Many left physically. The news from Big Willie does not help us be optimistic. The Banco Nacion and Los Pumas star is still alive, as if determined to score 21 points again to equalize the All Blacks. Or 21 points to defeat the Springboks and make Nelson Mandela fall permanently in love with him, who rejoiced in the defeats of the dominant white minority symbol from Robben Island prison.
I think my weakness for audiovisual archives has to do with the idea of their immortality, and explaining to the young and less experienced that if we fill our mouths with talk about them, or about Hausmann, Puccini, Kempes, Alonso, Passarella, Piqué Ferrero, Bertone, or Negro Ortiz… That’s why you can find it in homeopathic doses on YouTube or on some whim that TV sometimes allows me to do. For me, they remain idols that I only removed from the poster in my teenage bedroom when this blessed profession suddenly made me grow up; As for maturity, that remains to be seen. However, to my old father, it was something else. With Caesar at the head.
Some time ago, in a documentary about 1970s rock and roll, Eric Clapton referred to the disappearance of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison, all of whom died at the age of 27 just two years apart:When someone says that my icons are dead, I answer that those who died are my friends. When they say to me: “My damned icons are dead,” I answer that those who died are my damned friends.
Maybe my dad would say something similar if he could read this column.
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