Constantino Pons liked to make paella with the wood from the cattail chairs that had been broken that week. This man and his wife, Lola Miguel, lived in Mestalla, under one of the stands, between 1939 and 1971. The couple had two children, Luis and Lola, who grew up there, in an area of Valencia where everything was orchards that drank from the great ditch of Mestalla, which gives its name to the stadium that this May 20 turns 100 years old.
Lola, who is 86 years old, is still alive. One of her two children, the grandson of those Mestalla landlords, is José Manuel Manglano, who is 57 years old. The owner of a famous delicatessen is the heir to the only family that has inhabited the oldest stadium in the League. When she was six years old, her grandfather retired, but it was long enough to make her mark. “My parents had a vineyard in the Torrent area and for years I associated that smell of figs with that place. But not long ago, when we were sewing the life of my family with the memories that remained, I realized that that smell was actually from Mestalla. Because next to the house of my grandparents, my uncle and my mother, where we ate, it turns out that there was a fig tree”.
Manglano relates that during the Civil War, between 1936 and 1939, Mestalla came to function as a concentration camp. At the end of the contest, with the stadium badly damaged, the president of the Valencian Football Federation, Antonio Cotanda, proposed to Constantino to use it because they needed a bricklayer and someone to take care of the land. “They offered him housing in exchange for a job without pay. Around it was all orchard, so my iaio he dedicated himself to cultivating everything. They did not go hungry in that house.”
In exchange, that man flooded the field with water from the ditch and then distributed it as best he could. “That’s how it was, made a potato,” jokes his grandson. Constantine was much more skilled at painting the lines of the field. He would go to one of the mountains of lime that they had next to the house, fill a watering can and, by eye, he would make the lines with great skill.
When the Valencian architects Manuel and Salvador Pascual rebuilt and expanded the stadium, the house of the Pons Miguel family was boxed in by the grandstand. “The house ended in an attic because it was the end of the stands.” There, after each game, which was played on Saturdays and in the morning, because there was no electricity, the clothes of the Electric Front would arrive: Epi, Amadeo, Mundo, Asensi and Gorostiza. Her mother was in charge of washing the kit of the Valencia players and her daughter, Lola Pons, helped her unstitch the shield, one by one, and sew it back on when the shirts were clean.
A Janitor Olympian
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Antonio Campos lived in Pedralba as a child, but whenever he could he escaped with his grandparents to Valencia. He liked the city. One day, the grandfather, seeing his grandson’s fondness for soccer, accompanied him to the Valencia soccer field. Arriving there, he went to the door and the janitor stopped him. That man, a certain Constantino Pons, greeted him and explained that he could not come in. But the boy, who was very excited, begged him. Constantino was thoughtful and in the end he made a deal with Antonio: “Kid, go to the bar across the street, the Sports Taberna, and leave Mr. Tomás paid for a fifth of beer. If you do, I’ll let you in.” Antonio rushed out, paid for the beer and returned to see the inside of Mestalla.
That boy ended up signing as an athlete for Valencia. Campos, like the rest of the athletes from the other sections of the club, trained many days under the stands of Mestalla. Although he, since he was a long-distance runner -he achieved an Olympic diploma at the 76 Montreal Games in the 3000 m steeplechase event-, sometimes he would go around the field while the Valencia players trained. Thus he made friends with many footballers and one of the best, the Dutchman Johnny Rep, began to accompany Campos when he went to run at Saler.
The club’s athletes had a Grandstand pass to watch the Valencia matches. “Until 1994, when Paco Roig arrived and took over the sports sections.” Life, in return, had a wink in store for him: Antonio Campos ended up occupying the position that, in his day, Constantino Pons held. “I was a janitor between 1997 and 2015, when I took early retirement. Mestalla is my second home. I entered in December 1966, when I signed as an athlete, and I left the club on June 12, 2015. Almost fifty years”.
Mestalla is a refrain
For José Carlos Fernández, the centenary stadium makes him poetic. “Mestalla is the chorus of our lives. Childhood passes and you go to Mestalla. Youth passes and you go to Mestalla. Maturity passes and you continue going to Mestalla”. He doesn’t exaggerate. This fan is fifty years old and in January he will be forty as a member. There are more than a thousand games and, he assures, he does not believe that he has lost more than ten in all those years. “My friends would come and tell me: ‘José Carlos, we got married on March 28. We already imagine that you will not come, that Valencia is playing”.
This fan, without losing his poetic tone, says that it was predestined because from the patio of his school, the First Marqués del Turia, you could see a piece of the South Fund of Mestalla. “That’s where the spell began,” he says. Because, on top of that, he lived in Benimaclet and around the corner he played with other children on the sidewalks of the stadium. “Sometimes we went into the corporate headquarters, which was on the façade facing Avenida de Aragón, and the very affectionate employees let us pass and we were ecstatic seeing the trophies and flags.”
As soon as he could, he took out the child pass and began to go to the General de Pie. When Valencia went down to Segunda, in 1986, he bought a notebook and began to write down the lineup and the goals. “I never stopped doing it. I already have more than a thousand games. Now you leaf through it and you see how the lyrics are changing…”.
The day his firstborn was born, after three and a half hours, the father went and made him a partner. Rober is already 14 years old and although adolescence begins to tempt him in other ways, he maintains his passion and a curious custom: every year he buys a Valencia shirt and keeps the old one.
His father has not wavered. With the fingers of both hands he can count his misses. A couple of them came with her wedding. The day they were coming back from Italy, from their honeymoon, when the plane was flying over the city, Juan Carlos looked out the window and suddenly saw a point of light down there. Mestalla was illuminated in one of those few games that have been lost.
This incorruptible fan is anguished by the threat of the new stadium. “I hope we never see him. When he appeared in 2006, while people were celebrating him, my heart broke. Destroying Mestalla would be like a sentimental genocide for an entire town of Valencianistas”. At Mestalla he began to go to soccer with his friends. Every decade he changed friends. One of them became Rober’s godfather. That fan, Andrés, died in 2010 due to cancer. Days later, Juan Carlos went to visit his mother. The woman handed him her son’s pass and told him: “He wanted it to go to Rober.” To her daughter, Aitana, Juan Carlos could not retain her loyalty. The girl says that there is a lot of noise in the field. But it was she who gave her father a gift this time: the girl was born on May 20, the same day as the Mestalla anniversary.
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