… and people

Excuse me for abounding in the topic, or forgive the sadness, as I was saying Cesar Vallejo: I was a black and white boy from the fifth of 57. All my numbers were odd, 13 of the 7th of 1957. I had a happy childhood although my father lived too little and left in 65. In my house we were not crazy about football, but we didn’t live outside of it. The television talked about soccer in black and white and on NO-DO, the newscast that they put on before the movies in theaters, soccer was shown in black and white as well. I remember, although I was very young, that there was a lot of talk about Real Madrid, and of course from the Spanish selection, although this one, like me, was still almost in its infancy. One listened to the news, the television news, or the movie news, and an announcer with a voice always Matias Prats father gave the lineups. I clearly remember that, regardless of the line-up given by said announcer, whether in the cinema or on television, it always, inevitably, ended with these two words: “and people“. Any lineup I heard ended like this. And Gento.

My father, also named Don Francisco, made me the Athletic. On my black and white television, Atleti played with gray and white striped shirts and the grass was never green, in fact I remember the day my father took me to a soccer field for the first time as a child and I was amazed that played on a beautiful green carpet, as amazed as Aureliano Buendia when his father took him to discover ice. Sometimes my father and I would sit down to watch a game of the National Team, or Atleti, or Real Madrid, and every time the announcer gave the line-up and ended up saying “and Gento” my father would say: “That’s the good , the one that runs the most, the 11”.

It didn’t fail. The other day Don Francisco Gento stopped running, but a beautiful meadow awaits him up there where he can run freely, a meadow with aromas from the north and two beautiful sunflowers growing on the penalty spot. Rest in peace, Francisco.