The thriving Spanish sport of these times has capital debts. With Severiano Ballesteros, Ángel Nieto, Paquito Fernández Ochoa, Federico Martín Bahamontes, and, of course, with Manolo Santana. A very great great, a pioneer among pioneers. So giant that Rafa Nadal would not be understood without the imprint of this genius from Madrid who sought his life in favor of what he loved: tennis. Yes, tennis, but not the glamorous tennis of today, but fallow tennis, when in Spain only football and boxing and some cyclist epics had covers.
Santana was the embryo of Santana, of Spanish tennis. And all on their own, in times of Franciscan austerity, of the rancid Francoism and with sports linked to the Paleolithic. He, a hustler boy as a ball boy, made his living as Seve from stick loader in Pedreña or Nieto as an assistant in a mechanical workshop of his friend Tomás Díaz Valdés. Such was the precariousness that Manolo himself said that in the historic finals of that Spain in a Davis Cup thong in Australia against the aussies he traveled at the expense of his rivals John Newcombe or Rod Laver lending him a room in their house.
Spain owes its best and eternal retrospective to them. To the dreamer Santana, to the lone ranger Bahamontes, to Nieto’s gas when no one was accelerating, to caddy Seve when in Spanish eyes golf was the business of British peacocks, Paquito de Navacerrada who flowed on the snow like a madman in a country with a summer festival. Spanish sport owes its flight to everyone.
Yes, from a quixotic flight to what now seems to many recent amnesic generations to be the usual thing to do. No, the town crier Santana and his will were unique, the glory improvised. In his case, as the teacher Eduardo Galeano would say, a journey from pleasure to duty, even though Manolo always felt more pleasure than duty, because all the demands were what he set himself. How not to demand himself, if with his father in a Francoist prison, his mother and his three brothers shared a house in Madrid where up to 12 families queued in the bathroom.
Such was its expansive wave that even with Santana it changed the scraggly Spanish urbanism. Suddenly, back in the late sixties and early seventies, tennis courts proliferated like mushrooms. Cement, the players’ immaculate white, one-ton wooden rackets and balls. With Santana we learned what a ace, a break, a passing shot… With Manolo we learned that tennis was not the game of combustion today, big game by big box, but a sport of ingenuity and guides. What a doll Santana’s! A locatis, the moderns would say. A “crazy” used to say Nieto. It does not matter. A fabled athlete, a very great great of yesterday, today and tomorrow. Because beyond his trophies, Santana won a unique Grand Slam: immortality.
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