I remember well the night of the fight; It was the night of a defeat. From afar, as a spectator, I learned that there are few sensations as humiliating as that of failure when failure is reduced to spectacle.
It was July 27, 1991, at dawn, when I arrived home after having seen Poli Díaz on television humiliated by Sweet Pea. The Norfolk boxer put the Vallecano against the ropes more than once. And in one of the last rounds, he forgave him for the knockout in the manner of Machiavelli, pointing him to the center of the ring, demonstrating that when evil is dosed it does more damage than when it is applied immediately. “I will not spare your life, FoalI’m going to take it away from you; but not suddenly; I like to see you suffer, let’s go to the center,” Pernell Whitaker seems to have said to Poli Diaz, who looked groggy, exhausted from punching the air so many times. If there is a headline that was right in the chronicles, it was the one that said that, that night, against Pernell Whitaker, good Poli Diaz made gloves against the void.
Poli Díaz’s fight against Pernell Whitaker split the world into two halves. From that moment on, everything began to happen faster than expected. Rationalism and its pragmatic version, that is, the market, triumphed over passion and the humors of the blood. From then on, from that night, we began to swim in the icy waters of selfish calculation. A year later, Urtain threw himself into the void, crashing his body against the hot morning asphalt. He was 49 years old and had a pile of debt. Plagued by delays, Urtain suffered from vertigo and dropped from the tenth floor. The Morrosko of Cestona He did not deserve that ending, nor did Poli Díaz deserve to lose that fight where the beating of his fists confronted the reason of a market that would end him, little by little.
Years after the defeat I met Poli in the services of a Brazilian club in Callao; He held a broken mirror in one of his hands and followed with his eyes the white line that crossed the Madrid of that time. It was at the end of the 90s, and together we followed the same line that led him to rent me a tent on the edge of a field, next to the shanty town that served as the setting for my first novel: thirst for champagne.
Twenty-five years have passed since that time, but the memory is still alive, just like one of those fictions that life projects when life smiles at you with its toothless teeth, thanks to the slap of a boxer as cold as the fluctuations of the market. Today I remember the silence that followed the defeat, the slow air in my room and the balcony wide open, giving way to the gray hour of the morning. It was on July 27, 1991, when I learned that defeat, in addition to a feeling, is the ingredient that memory needs to make literature.
#master #combat
