I always believed that football was my favorite thing in life. More than food –the mother if not!–, as ‘El Flecha’, by David Sánchez Juliao, would say.
Since I was a little boy, my dad took me to El Campín and bought me soda with chips and a blue plastic visor so I could watch the game despite the sun beating down on the eastern side. The plan!
I always thought that I also liked everything about football: the stadium, the goals, the plays, the strategies, the announcers and their screams of emotion or tragedy, the victories, the defeats.
I loved the uniforms, the ball, the cleats. In short, the letter to the Child God that I repeated year after year in my childhood.
When I already graduated from high school, I told my dad that I was going to study journalism, he wisely told me: “Mijo: in this country you don’t need to study for that… But, well, if that’s what you want, then just I’ll tell you one thing: I will believe him when I go to a World Cup”.
(You can read: Qatar World Cup without the Colombian National Team (Meluk tells you…)).
‘This is my first World Cup’
From France 98 – 24 years ago, wow! – I brought you the official poster of that World Cup. “For you daddy. We did it: it was already my first World Cup. Thank you,” I wrote above.
Somehow he had already ‘trained’ me long before, in 1982, when he bought the first color TV we had in the house and a huge Betamax that allowed us to put our voices on the videotapes he recorded.
At the World Cup in Spain we played that I was the narrator and he was the commentator who fell silent when Italy eliminated Brazil.
I ever told that The Soccer World Cups were for us like a clock that every four years marked the hour on the hour of life.
Like in 1990, when we finished, hugging each other, perched on the bed in his room, jumping for Freddy Rincón’s goal against Germany until we broke the boards and fell to the floor with mattress and everything.
Four years later, when I was the press officer of the Ministry of the Interior (for those of us now, the Interior), I had to watch the World Cup in Neiva, the central base of operations of the Government to deal with the tragedy caused by the earthquake in Páez. (Cauca), which left 800 dead.
Despite the distance, “we watched together” the game that the United States beat Colombia by phone, the day of Andrés Escobar’s own goal. We did not hang up the call for a second, not even after the game, chewing on the defeat.
Before each game in a World Cup stadium, whether in South Africa or Russia, I called him and thanked him for being there to sign the notes in EL TIEMPO later.
(Keep reading: Maluma ‘stole the show’ in Qatar! This was his presentation for the World Cup).
‘I always believed that football was my favorite thing in life…’
I always believed that football was my favorite thing in life. But now, over the years, I understood that what I really liked was this job of counting and informing “and with its own tone, mijo”, as he repeated to me.
“That was good on you”, “I didn’t like what you wrote”, “don’t exaggerate”, “very well said!”…
I always thought I loved football, but no… I knew for sure, when I was old, that soccer was nothing more than a pretext for the deep love between my dad and me.
And I really believe that football, the passion for some colors or the shouts for a National Team are the memories of childhood, the love made stadium and ball by the cousins, the scoundrels of the ‘U’, the parents… .
“You know that one of the things that makes me lazy to die is not knowing if those bad guys from the National Team are going to qualify,” my dad told me, who died on December 24 of last year. Today I don’t give a damn that Colombia doesn’t play in Qatar or which one is going to win. This is my first World Cup without him and, to be honest, I know that I don’t like football so much anymore.
GABRIEL MELUK
SPORTS EDITOR EL TIEMPO
In networks: @MelukLeCuenta
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