ginseng peddling grandmother

Panting, he runs up the wing. On one side await the heavens of glory; on the other, ruin’s abyss. 

He’s the envy of the neighborhood: the professional athlete who escaped the factory or the office and gets paid to have fun. He won the lottery. And even if he does have to sweat buckets, with no right to fatigue or failure, he gets into the papers and on TV, his name is on the radio, women swoon over him and children yearn to be like him. But he started out playing for pleasure in the dirt streets of the slums, and now he plays out of duty in stadiums where he has no choice but to win or to win.

Businessmen buy him, sell him, lend him; and he lets it all happen in return for the promise of more fame and more money. The more succesful he is and the more money he makes, the more of a prisoner he becomes. Forced to live by military discipline, he suffers the punishing daily round of training and the bombardments of painkillers and cortisone to forget his aches and fool his body. And on the evening of big games, they lock him up in a concentration camp where he does forced labor, eats tasteless food, gets drunk on water and sleeps alone.

In other human trades, decline comes with old age, but a soccer player can be old at thirty. Muscles tire early: “That guy couldn’t score if the field were on a slope.”

“Him? Not even if they tied the goalie’s hands.”

Or before thirty if the ball knocks him out badly, or bad luck tears a muscle, or a kick breaks a bone so it can’t be fixed. And one rotten day the player discovers he has bet his life on a single card and his money is gone and so is his fame. Fame, that fleeting lady, didn’t even leave him a Dear John letter.

— Eduardo Galeano, Soccer In Sun And Shadow

I love this so much. I promised myself I would attempt to interact with the things that came through my feed on tumblr instead of just mindlessly reblogging pictures of food/books/feminist rage/pelicans (Jason Lanier: “If you listen first, and write later, then whatever you write will have had time to filter through your brain, and you’ll be in what you say. This is what makes you exist. If you are only a reflector of information, are you really there?”), but THIS. I’m twenty pages into Galeano and he writes about footie in ways that make me feel ashamed that I ever tried. I think even non-fans would find this book compelling. The writing surely is.