Kaka: Hello, children! Thank you for welcoming me to your school on the wonderful day. I am really looking forward to answering your questions, so who has the first one?
Dani: Hi, Kaka. My name is Dani and I’m eight. My question is: What is your favorite thing about Spain?
Kaka: That’s a very good question, Dani! I have lots of favorite things about Spain. The people, the food, the culture. It’s all very special. But above all else, I love my friends here. Like all of you! Thank you, Dani. Who has another question?
Bill: Hi, Kaka. I’m Bill and I like Real Madrid. Will you kill Barcelona until they are dead this season? Please say yes.
Kaka: Heh, no no no, we don’t want anyone to die, Bill. Of course we hope to beat them this season and win the title, but that’s all. We don’t want violence in football.
Felix: Hi, Kaka. My name is Felix and I’m nine. If you are sold to Chelsea or back to Milan for a lot less than what Real paid for you, does that make you a failure?
Kaka: Wow. Where did you get that idea, Felix?
Felix: I read the papers.
Kaka: Uh, wow, you’re a little young to be reading newspapers, aren’t you, Felix? No, I don’t think it makes me a failure. I’ve had some injuries and couldn’t do as much as I would like for Real, but I think this season I will prove my worth to those papers. Who, uh, who has another question?
Briana: Hi, Kaka. I’m Briana and I like hammers. Why did you let Brazil do so bad at Copa America? My mother said you abandoned them the way my dad abandoned our family when he met that tramp Sandy.
Kaka: Oh wow. Wow, I, uh- I didn’t abandon anyone. I just needed a break after the long season and I knew Brazil would be better off calling up someone else. Wow, I’m sorry about your family and Sandy, but. Wow. Does anyone else have a question? Maybe about the new season and how exciting it will be?
Xavi: Hi, Kaka. My name is Xavi and I’m 31. Cesc is suffering.
Kaka: That’s, uh, that’s not a question Xavi. Why are you here? Please, do any of the children have one more question? Perhaps a question about football and happiness?
Eric: I have one!
Kaka: Excellent! Please, ask away, young man.
Eric: I’m Eric and I have two dogs. Xavi just gave me a note telling me to ask you this: “Cesc is suffering.” And then he wrote 18 exclamation points. I think he’s crying now. Why did you make him cry, Kaka?
Kaka: Jesus.
— from this Dirty Tackle Exclusive.
I—I have nothing intelligent to add. sob.
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.
