Michael Jordan, the closest thing to Leo Messi in terms of hegemonic dominance of a sport, appeared in the excellent documentary The last dance with bloodshot eyes, recalling the darkest part of his exaggerated competitive gene, letting hatred fester unapologetically to which sometimes it is necessary to resort to wake up the monster that dozes inside the myths. Jordan found in the Pistons the ideal enemy for him to deploy in all its dimensions. In the 1980s, the Detroit team had people like Rick Mahorn, author of the phrase "we could lose the game but not the fight", or like John Salley, another such: "Those who say we are thugs or villains can kiss my ass."
The fascination for the best athletes must include the assimilation of the complete lot. To admire Leo Messi for all that he has made us enjoy playing ball, but to make his recent contradictions ugly, as if all the rest of us did not have them, is to give up an essential part of this type of unique athlete. The elite does not admit pristine personalities, everyone hides secrets.
In this World Cup Leo Messi has discovered unknown traits of himself probably because he has needed them and will need them if he wants to win this World Cup. He has delved into every corner of his mind, exploring even evil, transmuted into Martin Sheen chasing Colonel Kurtz as a must-see in order to improve himself, not so much as an individual, but as a radical competitor.
Ramon Besa wisely wrote yesterday that Messi has pushed his Argentineization process to the limit. It's one of the changes. His involvement with the group and his leadership have stained his epidermis with South Americanism, understood as the somatization of a football in which the ball is only one part of the many factors involved. Argentina lost against Saudi Arabia and from those ruins began a process of building a team, something that does not always happen by playing better, but also by taking the commitment to your teammates to the last consequences and, in this case, with your country, the core.
Argentina has been criticized for its brawling against the Netherlands. Nothing new in the history of football. They were the quarterfinals of a World Cup. The tension in these scenarios is so thick that the air can be eaten by the spoonful. Rijkaard, Dutch and the calmest guy on the face of the earth, spat on the German Völler in the 1990 World Cup; Zinédine Zidane headbutted Materazzi in the 2006 final. Messi wanted to find the enemy in Van Gaal, he exaggerated a statement from the Dutchman or received fictionalized translations of what he said, but it didn't matter, he swallowed them and then spit them out. Messi is having a huge, Maradonian, unique World Cup. Everything is used to achieve it. The Argentine spectator has fallen madly in love; the impartial, he has surrendered to the evidence.
We are not going to discover now the attraction we feel for evil. It is a natural inclination. From Judas to the false reverend incarnated by Robert Mitchum in The Night of the Hunter (love and hate tattooed on his fingers), through the bad guys from the Peaky Blinders series. The seduction by the wild side of life, which Lou Reed sang. How boring everything would be otherwise.
Nor is it worth stigmatizing everything Argentine, without a doubt the nationality most prejudged by the clichés. Despite the agony that seems to accompany their journey in this World Cup (they even managed to suffer against Australia), they know how to laugh at themselves (follow the adventures of Jero Freixas and his wife on social networks) and nobody shot with more truth and finesse the soccer that the director Juan José Campanella in a long and hypnotic scene of the film the Secret of their eyes. They are simply playing the World Cup. Maybe it does make them different that you have to look under rocks to find one of its inhabitants who doesn't like soccer, or maybe it's that other topic?
Around Messi are the boys, they include Scaloni, the sane coach, the players and the thousands of fans who sing the song of the Fly to infinity and beyond and cheer like no other fan in Qatar. Regarding the dressing room: it is not the same to belong to the lineage of the thirty-somethings Emiliano Martínez (goalkeeper) and Otamendi (centre-back), quarrelsome types ready for anything, than to that of the young Julián Álvarez and Enzo Fernández, whose inclusion in the eleven has been one of the keys to improvement. It is the mixture of both worlds that is welding a team that plays fair but already has the makings of a group of friends that is difficult to win. All that remained was for Lautaro Martínez to score the decisive penalty to integrate him again, safe from the cruel comparison with Higuaín.
Tomorrow they all face Croatia in the semi-finals and, if they pass, possibly France in the final. France is much better, we will say applying logic, but to win they will have to do it over Messi, over the boys and over all of Argentina.
