Joaquim Oller, 65, an economist, who has worked all his life in his family's business, does not like to be compared to a guardian angel. “I am a normal person, with virtues and defects.” Let each reader judge what this man is like without children, but “with two brothers, two sisters and thirteen wonderful nephews.” In September 2021 he took pity on a young Senegalese man who was collecting scrap metal in Sarrià.
The first thing that caught his attention about Modou Lo, who was 21 years old at the time, was his athletic build and his wingspan (he measures more than two meters). The second thing, his boyish and sad face. He never smiled. He had arrived in the Canary Islands a year earlier, by boat. He was in Malaga and Bilbao until he ended up in Barcelona, where working from dawn to dusk, from eight in the morning to eight in the afternoon, he can get “about 30 euros.”
Four years after his arrival in Spain, he has finally managed to regularize his situation and obtain papers. Today he continues to survive on scrap metal, but two weeks ago he made his debut as a goalkeeper in a soccer team from group 13 of Cuarta Catalana, Penya Blaugrana Ramon Llorens, from Rubí. “At first it was difficult to see him smile, although he is increasingly happy with us. And we with him,” says Sergi Monterde.
Sergi is the sports coordinator of the entity, which has twelve teams in all categories, including children's. The first team plays in the Catalan Third League; and the second, with which Modou has already debuted (they lost 4-2 in the derby against Olímpic Can Fatjó, from Rubí) in Fourth. The idea is for him to gain experience and confidence in this competition to progressively make the jump to Third, they say at the club.
At first, Àlex Morales, the coach, asked him to get going. And Modou put them on. He challenged the ocean without knowing how to swim. He barely survives on scrap metal and saves a little every month to send to his mother and his four siblings. He is a scrap metal dealer by day and a soccer player by night. If he can do all that, he can get his act together. For the team, for him and for Joaquim, the first person who helped him without asking for anything in return.
Why did he do it? Because he has thirteen nephews, because he is passionate about basketball (as a young man he tried his luck in this sport, but he is only 1.80 m tall and is nearsighted) and because he remembered a 25-year-old young man who toured Morocco and the Atlas with a Ford Fiesta. “I got lost many times. People who didn't know me at all let me sleep in their homes and their hospitality taught me the meaning of life: helping others.”
He says that he is not a saint, but also that “we are here to lend a hand to those in need.” That's what he did when he began to weave a network of solidarity for Modou. One of his threads reached La Vanguardia, which published a chronicle on September 20, 2021. About twenty basketball clubs (from Catalonia, but also from Madrid and Ourense) were interested in him, in addition to a handball club. from Pontevedra.
Modou's story even captivated Dani Garrido, from SER, who opened a Sports Carousel with him. A journalist from the ACB, who we will only call P. because of his desire, sent him two huge boxes of sports clothes and shoes. But P. also punctured the bubble: “At his age, and without experience in a sport as technical as basketball, he would need a miracle.” Well the miracle has arrived. But not in basketball, but in football.
“If one ball doesn't work, let's try another one.” An incorrigible optimist, Joaquim continues to believe that Modou is a diamond in the rough. He helped him regularize his situation (the La Vanguardia article was a grain of sand in obtaining the papers). He also took him to the Marcet soccer academy, run by the family of an Espanyol legend, Javier Marcet (1928-2016), where even promising young people from North Korea have trained.
What Joaquim does not want to be said, but what is confirmed at school, is that he paid for a course that is not exactly cheap. In nine out of ten cases the result would have been in vain, but... But miracles sometimes exist. Modou shone so much in goal that, when the course ended, a great little team from Rubí knocked on his door: Penya Blaugrana Ramon Llorens. It seemed like a wink of fate.
This club is named in honor of the shortest goalkeeper in Barça history, Ramon Llorens (1906-1985), 1.64 meters tall. Modou, at 2.06, could be the tallest in Spain and one of the tallest in Europe. “He has a lot to learn, but his evolution is very good,” they explain at the club, where they believe that sport is also a way of social integration. And there this young man who today seems like someone else has already won. Smile a lot.
Modou doesn't miss any training. On non-session nights, he works out on his own. “When the rest of us are slumped on the couch, he gets going, after hours and hours looking for scrap metal,” says Joaquim, who insists on taking credit for himself. “We are a modest club,” they repeat in Rubí, although teams like this embody the best of sport and teach players who can measure 1.64 or two meters to be giants.
