Luis Suárez belongs to the category of explained players. They are part of the idol hierarchy of the club's history, but we never saw them play and there are not enough games filmed to give us an idea. Does not matter. The history of art also works by oral transmission and when Suárez played, the most reliable witnesses say that he was an artist. For a long time flamenco lovers divided the world between those who had heard Silverio sing and those who had not. It was a face-to-face frontier and a survival resource prior to the abundance of recordings that followed.
Soccer imitates flamenco and Suárez belongs to a tradition in which we have had to trust those who saw him sing – I mean, play. Elegant, fast, creative, decisive and intelligent are adjectives that have accompanied him in the construction of a myth that we did not quite believe because the Suárez that we knew was a bald man, discreet and smart enough to dodge cordial attacks on the radio. that José Maria García dedicated to him or to always be sensible in the transmissions of the SER. We also knew that Josep Maria Minguella had seen him play and that when he talked about him, his eyes lit up.
The explained players are important: they unite the sentimental education of the fans. Kubala, for example, represents this phenomenon and although we have recovered accelerated images of the NO-DO, the most precise testimony continues to be Serrat's song. We also know that Suárez had to live with personalities and vanities typically from Culés, that he seduced the Italian fans and that Barça had to sell him because he was bankrupt. The episode reminds us of another and makes us think that one day it will be our turn to become the minguellas who will tell the young culés who Leo Messi was. The difference will be, however, technological: the culés of the future will be able to inject themselves with a hologram to become a Messi even more Messi than the real one.
Things I know about Suárez: that he won the Ballon d'Or as a Barça player the year I was born. That Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, who saw him play, defined him with one of those phrases that try to imitate the aesthetic impact that an artist produces on you: “the precociously magical Luisito Suárez”.
The diminutive is important. Many Barcelona fans called him Luisito, it is not known if for anatomical reasons or for supervening familiarity. We never call Iniesta, who is the closest thing to Suárez that we will ever see, Andresito. The problem is that, many years later, in the midst of a binge of triplets and tridents, Andoni Zubizarreta signed Luis Suárez, the great Uruguayan striker. The homonymous coincidence should have imposed the hierarchy of experience. But thanks to the emphatic juggling of Gerard Romero (among others) and the enthusiasm aroused by the striker's voracious goalscoring, they also called him Luisito, it is not known whether to forget the past or, as a tribute to the continuity of memory.
Today everything we will explain in the newspaper about Suárez will be true. But if you really want to know who it was, don't look for accelerated and defective images on YouTube, but go to one of the many Catalans who saw him play and let him tell you who it was with the charm, sadly threatened, of oral tradition.
