To say that a bullfighter has personality is to confirm that his mark goes beyond considerations of style or art. And José Fuentes, who died this Monday of a post-election hangover in the Linares of his soul, was a bullfighter with personality.
His adolescence was spent in different trades (apprentice in a shoe workshop, waiter...) in which there was always a bullfighting reference, which fed him a vocation that began his journey, when he was eighteen years old, in the Plaza de Linares in a party for beginners A year later, and having fought alone some bullfights without picadores, Rafael Sánchez "El Pipo" notices him, a proxy that was Manolete's and who had just broken as such with El Cordobés, and makes him debut, now with horses, too in Linares. He triumphed and thus began a joint journey that would last for years of presence at all fairs.
“Linares took it from us, Linares gives it back to us”. The city where Manolete left his life was also the one that was now giving birth to a new bullfighting figure, José Fuentes. An advertising slogan, whose author "El Pipo" sent the message that Manolete already had a successor. In Barcelona, on Saint John's Day in 1963, José Fuentes still appeared as a bullfighter and, despite the fact that the failure with the sword prevented him from winning, he already left his mark on the Catalan fans, in a career in the arena, which, With comings and goings and occasional reappearances, it lasted until 2002.
Fuentes took the alternative in Malaga on April 18, 1965, from the hands of Antonio Ordóñez and confirmed it in Las Ventas in May of that same year.
A fairground bullfighter for some time, Fuentes was criticized by some for a certain coldness in his artistic expression, perhaps due to the elegance and ease with which he expressed his bullfighting. To disprove it, there remains the memory of his afternoon in Barcelona in August 1965, of which the critic Mariano de la Cruz wrote: “As fans we thank José Fuentes for the crutch slaughter of the sixth bull. The task had all the essential and aesthetic value of Manolete's bullfighting, the slowness and temper of the best bullfighting of Ordóñez and almost the natural grace of Pepe Luis Vázquez. And we can add that it also possessed a definitive and resounding classicism. So much so that only Pepe Luis, Ordóñez and Manolete managed it on their best afternoons”.
Knowing the bad news of the goodbye of José Fuentes, the matador also from Linares, Curro Díaz, comments for La Vanguardia: "The first images I have of bullfighting were with the maestro, already retired, fighting in the hall in the Plaza de Linares, who they shocked me. He was that, a bullfighter, from the makings and with his way of being and a great connoisseur of the brave field. Because of his personality and his career, he has been a bullfighter's bullfighter, but I think he has not done him justice. Those of us who have enjoyed being close to him verified his passion for bullfighting. He had the gift of temper and an extraordinary class ”.
Curro Díaz remembers an anecdote: “For better or for worse, his great personality came out. In Madrid he had a big poster, before and after that afternoon in Las Ventas in which someone from the line shouted pic!, pic! (advantageous trick on account of the date with the crutch) and the teacher asked for a pair of scissors and right there he cut the end of the red cloth”.
José Fuentes, genius and figure
