Gabriel García Márquez, and the magic of football writing
By Paul Hyland
“And so I resolved to go to the stadium.” Gabriel García Márquez loved starting his stories like this, with a sense of time always in motion. Here in his 1983 work, “The Oath” — neither purely fiction nor exactly fact — Barranquilla-based Atletico Junior are set to take on Bogotá’s Millonarios in one of the most hotly-anticipated matches of recent times.
In his first ever visit to a football game, the narrator finally understands how the sport has become the world’s greatest cultural phenomenon. There’s something magical about the experience, of bearing witness to the talents of Junior’s Heleno de Freitas and Millonarios’s Alfredo di Stéfano. Something quite unreal about losing himself, and his sanity, in a crowd of thousands of people. It’s a story that exposes the difficulty in writing objectively about football. For football writing always has something subjective, something fictional about it.
“As this was the most talked-about game in history,” he begins, “I had to get there early. I must confess, never before in my life have I turned up anywhere so early, and never have I left anywhere feeling quite so exhausted.” Just as, in his 1985 novel Love in the Time of Cholera, romantic love is presented metaphorically as an infectious disease, García Márquez writes about football here as if it were a contagion infecting one supporter, then another, then the next, until it becomes an epidemic.
Or perhaps it’s more like a religion, his first entry into the stadium a kind of baptism: “Alfonso and Germán had never taken the initiative in inviting me into the Sunday congregation of football, though they probably knew how easily I’d end up losing my mind, along with all traces of my civilised self, as I did yesterday on the stands of the Estadio Municipal.”
Blending fact and fiction was one of García Márquez’s favorite techniques. The Estadio Municipal actually exists, though it’s better known as the Estadio Romelio Martínez. The teams in the story, Atlético Junior and Millonarios, are also real. So too, are their players. (De Freitas and di Stéfano are two of the greatest footballers of the 20th century).
It’s less clear, however, if the match depicted ever actually took place. If it did, it can only have been in June 1950, the one time the two clubs faced each other while de Freitas and di Stéfano played for them. That game would certainly have been one of the most talked about in Barranquilla’s history, as the previous year’s Colombian league champions were on their way from the capital, bringing with them the prodigious Argentine striker di Stéfano, who had represented the Colombian national team four times the previous year. But no detailed report of the game seems to exist. This is why the story is so hard to categorize: Is it a fictional account of a game that only ever played out on the page? Or is it the only surviving record of a meeting of two of history’s greats?
Perhaps it’s somewhere in between. For García Márquez, the very real act of entering a football stadium adorned in one team’s colors precedes something quite unreal. For no sooner has he set foot in Juniors’ Estadio Municipal than he magically ceases to be Gabriel García Márquez. How can a non-believer be converted to the popular religion in the space of just 90 minutes? How can a world-famous man of letters be reduced to a raving lunatic, then come to his senses as soon as the final whistle blows?
For García Márquez, it’s because every football match begins with the same enchantment. “Now I understand,” he says, “why such prim and proper gentlemen blend so easily into the background when they don, as is the custom, their multi-colored caps. With that simple act they are automatically transformed into someone else, as if their hats were nothing other than a uniform for a completely new personality.”
Supporters in the stands — carrying their flags and banners, wearing their hats and scarves — are not themselves. Or rather, they’re at once themselves and at the same time someone else, some other version of themselves possessed by a higher power. The players are not just men dressed in colorful attire, either. They’ve transformed, as if by magic, from athlete to idol. This metaphysical transformation is, above all, football’s great appeal to García Márquez.
Consider, for example, the 31-year-old Rosario native who spends his Saturday afternoons sporting red blue stripes on a field in Barcelona, known to his friends and family as “Leo.” As soon as he pulls on the blaugrana, conjures the ball past yet more unsuspecting stooges and teleports it into the net, he’s “Messi,” the repository of the ambition of hundreds of thousands watching on from the sidelines. Leo is no longer Leo.
The relationship between footballer and fanatic, hero and worshipper, is encapsulated in García Márquez’s effusive written style. The name “Messi” and all we associate with it — isn’t it just a fictionalization of who Leo actually is? By the same token, isn’t football writing a purely subjective fictionalization of a real event?
“The Oath” was Garcia Marquez’s only real foray into football writing. His work rarely touched upon subject matter so banal. His greatest tome, the 1967 masterpiece 100 Years of Solitude is a bible of the history of South America and its inhabitants, presented through a mode known as magic realism. These days, magical realism is a popular buzzword for any story that seems too strange to be true. Even the altogether realist 2015 Netflix drama Narcos, set during Colombia’s war on drugs, promised a magical realist account in a “place where the bizarre shakes hands with the inexplicable on a daily basis.”
Magical realism is a poorly-understood cliche of Colombia. It’s not so much a style where the bizarre shakes hands with the inexplicable as one where the beautiful and the good is expressed through the divine; the horrid expressed through the infernal. It’s where the banal is delivered as impossible, the impossible delivered as banal. García Márquez’s brand of magical realism is designed to express ineffable parts of human experience. And it works just as well for describing the experience of the football supporter.
But García Márquez isn’t writing about football as much as he is writing about writing about football. And just as literature expresses the inherent absurdity of the individual experience, so too must football writing express the inherent absurdity of the supporter’s experience. And just as each perspective on a match is unique and subjective, all football writing should reflect the unique subjectivity of the writer.
“I don’t know if it’s too soon into my career as a football fan to indulge myself in a few personal observations on yesterday’s match, but now we’re agreed that losing your sense of embarrassment is one of the essential conditions of fandom, I’m going to tell you what I saw, or at least what I think I saw, yesterday afternoon.”
Anyone who follows football knows, deep down, that their love for the game is irrational, their choice of team arbitrary, their top-of-the-lung screaming for an inflated sphere of rubber to pass between one set of metal posts more often than another fundamentally absurd. So how can you ever write rationally about something so deeply irrational? How can we describe in objective language a profoundly subjective experience, where everyone gathered in the stands will see things from a unique angle, and will experience the match in a unique way?
“The Oath” is both an abstract narrative as well as a match report of sorts. “First of all,” the narrator explains, “it seemed to me that Junior dominated Millonarios from the very first moment. If that white line that splits the field into two halves means anything at all, that statement must be true, given how little time Millonarios had the ball during the first period in the half of the field containing Juniors’ goal. (How’s my debut as a football writer going?)”
Football is described here as if it were some inscrutable dark art; an unexpected approach, but one that, in Garcia Marquez’s hands, works. For as much as the written style is of an outsider looking in, those of us familiar with the sport will surely agree that Juniors were the more dominant side.
Irony of ironies: No sooner do we see that football fanaticism is a kind of magical enchantment than the game itself is demystified, simplified, reduced to bones so bare even a complete novice can describe it coherently. But that demystification serves a purpose, reducing the game to a blank canvas whose simplicity is its magic.
Now the 22 men in their multi-colored outfits are not just athletes. They’re characters in their own novel, penning new plotlines with each kick of the ball. Take Botafogo legend Heleno de Freitas, who took to the field for Junior in a match that must have been played in 1950, if it was ever played at all. Look how comfortably the language of football and the language of literature collide.
“If Junior’s players had been writers instead of footballers, I reckon that the ingenious Heleno would have been an extraordinary detective novelist. His keen perceptiveness, his calm, inspector-like patrol of the field, and his quick, unexpected finishes were worthy of the author of a new detective for crime novels.”
With descriptive work like that, it’s little surprise that de Freitas, who scored 19 goals in 18 international appearances for Brazil, operated chiefly as a target man. But how much more it tells us about him to picture him as the protagonist of a great detective novel: his ability to evade capture, his reliance on intelligence over raw power, his tendency to use his head in every sense of the term.
While attacking football is a kind of literary creation, defending has more in common with criticism. Junior center-back Dos Santos, “who despite what his name would suggest played more like four men than just two, would have made quite the art critic, blocking the path of all of those aspiring writers who would try no matter how hard to reach the goal of immortality.” How well he captures the cynicism of all great center-backs, their keenness to denigrate the creative work of others, their inherently destructive enterprise.
Writing about football isn’t quite destructive, or cynical. But it is technocratic. It’s a closed shop populated usually by men of a certain lineage and expertise. That comes with its own lexicon. Most football writing is prosaic. It obeys a certain rubric built of set phrases and structures. But football is not prosaic. Its importance to those who care about it can’t be expressed rationally. Perhaps good football writing always needs a touch of the poetic.
Good footballers most certainly do. Juniors’ de Latour would have been a tremendous author of inspired, full-length poems, such was the pulsating rhythm of his game, his ability to control the tempo, but “the same can’t be said of Ary, whose Junior teammates didn’t give him the least opportunity to display his literary skill.”
In a world where the best players are authors of their own stories, it’s only right that the great magical realist should cede the spotlight to the greatest author in his country’s history. “And that’s not to mention Millonarios. If their star player di Stéfano knows about anything, it’s rhetoric.”
The Unexamined Game is a series exploring the intersection of philosophy and football. You can find the previous articles in the series here:
Toward a philosophy of football
Pep Guardiola, tiki-taka and the end of football
Ball don’t lie: Football’s problem of other minds
How Isaac Newton ruined football
Stefano Pioli, and the power of mindfulness
Raheem Sterling, Michel Foucault and football’s racist discourse
The longest penalty in the world