Next time you’ve got a minute to reconsider whether you’ve ever truly been good at anything, pull up some blurry youth academy footage from Messi’s hometown club, Newell’s Old Boys.
The gift was there even before his left foot was. The greatest player ever to kick a ball wasn’t ready to do the thing he was put on this Earth to do. “I was screaming, ‘Shoot! Shoot!’” Aparicio said. Then he stops talking and pulls a face that can only be described as a kind of shrug, as though even at the end of his life he was still struggling to accept the cosmic logic of what came next. There’s a video of the coach telling this story as an old man, fluttering his hand like a fish whipping through water. “He controlled the ball and took off diagonally across the middle of the pitch, dribbling,” said Aparicio. Whatever makes it make sense to you: the gift was just there. Choirs of angels cranking a heavenly spotlight to shine on this one particular patch of dirt in a working-class neighbourhood in Rosario, Argentina. Unplumbed regions of the brain glittering like fireworks in the dark.
Picture lightning shooting up a tiny spinal column, if you want. But the second time - Aparicio remembered this many years later - the ball hit his left leg and something happened. The first time the game came his way, sure enough, the kid stood stock still and watched the ball roll by.
0 kommentar(er)
