FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Sports

Eduardo Galeano and the Art of the Elegant Fact

Eduardo Galeano wrote passionately, perceptively, and lucidly about a great many topics. But no one has ever written about soccer quite like he did.
Photo By Jose Francisco Pinton (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Eduardo Galeano understood what's important: adamant leftism and soccer. He was born in Montevideo, Uruguay and died there on Monday, at the age of 74, from lung cancer. He wrote exquisitely and voluminously and on many topics, but most strikingly, he wrote densely—he could reduce an idea or emotion down to a few weighty words. It is difficult to write with this sort of laconic gravity. It's horseshoeing. You do it correctly, or you get kicked in the face.

Advertisement

There are a pair of sentences in Galeano's Soccer in Sun and Shadow I carry around in my mind. They're about the Basque sculptor Eduardo Chillida, who made the wind combs in San Sebastián and was quite a goalie in his day before his ligaments were sundered to sawdust by a tackle: "Chillida works with materials so heavy they sink into the earth, but his powerful hands toss iron and reinforced concrete into the air where they discover other spaces and create new dimensions on the fly. He used to do the same thing with his body."

Read More: A National Soccer Team Is Not Just A National Soccer Team

That book is filled with many kind and beautiful tributes like this. It exudes a deep appreciation for the players who provided Galeano moments of happiness. It thanks the game itself for capacitating those moments. Galeano knew how to muse without sounding like he was full of shit. Part of this was knowing when to stop. Johan Cruyff has moved more than a few writers to verbose, toweringly unpleasant orgasm. Galeano gave him a little more than a page.

The Uruguayan brought his talent for words to the athletes and spectacle they were tasked with describing, as opposed to the other way around. Some of the most devastating lines in Soccer are elegantly stated facts. It was Galeano's journalistic training that gave him this knack. He published several long, poetic books about the colonialist molestation of South America. Those volumes were more contentious than anything he wrote about Garrincha, but they were equally political, equally polemical, equally rooted in truth.

For Galeano, everything he learned was assimilated into a mental neighborhood. Soccer lived next to governments, which lived next to economics, which lived next to history. They commingled sometimes—commingled always, in some respects—but could also be discussed as such. In some passages, Soccer is a reveling in the splendorous escape games provide; in others, it's an exploration of how they affect and reflect the world outside themselves. Moment by moment, it goes where it needs to go.

This is sportswriting as it should be: unblind to the broader picture, but myopic in all the right ways, not too high-minded to miss the meaning in how a striker throws himself into a header. Intimate familiarity with the wildness of life's pleasures is as important as understanding the structures that seek to tame and commodify them.

Galeano once said the vividness of his wife Helena's dreams embarrassed him, because his were banal and not worth remembering. But if he had an artistic mission, it was about remembering: the big and the quotidian, the crucial and the frivolous. He made it all vivid. Perhaps this is why he and Helena got along so well. She dreams the way he wrote.