Recognize these guys? 

Well, you know the short guy.  The tall, metallic, long haired dude in the back you may or may not depending on your soccer IQ.  It’s Carlos Valderrama, the captain of the 1990, ‘94, and ‘98 Colombian World Cup teams, known as probably the greatest Colombian footballer ever.  You won’t get an argument from anyone here in Santa Marta, the town he grew up in.  Here they remove the Colombian qualifier, and he is ‘the greatest footballer ever’.  Even a relative non-follower of soccer like myself recognized the long shag of blond locks.  I don’t know what they used on the statue to do the hair, but it’s a classic. 

This is outside the Santa Marta stadium where the local B-league or C-league team plays.  At the last minute, we met this kid, also named Carlos, who is a journalism student and he offered to take us to the game.  Actually, he offered to take us to two soccer games.  This one and his sister’s junior high game.  We opted for just the one.   Three  foreign guys lurking around the sidelines as a bunch of 12 and 13 year old girls played soccer?   Not sure that would go over so well with the Colombian soccer moms. 

Here’s the Santa Marta game (my memory in forgien languages is terrible so I don’t remember the team name).

The fans are intense.  A large portion of them spend the entire, and I mean entire, game jumping up and down, chanting and singing.  And when they score.  Holy. 

I loved their version of the Lambeau Leap.  The home team scored and the player ran to the chainlink/barbwire fence that separates fans from the the field , leapt up onto it (the chainlink portion) and started madly rattling it, as fans on the other side leapt up on it and did the same, but even more frenzied. 

Our guys won 2-0, but, since we found out about the game so late, I wasn’t able to bet in time.  Too bad because I would have bet on the home team for sure. 

So…remember these guys?

That’s right.  Me and the statue himself.

Any other situation and you couldn’t pay me to go up to a pro athlete and ask for a photo or an autograph.  Not Jordan.  Or even Bird.  Not even my man, Doug Flutie.

Alright, maybe Doug Flutie.

Here though, when the other Carlos told us Carlos Valderrama is a part owner of the team and was at the game, I went for the photo-op.  As you can see I’m in the classic, ‘no, no, you have to hold the button for it to clic-’ pose. 

El Pipe, as he is known, couldn’t have been nicer.  Thanked me in English for coming to see his team play.  So I thanked him in Spanish for coming to play in the states (other Carlos had mentioned he had played MLS at the end of his career), or at least I think I thanked him.  I fumbled through something like ’Me gusto cuando tu…ah shit, what’s the word for play? Playar?  Maybe jugo-something?  No that´s juice.  Maybe-  Jugar!  I can’t believe I just remembered that.  That’s freaking amazing.  Score one for the BFA St.Albans school system.  But how do I say it in the past tense? Jugared?  Jugando?  And I wonder if I should be using the tu or usted , I mean he may find it impolite if I presume-ah shit, he’s looking at me like I’m a crazed fan, I better spit something out…jugar  por Tampa Mutiny’.  

He smiled.  So if I screwed up, I didn’t screw up too badly.

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After the game, we ended up at Carlos’ house.  The journalist student Carlos that is. 

And in what was about 5 weeks in the waiting, I finally got an answer to my Ollie question.  While we sat on their porch, his younger brother was practicing his skateboarding and after observing the technique carefully, I think, with a little practice, I’m ready to nail one now.

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My father spent a lot of time in Colombia during the period they lived in Caracas.  He spent a lot of time in a lot of places actually during that period.  His work was bouncing him through a whole host of Latin American countries, as well as up to New York now and again.  There’s a poker story that happened during one of these New York flights that I came across.  He was flying up in the company plane with a bunch of the bigwigs and everyone was playing poker throughout the flight.  It seems the top dog was getting crushed by the time they reached NYC, so he made the pilot circle for a few more hands.  They kept the holding pattern for an hour til the exec’s luck turned.

Around this time though, I gather that all that travelling had lost its allure.  He was starting to get sick and the constant bouncing from one country to another, and all the inevitable social obligations, etc involved were not conducive to his health situation.  As to what he had, there seems to be no certain answer.  The doctors weren’t sure…I’ve seen mention of tropical fevers…malaria…Hepatitus.  Whatever it was, his bouts with it were starting to kick in during this time in South America.  This next part is common knowledge within the family so I don’t feel like I’m leaking some family secret or something…it was just another part of his life…a pretty common fact in a lot of families.

He was a bit of a drinker.  More than a bit.  And when he started to get sick, he was told by the doctors to stop as his liver wasn’t in great shape.  He didn’t. 

Things would start to get worse.