El futbol a sol y sombra.

Nash, Susan Smith

Eduardo Galeano, who was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, has earned a solid reputation on the strength of his courageous reporting of the cultural, political, and economic crises associated with dictatorships in South America. After a military dictatorship was established in Uruguay, he lived in exile in Spain and Argentina, where he founded the cultural magazine Crisis and wrote several books. The recipient of many awards, including the National Book Award and the Casa de las Americas Prize, Galeano (see WLT 66:1, pp. 76-77) continues to write on political and cultural issues, the latest being on what he views as the rise and decline of soccer (el futbol) in South America.

Galeano's latest book addresses a hugely popular sport with sometimes frighteningly intense audience engagement. Nevertheless, El futbol a sol y sombra is not a criticism of sports enthusiasm. Instead, it is more of an affirmation or endorsement of el futbol - albeit an endorsement of Galeano's vision of it. El futbol a sol y sombra functions as an extended allegory of what society holds as ideals of teamwork, community, valor, and vision, and how these become corrupted by the desire for personal aggrandizement - whether in pursuit of fame or fortune. Galeano laments the passage of soccer from sport to big business as he details its decline, giving a chronology of significant players, games, and events in this century.

The underlying assumption in El futbol a sol y sombra is that the early days were more "pure" and thus uncorrupted. However, a close examination of the text forces the reader to question the values that underlie this assumption. The premise that Galeano (and others who likewise lament - probably justifiably - the commercialization of professional sports) holds is that the spectacle or extended drama of sports inculcates in the onlookers a set of values that are then applied to society at large. For Galeano, the virtue of the "pure" sport is that it teaches mythic-level role models - the idol, the warrior, the team-player - and enacts the meaning of individual sacrifice in pursuit of a worthy goal (el gol or ultimate victory).

Somewhat surprisingly, the tone of the book is often whimsical or tongue-in-cheek. For example, when Galeano provides the setting of certain important soccer matches, he often contextualizes the event in a way that deflates the grandiose aspirations of corporate interests. The 1934 world championship is described in such a way: "Johnny Weismuller lanzaba su primer aullido de Tarzan, el primer desodorante industrial aparecia en el mercado, la policia de Louisiana acribillaba a balazos a Bonnie and Clyde. Bolivia y Paraguay, los dos parses mas pobres de America del Sur, se desangraban disputando el petroleo del Chaco en nombre de la Standard Oil y la Shell mientras Mussolini inauguraba, en Italia, el segundo Campeonato Mundial de Futbol."

In El futbol a sol y sombra corporate interests, the great corrupters of the sport, are also the corrupters of the human will, particularly in individuals whose expectations have been aroused by the advent of industrialized nations' exports of consumer culture and seductive (yet false) images of instant prosperity. Galeano's jeremiad is a call for change in an era when change will be most difficult because economic pressures are real and idealistic standards often fail to satisfy.

Susan Smith Nash University of Oklahoma