I was born and raised in Carlos Pellegrini, Santa Fe, a town of five thousand inhabitants where there were two clubs, San Martín (the “Uruguayans”) and Americano (the “Polancos”).
Chance made my parents move to the town next to the house of a family sympathetic to the second, make friends with them, and thus we obtained our membership cards.
look too
A place for everyone, including "losers"
What is common in these towns is that the children go to school in the morning and play sports in the club in the afternoon;
more than one, usually.
My first foray was into the most popular of all, soccer.
The teacher of the lower categories was Kity García, who had the ability to pocket the ball (with his foot) in a twenty-liter container at a distance of ten meters.
I didn't watch football on television, although I did go to the field on Sundays, so
my tactical knowledge was limited to what I could see from my height of one meter thirty
through the wire fence that separated the grass from the stands, and my technical knowledge, to the rudiments that my father was able to transmit to me.
Basically: don't hit the punt ball because then your big toe hurts.
Juanjo Conti (in a blue beanie), with his friend Hernán.
They are still seen and he was one of the first to read this text.
I remember little of the practices, only the one in which, tired of not scoring goals, I told Kity that I wanted to be a goalkeeper.
He laughed at me and sent me to the arch so that they "filled my basket with cucumbers."
On the other hand, the Saturdays that we played against other clubs are much more present in my memory.
Maybe because of the colors of the shirts, that blue and red satin we wore, as opposed to the opaque clothes we wore during the week.
I am going to consign three episodes that we could title "The rebel", "The liar" and "The deserter".
The first took place in a tournament organized at the San Jorge club.
Because of my low effectiveness to score, Kity García put me in midfield, behind the 5.
"If he doesn't score goals, at least he gets in the way
," he said.
But where there was misfortune, I saw an opportunity.
As soon as the ball reached my feet, I turned around, faced our goalkeeper, who was distracted, and nailed it into the corner.
The players of the opposing team shouted, happily, the goal, and I, not to be outdone, jumped with them.
Kity asked for the change immediately.
Soccer.
Juanjo Conti (second from the right) in an internal tournament of a club in his town, Carlos Pellegrini, Santa Fe. Once, he remembers, they put him to play at the last minute.
The second occurred locally.
We were facing our classic rival, San Martín, and among the red and black players was a friend from school, Cristian Sopeto.
He was very good and I admired him.
It turned out that it was cold that day and my mother had sent me with a long-sleeved white T-shirt under the sweatshirt.
When it was time to change into our club shirt, I took off my tracksuit and left my long-sleeved one on, so that my forearms, instead of being bare like the rest of the boys, were covered in white.
At the end of the game, Cristian came to greet me and, due to my distinguished clothing, in the innocence of a child, he asked me if I was the captain.
That day, I chose the lie.
The last episode is the end of my football career.
Kity had me on the substitute bench and contrary to that unwritten law of children's football that says that "everyone plays", time passed without him even looking at me.
From the stands, some guys who had gone to town for the weekend gesticulated: “So?
When are you coming in?"
The second half was advanced when Kity finally told me to warm up.
Happy, I took off my jacket and walked a couple of times around our bank sector at a slow jog.
When the referee announced the change, I ran to my position and from there waved to the stands.
A second later, the referee whistled again.
The match was over.
To the disbelief of the trick that the coach had played on me, the anger followed.
After each game, the boys took the shirt to wash it.
I told my mom that instead of doing that, I would send it back spray painted.
I did not do it.
But I didn't come back either.
I didn't play another sport until summer came around and I signed up for swimming.
He still didn't know how to swim “deep”.
I mean, she didn't know how to float.
My institutional passage through the swimming pool had only had one antecedent, a few years before, in the vacation camp.
I was supposed to have learned the rudiments of staying above the waterline there, but I didn't.
Our teacher was Miss Ivana and the only thing I can remember is her body worked on her.
Perhaps that is why it was difficult for me to retain other details such as kicks, strokes or breathing techniques.
Be that as it may, it was time for the first competition of the summer in this new stage and I still couldn't be in the deep end of the pool without holding on to the edge.
Luckily, the race took place across the width of the pool and not the length of it.
, which made it possible, with a little cunning, to locate me in such a way that all my journey was along the beach.
There is an old VHS filmed by Brigi Perotti in which you can see me, skinny and dark, waving across the pool, but instead of kicking, I walk.
Two years later I tried basketball.
I had “hit the growth spurt”, which I thought would help me.
And for a while it did.
Hitting the ball with the hands was easier than carrying it with the foot.
There were a lot of points per game, which allowed me to score some every time, and I had been able to make friends with several of the other guys, even if we were not in the same class.
Had I found my sport?
The problem came at the end of the second year of sports practice.
Two things happened.
One of a physical nature and one of a psychological nature.
The first was that when the category changed, the ball became heavier and the hoop higher.
Where before it was easy for me to shoot, now it was more difficult and statistically rarer.
The second was that, for that summer, they gave us homework.
I must say that I tried.
I really tried.
I agreed with Chiqui Suárez and the first week of vacation we asked for the key to the gym and we got ready to complete the first exercise sheet.
We spent the afternoon shooting hoops and scoring until sundown.
When we got tired, we went to the gym door and realized that we were locked in.
Someone had locked an external gate and we had no way to open it.
At that time, we did not have cell phones either.
We ran to the front door, which was made of glass, and we started waving to the people we saw.
I think it took more than half an hour before someone stopped, understood us and went looking for the manager to open the door for us.
We do not continue the practice.
I don't know what weighed the most in the decision to leave.
If, as I said, that the hoop had become unattainable or, perhaps,
nerdy
pride hurt from the unaccomplished task.
Anyway, I went to the first class and since the teacher already knew about my decision, every time he touched the ball, he would cheer me on and applaud.
If he had doubts, that embarrassment finished convincing me.
As adolescence started, more interested in books and computers, I managed to avoid other sports.
The physical education classes at school were enough for me and even allowed me to fantasize that perhaps my destiny was in athletics.
But it was not like that.
For the intercollegiate games, I entered the javelin and shot put events, and in both disciplines I put the lives of other students in danger.
The result was that instead of being part of the team for any of those tests, I traveled as a field assistant for the chess team.
Not only had I not excelled in any of the activities that required physical dexterity, but in the only one that consisted of one hundred percent intellectual action, I did not measure up either.
I thought I was going to college never having made it in sports when in my senior year of high school, I got one more chance.
One of my friends played tennis and the following weekend there was a camp with boys and girls from other towns.
I signed up and participated in the activity.
I came back with the phone number of a girl from María Juana and later, I had to attend classes
.
The thing with tennis is that if you don't have your own racket, it's very difficult to master your shots.
I didn't have one, so I used the ones from the club.
Always a different one, since he was not the only one in that situation and those who arrived first grabbed the best ones.
Sometimes I would arrive early and get a carbon fiber and other times I would arrive later and have to settle for a peeling aluminum with yellowish strings.
In my first and only tournament, I played only two games before getting knocked out.
The first, against a mastodon that I still remember today.
He was hitting the ball so hard that I could barely return some of his blows.
The second match was against the friend who had invited me to play the sport in the first place.
I couldn't lose.
I didn't want to lose.
So even though he was better than me, I took advantage of the fact that in amateur tennis there are no judges and you trust the player's word to define doubtful balls on his side, and every time one of his shots fell within the court, but near the strap, with a serious face, I drew a circle with my racket from the outside on the brick dust and shouted "Out".
We played the longest set in the club's history until he got tired and gave it to me as a win.
For the next two, he requested the presence of our teacher and I could no longer steal in his face.
When I moved to Santa Fe to study, I had the perfect excuse to avoid sports.
Anyway, I made some attempt.
I remember a five-a-side soccer game in which I tore myself after the first kick
and a paddle game in which I hit my left eye with the ball.
Then I got married and one fine day my wife started playing volleyball, a sport she had played in high school.
I took her and waited in the stands reading.
That's how I spent the first year until they managed to convince me to join the class.
But when I signed up, many more people did too, so the teacher decided to divide the group into two, A and B. In A were the experienced ones, those who already knew how to play, the athletic ones.
And in B we were the rest.
I must say that it was, so far, my best sporting experience.
I learned to hit the ball, how to move on the court, the rules.
And one fine day, I was promoted to team A. Some will say that it was because the rest of the members of team B dropped out and I was left alone.
I think it was because my sporting prowess, after years of trial and error,
----------------
Juanjo
Conti
is a programmer and writer.
He was born in Carlos Pellegrini, Santa Fe province. He graduated as an Information Systems Engineer from UTN.
He has published the novels “Xolopes” (Automágica), “Las lagunas” (Editorial Municipal de Rosario), “Las iteraciones” (Contramar) and “Los quemacoches” (UOiEA!).
He writes sporadically in digital and print media.
His personal website is juanjoconti.com.
He no longer practices volleyball, but does gymnastics twice a week with teacher Ceci.
With his publication, the text “Stories of a mediocre athlete” becomes part of “Variations on Carlos Pellegrini in the nineties”, an unpublished non-fiction book.
