The hanger, in a newspaper, is that minimal or great excuse that current events offer you so that we can write an article. The newsrooms are full of them: the coats hang from the physical ones; of metaphorical, much of the content. For almost everything you should look for one. The reason, the excuse to work on something with multiple approaches, if possible, original.
In El País Semanal we did not have any hangers when we considered making a profile of Michael Robinson before last Christmas. But we had the only reason that it does not need excuses and it is powerful enough in itself: just because. What we did not know then was that we would not finish doing it. This is the story of a joyous truncated profile. We will count it as it is: a report in itself that was drowned in the inkwell, that could not be finished, that has no end point.
I still have the message in which Michael Robinson, on a Saturday after hours, asked me to call him. I had to comment urgently something. When a friend dials the phone almost about to break into the early hours of the morning, even if they usually do so to run away from their ghosts or to vent, a fortuitous encounter, a joke, something just funny that just happened, even if a dinner or end of a series, better answer. You can only regret it. Much. The next day, we talk.
-I have cancer.
We feel the silence preceding those words that try to seek comfort. But he broke it with his ice pick and a succession of jokes in the way of those spells that sorcerers apply. We ended up laughing out loud:
I have cancer, he said.
We feel the silence preceding those words that try to seek comfort. But he broke it and we ended up laughing out loud. "
-This is a scam, because I feel like never before.
Michael was such a good person that he feared the suffering of others much more than his own. For this reason, some of us never knew to what extent he was aware of what was coming upon him. When we had decided to start the report, I called him. The greatest hanger we could imagine had not yet been produced. A whole carom: Liverpool, his team, would meet Atlético de Madrid in the quarterfinals of the Champions League. Michael Robinson would comment on that for Movistar +. The first leg would be at the Wanda Metropolitano. The return at Anfield. The excuse came to meet us, to give us in a sense the reason ... What better occasion to make a story with who had won a European Cup with the Reds than traveling to what was his field?
We start at Wanda. Robinson and Carlos Martínez used to arrive a minimum of two hours before the broadcast. The second blurted out when he greeted us: “But you already know everything about English! What else do you want to tell us? ” It was cold and the stadium sports stands are installed in the old comb, where a biruji that cuts the skin runs. He was trying to get the idea that he should spend more or less five hours out there, along with two reporters who marked his steps: a graphic that he had just met for the first time and a pen that he already knew well.
But we did not see him that night of the Cholista offensive with the athletes a bad gesture. He sat in the stands, enjoying the emptiness before the din caused by the red and white fans, that heterogeneous and striped amalgam that bounces like a voice when it roars. Carlos Martínez seemed to focus on his fattened slimness with a scarf to summon the energies that later allow him to count the devilish rhythm of the ball on the field like no one else. And that night was presented as a great fight. No paperwork: soccer or life.
Robinson did not trust who he considered to be the most masochistic team in Europe: "The one who knows best how to suffer," he said. He would have preferred anyone before crossing into a tie with 11 starters trained by Cholo Simeone. Atlético won 1-0 in the first leg. As short as the result seemed, that only goal was worth 10. The leader of the Premier, the current European champion, had fallen, the team that had 27 days without losing in their league. But Robinson did not stop smiling despite the fence, despite the harassment of the wild beasts in their efforts to win every meter of land in pursuit of the ball. Shivering, he smiled, shaking off a hot dog on the break, winked. It was an afternoon of lace for defeat where he still had a glimmer of hope for the return. But while he was lamenting, at the same time, you could notice his enjoyment in a job in which more than 30 years later, he still felt as grateful as the first day.
Was you aware then that you had so little time left in front of cameras and microphones? Robinson gave off a strange serenity that day. He measured his words, looked at the emptiness of the stadium when he ran out of souls like someone watching the curtain fall. At the time, he had been fighting his melanoma for a year and three months. The irony, the sarcasm, the biting -all those raw elements of humor- had served him not to fail. Perhaps because, at the same time, he combined them with moments of lucidity and hope. "I do not think to die of this," he told us shortly after his diagnosis.
He did not stop working, he did not give up, he did not give up keeping us company and the privilege, he said, “of getting into the living room of their houses”. In that year he held another Champions League for Liverpool the previous spring. He hoped to renew the title and pass the round at Anfield. "It is that we are very good, dammit." I didn't know then. But that was going to be his last game.
He did not stop working, he did not give up, he did not give up keeping us company and the privilege, he said, “of getting into the living room of their houses”.
We set about organizing the trip to Liverpool. Flights and hotels came out of one eye of the face. The 2,500 athletes who would travel that day skyrocketed rates. Michael was looking forward to showing us around the city. Then we would have wanted to go with him to Blackpool, where he spent his childhood after being born in Leicester in 1958, to show us his neighborhood, the exact place where his parents set up that Bed and Breakfast, the school where he continuously made pellas and Miss Baker instilled in him that crude sense of perfectionism. The route of the boy who left school and was going to train but he doubted whether to dedicate himself to rugby or soccer, a dilemma so genuinely British for the lower-middle-class kids.
Who knows, perhaps, also within Anfield, to touch the shield together, as the players do before jumping onto the field, to get into the locker rooms where he learned the importance of stripes, the respect of beginners with aspirations based on having the pants, jerseys with bibs before the mud marked them and cleaning the boots of the elders. All that he knew how to count like no one else. The hidden rules that later allow the operation of what we deem special, respect for legends, naturalness and the sense of sacrifice with which he learned the magisterium that led him later to succeed in what he set out in life.
It was freezing in those latitudes too. So much so that he sent the following message: "Bring some leather underpants because it is cold as hell." But it was March 10. Just the day the virus was threatening to such an extent that the newspaper prohibited the planned trips. Prudence advised avoiding risks. And for that, nothing worse than loitering in airports or getting on a plane with dozens of fans, heading for a probable contagion. "We have been spoiled for the trip Michael, enjoy it."
If the defeat of his team was bad news for him, the worst were yet to come. Just the next day he felt bad. “It made me dizzy and I wasn't very aware of the language I spoke in, whether English or Spanish. Fuck! Cholo Simeone wants to finish me off ”. He was still joking on the way to getting tested at the hospital. But since he obtained the latest results, he knew that there was no remedy with those multiple balls, he said, that they had invaded his brain in a cruel metastasis. One of those bastard afternoons of confinement, a message entered her on the mobile: “I hope you are well and going through the circumstances with the necessary elegance. However, I don't… ”
He was receiving radiotherapy daily in Benalmádena, with the results, he would decide. "My last game was at Anfield. And when I think about that, Atlético always wins. Brain stuff ”, he let off steam. Meanwhile, the demons took me for not having accompanied him. And I tried to cheer him up by telling him that they had had to suspend all the championships until he could tell us again in the broadcasts. Such was its importance in the gearing of the show. Soccer without Robinson explaining to us what the hell we are seeing is on the way to becoming something sad and much less exciting.
"My last game was at Anfield. And when I think about that, Atlético always wins. Brain stuff ”, he let off steam.
Now it's time to think about how this report would have been. Get the idea: although you think you are reading it, it does not exist. They are mere notes of what will never see the light. It has been truncated, but I think about what we would have talked about. And that in itself is absurd, because with Michael Robinson, for these things, there was never a fixed script. From a phrase, from any question, he would draw a book for life loaded with epic, pregnant with a sense of humor, accompanied by a mystical face to sacrifice, tasting every word, crumbling every anecdote based on joy. For the sheer pleasure of telling, even the bitter moments took on their just and opposite meaning. Also for the eagerness that put in the adventure of asking and questioning at every step. Like that day when hanging up his coat in one of our favorite restaurants, the mythical Zeraín, he released before sitting down to eat: “I was thinking that Jesus Christ was a crack, but, tell me, do you really care who the hell he was his father?".
In Liverpool, in that trance in which the man on the verge of the end returns to the child's stage, we would have spoken of a handful of human divinities without appealing to their parents: common idols ranging from Messi to The Beatles. But also of his lineage: of Gabriela, his granddaughter, of the exploits and hardships of his parents and grandparents in world wars, of the sweetness with which he remembered his mother and grandmother, of the pillar that Chris were for him, his wife and Liam and Aimee, their children.
By stepping on the soil of that homeland that was no longer part of Europe at will, he would have overcome that rage for the lost battle of Brexit, a chapter that made him cry more than once and twice ... We would have regretted that frivolous and greedy market in which football has become, for which he had drawn an analysis in which very often he found it difficult to continue to maintain enthusiasm. I would have bought a copy of The Guardian - its British reference newspaper together with EL PAÍS in Spain - and I don't know if any gin and tonic had fallen. I think not, because outside of Spain he did not like to ask for them. He looked stupid when he saw that they were not served in a balloon glass or a glass of cider. Asking for a gin and tonic outside his adopted country meant throwing money away.
We would have commented on his dream come true of living by the sea. Something that he caressed long before falling ill and that he did when he retired last year to Marbella. To what extent he was finally content within his own skin. It was something that tormented him. Not being worthy of their holdings, of their convictions linked to ethical and emotional roots.
There he would have enjoyed his role as a guide in Liverpool more than a dog with two tails, one of those retruecanos in which he adapted the English saying to the Spanish saying. Because with Robinson, not only does a benchmark of sport and communication disappear in its ethical, aesthetic, and moral aspects. A language disappears, a language that was created in each sentence and of which it was a pioneer and transformer. A before and after that resonates with its powerful and evocative echo among several generations. Those of those who have listened carefully and will continue to do so within their memory.
