One of the tasks I was given as a young journalist, 30 years ago or a little over, was to cover the two clubs of Petah Tikva.
Hapoel was then the top club in town, with a rich history of six championships, a large crowd and a young coach named Abram Grant;
Maccabi was the small and surviving club, which with a small crowd tried to tail its senior city rival.
In those days there was a change of generations in Maccabi, when the old Nachman family was replaced by two young and ambitious brothers - Avi and Amos Luzon.
My father worked at a bank, Amos was a contractor at the beginning of his career.
It was a painful, honest and open conversation, and I later realized that it was the narrative that would activate the Luzon ethos all his life.
I remember Amos talking about his father, an employee of the municipal sanitation department, who one day took the keys to one of the public buildings he was in charge of and sent him home humiliated.
Petah Tikva has always been the city of Israel's football fans.
Yitzhak Zeevi, Menachem Heller and Gavri Levy from Hapoel compared to Shmuel Ben Dror, Shmuel Bglibter, Pinchas Wolfowski and Nehemiah Graf HaMaccabist.
The Luzons, who saw before their eyes the discrimination of their father by his Ashkenazi employers, had previously engaged in domestic battles with the veteran Maccabi members and made sure to keep away the families who were so identified with the club - Believer, Zeltzer and Ben Dror.
With considerable talent and skill, the brothers went into the real big battle - a struggle at Hapoel, which in those years was insurmountable in terms of size and quality differences.
My father came to the Football Association and fought bitter personal battles with Gavri Levy, first the chairman of Hapoel Petah Tikva and then the chairman of the association.
Long periods did not speak to each other.
Over the years, Hapoel has weakened financially and athletically, and Maccabi has built an excellent youth department and taken over this sector in the city.
It will also take on a youth championship, and two of the department's graduates, Manor Solomon and Liel Abda, will become stars and be sold to Ukrainian Shakhtar and Scottish Celtic for more than € 10 million, with options for future profits from them.
Maccabi became the absolute domain of the Luzons, as the brothers and their children divided their roles in the club.
The eldest in the children, Guy, the son of brother Victor, received the coaching of the adult group.
Some of the time he succeeded, others he failed.
He also started this season as a coach, but was fired and replaced by Nir Klinger.
Although in the fight for the position of Maccabi's candidate for chairman of the Football Association, Avi easily defeated Aryeh Zayef, a senior economist and fan of the team himself, and even though I also thought he and Zayf were no more suitable When he was appointed chairman of the association) was a victim and bitter.
He never knew how to make the separation between the statehood that his position as chairman demanded, and often fell in remarks towards anyone who claimed to have harmed Maccabi Petah Tikva.
Regardless of the fact that many of the team's fans left this season and did not come to its games, after difficult confrontations with Guy Luzon and his family in general, any survey among football fans in Israel would reveal that most of them are satisfied with the relegation of the Luzon League.
To a large extent, the confrontation between the family and the fans is reminiscent of the story of Hapoel Jerusalem, which lowered the Luzon League this week.
There, too, a crowd confrontation with owner Yossi Sassi gave birth to "Katamon", a group of fans who started in the third division, swallowed the mother team, reached the Premier League this year after more than 20 years and also survived the season successfully.
By the way, one of the prominent fans in the protest against the Luzon, Idan Goldstein, told me this week that the fight will continue until Luzon, who does not hold an official position at the club today, leaves.
If required, fans will consider adopting the Katamon model.
Meanwhile, the long-standing idyll between my father and Amos also ended with the departure of Amos, Patron of Maccabi, and its acquisition by Rishon Lezion.
Meanwhile, Amos' efforts to defy him have not increased, and his first will now fight in the tests against the first division team Kfar Shalem, in order to survive in the second division.
So Maccabi goes down, but everything could have been worse, since Hapoel found itself for one game in a starting position back in the Premier League.
She drew 6,000 (!) Of her fans to the municipal stadium, but snatched a trio from Kfar Qassem and the dream expired.
By the way, in Maccabi's last decisive games, it failed to bring in more than 300 fans, most of them players from the youth department who are obliged to attend.
The seeds of relegation have been sown throughout the season, but the clear direction down intensified when Avi Luzon also fired Nir Klinger a month ago, who was appointed in place of his nephew Guy only in December.
The press conference after the layoffs is poorly remembered, in which Luzon, a senior banker and former chairman of the association, said: “I have never issued a letter of dismissal to anyone.
This is some kind of new trend, 'Give me a letter of dismissal'.
You're told to go, then go "...
When I heard my father talk about Klinger like that, I was reminded of the painful interview from 30 years ago, in which he talked about his father's atomic employers.
Here, as if the years had not passed, the bowl was overturned and the employer, my father, was sitting and humiliating an employee.
Aviadp65@gmail.com
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