People rave about people they don't really know.
The public biography of Luis Díaz, the Liverpool footballer who will face Real Madrid in the Champions League final, is a round misunderstanding: he was not poor or malnourished as is said.
He did not grow up on an indigenous reservation or raise sheep in the mountains, as the press insists.
It is true that he represented a native team in a world championship, but it was more out of mutual interest than a sense of belonging.
His great-grandmother was Wayuu, and yet Luis Díaz does not speak the language nor do the gestures and habits of this ethnic group from Guajira, a region along the Caribbean Sea from which come out characters as exaggerated as another Díaz, Diómedes, the Vallenato singer.
In a society in which the father figure is usually absent,
He had a dedicated father above him and studied at a good school.
You can love a person very much, as is happening these days in Colombia with Luis Díaz, and caricature them to the point of a certain idol saintliness.
A presidential candidate and university professor, Sergio Fajardo, said in the middle of the electoral campaign that his eyes watered when he saw him play in the Premier League: "I see him as a little boy, facing those big men...".
The reality is that he is a 180 centimeters athlete, fast and resistant, capable of continuous efforts of 50 meters, an essential condition in modern football.
Misunderstanding about his physical condition is common.
Ever since a Colombian U20 coach, Carlos Alberto Restrepo, said that he had suffered from malnutrition and that at 18 he couldn't play two games in a row because he was losing muscle, his weakness has been assimilated with hunger.
Room of the house of the paternal grandfather of Luis Díaz in Barrancas, Guajira.
April 11, 2022. Camilo Rozo
"It isn't true.
There is not a single medical fact to corroborate that, ”explains Didier Paz, a kinesiologist who treated him for several years.
It is true that at that age he was weak and that he suffered in the clash with opponents.
His biotype was that of someone skinny who hadn't finished developing yet.
He had just been signed by Barranquilla, a second division team.
In the following year he grew more than 10 centimeters, something not very normal at that age.
He then started a multivitamin amino acid treatment to increase his muscle mass.
For the first time in his life he did gym work.
He “strengthened without losing speed.
That made him the beast he is today.
It is rare that he loses a hand-to-hand duel now, ”adds Paz.
His is now a higher form of locomotion.
His father, Mane Díaz, took him to tryouts for Barranquilla, the team from a coastal city famous for its carnival.
He showed up in January 2016, along with 3,000 other teens.
Luis Díaz was then 17, a late age to enter the structure of a professional club.
They selected him, and in the following two years he showed an evident improvement that led him to play in the first division, in the Junior.
Mane's commitment had been key for something like this to happen.
He was a humble man who made a living working low-skilled jobs, a common reality in rural Colombia.
He traded animals or sold food on the streets of Barrancas, his town.
He was once a cook in a restaurant.
His true passion, however, was physical education.
In a soccer field in front of his parents' house he trained a handful of boys in the afternoons.
He was the referee in the games.
He was an empirical teacher.
His son was one of his students.
Mural made on the facade of the house by the paternal grandfather of Luis Díaz.
In the photo, Lucho's father: Luis Manuel Díaz, or el Mane.
Barrancas, April 11, 2022. Camilo Rozo
"This is where it all started," he says, pointing to the stony field and the old goal posts.
He is a gray-haired man with thin-rimmed smoked glasses and a flowery shirt tucked out of his jeans.
He is shorter than his son, who inherited the height of his mother, Silenis Marulanda.
At that time, Luis Díaz was studying at the Remedios Solano school, a religious institution.
He formed a group of four inseparable friends with Jesus, Luis and Amin.
Today two of them are civil engineers and the other is a lawyer.
"He was already telling us then that he was going to be a soccer player, as if he had grabbed a time machine and would come back to tell us," recalls Amín, the most extroverted of the group.
He was the opposite of Luisfer, as they called him then by his full name, Luis Fernando.
On one occasion they attended a science class in which the use of hydrocarbons was explained.
When he finished, Amin sprayed the door of the room with leftover gasoline.
Someone lit a match.
Luis Díaz, who was passing by, caught fire in his sports pants.
His cloth stuck to his skin and seared his leg.
He wept horribly.
The management was looking for the culprit to expel him.
“They asked him if it was me and he didn't say a word.
He never ratted me out,” Amin says.
Field of the school where Luis Díaz studied.
For some time, abandoned by the transfer of the school.
Barrancas, April 11, 2022. Camilo Rozo
The school building has been abandoned.
The old classrooms are buried under a cloud of dust and old junk.
A test tube, the skeleton of a natural science class, blackboards on which mathematical formulas can still be guessed.
The English teacher, María Pía, says that on one occasion Luis Díaz asked her what the hell another language was for him.
He now plays in an English team: “When children don't want to learn I tell them this anecdote”.
Ledis González, a science teacher, remembers him quiet, shy, but very moved.
She saw him making a ball of paper, tapping it with both legs and smashing it against the fan.
She called him the boy with light feet, like Achilles.
Rosidis Oñate, a Philosophy teacher, wrote to him on Facebook when he played in Junior and later in Porto, in Portugal.
"I told him to please not go and tattoo his whole body like the rest of the footballers, that's terribly ugly."
She soon discovered that he was not going to be a philosopher, but that he was hiding another type of intuitive intelligence.
Oñate believes that the story of Luis Díaz is extraordinary in the sense that this is the land of Diomedes, who had 21 children and probably committed a crime at the height of his fame;
the place of the eternal party, the party, the sexual exuberance and the smuggling of marijuana.
And, in the midst of all that, like an island, Luis Díaz, upright and conscientious.
“Here the parents initiate their children in alcohol at 13, it is cultural.
He was different.
Suddenly the universe or nature protected him.”
In the eighties, Barrancas was part of the route of the marimbera bonanza, the boom in cannabis exports to Miami and New York.
La Guajira was filled with dollars.
A parallel and underground economy was born that works to this day.
Everything was celebrated with rum and vallenatos.
"The men were killed for anything," says Professor Oñate.
Funerals were a social event, especially if they were blockbusters, that is, very crowded.
People dressed in their best clothes.
Later gasoline traffic proliferated.
The young people disassembled the interior part of the cars to fill them with gallons of gasoline.
It was common to see them later crashed into the trees on the main road, engulfed in flames.
Rosiris Oñate (left) and Leidis Gómez (right) were Luis Díaz's teachers at the school.
Here they pose in one of the abandoned halls of the old town school.
Barrancas, April 11, 2022. Camilo Rozo
Mane Díaz, like many of his countrymen, took the right path.
He founded a club in the neighborhood, the Clubballer.
His son Luis turned out to be the most talented of all the boys he trained.
The most important thing that happened to father and son in the following years was the call for Luis Díaz with the native team.
The Onic, the national indigenous organization of Colombia, wanted to present a team in the South American championship that was going to be played in Chile in 2015. It organized a tournament in Bogotá in which it scouted 1,200 boys from all over the country, previously selected in their regions.
Luis Díaz played in the Guajira team.
He had been registered as Wayuu by his great-grandmother.
Carlos El Pibe Valderrama chose the players, but later he could not travel with them to the tournament.
And this is where another common misunderstanding arises: Valderrama is not Luis Díaz's mentor, as is repeated like a mantra.
El Pibe has never said that he is, it is the others who have built this narrative around it, that of the old idol who discovers his successor.
Indeed, Valderrama valued him and took him into account, but he did not look for a team or was interested in his future.
When they said goodbye, Luis Díaz continued in Barrancas, lost in a place without a future, on the verge of becoming stagnant.
At that time, says Didier Paz, the kinesiologist, in that selection there were four or five players who stood out more than him.
For example, Víctor Contreras, a boy who now plays in the second division in El Salvador.
Or a certain William Cervantes, disappeared from the map.
"It makes me sad that due to lack of support, more talents could not emerge from that team," laments Paz, who implies that the hatching of Luis Díaz is a rarity, an orchid that grows on a rock.
Behind there is no systematized talent detection work.
Luis Díaz posing with Alex el “Didi” Valderrama, (right) cousin of Pibe Valderrama and on the left his father “Mane” who sometimes also officiated as referee.
Barrancas, April 11, 2022. Camilo Rozo
The indigenous team had problems financing their trip to Chile.
The Colombian Football Federation prohibited them from wearing the official team jersey.
Paz explains that they had to buy the uniforms at a cheap merchandise store called San Victorino, without the official team shield.
Colombia reached the final, which they lost to Paraguay.
Luis Díaz scored three goals in five games.
It could have been his catapult, he wasn't.
He returned to Barrancas and in the following months it was him when he went to try Barranquilla and they finally selected him.
"Luis's only mentor is his father," concludes Paz.
Mané Díaz has stayed in Barranquilla, where another of his sons plays.
But he doesn't fit.
He likes Barrancas better, where he lowers the car window and greets a neighbor on the street:
-Bye teacher!
Everyone knows who he is and he knows everyone.
He sings vallenatos in a musical group.
The problem is that some very dangerous local mafias operate there.
He has a coffee farm in the mountains that the police have advised him not to visit.
They could kidnap him on a sidewalk.
Every day he changes his routines so as not to become an easy target and he drives the car more than once in case someone follows him.
23 years ago he received a social work house.
The life of his family took place in that of his parents (having lunch, taking a nap, killing the afternoon), Luis Díaz's grandparents, but the whole family returned to sleep there.
Its appearance, in fact, is that of a long room that ends in a patio where there are clothes hanging.
There are medals and brass cups everywhere.
A layer of dust falls on the trophies.
Tender photos of Luis Díaz as a child, photos of Mane in a tracksuit and with a whistle around his neck.
Diplomas, honorable mentions, pictures.
As a joke, his children wrote with white paint on the facade: “Support Mane for the council”, as if he were running for public office.
In the house of "Mane" Luis Manuel Díaz, Lucho's father, there are several corners with a mixture of trophies won by Luis as a player and by his father as a coach.
Barrancas, April 11, 2022. Camilo Rozo
It seems.
The phone doesn't stop ringing.
He has to schedule the visit of a minister, the talks with the advisers of the presidential candidates who want to attract him to his campaigns.
His latest headache is a new 11-a-side soccer field that they have built in the town.
The builders made a mistake and made it 10 meters shorter, so it cannot host official competitions.
Now the City Council has to buy surrounding land to stretch it out.
The stadium was going to be called Olinto Fonseca, he was the first professional soccer player from Barrancas, who has the advantage of being dead.
The law prohibits naming municipal works after living people.
But the residents of Barrancas do not care, they have started a campaign to name it after Luis Díaz.
They are in a hurry to see his name carved in stone.
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