On the other side of the river, in that peaceful and Candomber city that is Montevideo, there is a statue of the ball fan.
Why are the Uruguayans the ones who erected a similar monument when, in general - and this said with all humility -, we Argentines would exercise that peculiar characteristic much more than them?
It turns out that a man of notable physical build named Prudencio Miguel Reyes (
El Gordo
), a saddler by trade, began to work, proudly, in the first non-English soccer club in Uruguay.
The brand new institution was named, precisely because of that Creole peculiarity,
the National Football Club
(in 1899 no one wrote
“football”
, no matter how nationalist it was).
The point is that
El Gordo
Reyes was in charge, in the
Utilería
area , of
inflating
the leather balls, which in those years did not have an air chamber inside but rather a cow bladder that, to give volume to the ball, had to be inflated.
The balls were uncontrollable, they went everywhere, they became very heavy if it rained (the leather absorbed the water) and the cord that was used to sew the gap through which the deflated bladder was inserted could hurt the footballers: if a “thread” If the touch was left out during the game it became sharp like a stiletto.
To the point that many players wore berets to protect themselves when heading.
Gordo
Reyes had the lungs of an ox and was meticulous in his task of swelling bladders.
A poorly inflated ball acquired the shape of a pear and was discarded, with the consequent financial loss for the club.
But the particular prop man began to do something unusual for the time, where the public that attended the stadiums was made up of bogeymen who only rewarded some plays with lukewarm applause.
During the games, Prudencio ran on the side of the field, from one side to the other, crazy, shouting and haranguing his players constantly:
“Eeehhh!
Let's go up National!
In the stands they asked who was that man who was so annoying with his noise.
“It 's
Prudencio, the one who inflates the balls…”
As the games progressed, the public began to follow the Nacional
“ball fan”
and began to massively change applause for harangues and, later, for shouts.
This is how they became
“fans”
, like Prudencio.
The statue of Prudencio Reyes, on the Nacional field in Montevideo.
Needless to say, the term crossed the Río de la Plata faster than if TikTok had existed and Argentine fans became, almost immediately, the
“fans”
of River (1901), Racing (1903), Independiente and Boca ( 1905) or San Lorenzo (1908), in strict order of appearance.
Good old Prudencio died in 1948, but Nacional installed a statue of him in 2020 on its field in which he still raises his right fist haranguing his boys.
There are passions with strange words.
If they had called it
a ball inflator,
today we would be talking about the
“inflas”
of each club.
And that in Argentine football
inflated
visitors are not allowed.