On June 11, 1989, and before the astonished gaze of the 107,000 spectators that packed the Santiago Bernabéu, José Miguel González Martín del Campo
Míchel
(Madrid, 58 years old) left the pitch on his own.
There were three minutes left before the end of the first half, Madrid won 2-0 and was already League champion.
But Míchel, 26, was full of rage.
“I had told a teammate with whom I always went by car to train: 'In one of these, I'm leaving the field'.
Emilio [Butragueño] was forgiven everything, but they had me and Martín Vázquez under scrutiny.
Do you know what murmur is?
Ask.
What murmur?
Answer.
When someone makes a 30-meter game changer, and the ball goes through the air, there's a murmur.
It's a murmur to see how it goes down.
And you look at the sky, you wait for the ball, you are aware of your mark, and you listen to the murmur.
The one of yours.
“He loses it”, “he doesn't stop it”, because in the band you also listen to everything.
And as control goes away, or you hit it with any part, or lose it, after the murmur the whistles can come.
Q.
Was there a murmur that afternoon?
R.
That afternoon I gave three inside passes to Buitre and Hugo Sánchez.
One was cut.
Another was a dangerous action.
One more intercepted him.
We were winning the League, but they whistled at me.
So I left.
Q.
Your colleagues?
A.
One of them knew what he was doing.
Others told me where I was going.
And Benhakker in the desperate band: "No, don't go, no".
Q.
What did you do when you got to the locker room?
R.
I had a feeling close to the one I will have the day I die.
"So far we have come.
I am at peace.
It's time to go."
I asked a club employee to tell my wife to come down: “Tell her we're leaving now”.
I left the locker room when the teammates arrived celebrating the League.
That night there was dinner and a party, but when I got home I went to bed and asked not to be disturbed.
Q.
And?
A.
My wife came into the room when the phone rang.
"Is jose".
I put on, of course;
It was Camacho.
"What's up, bighead, we're here already starting the party and we don't see you.
Are you late?
And me in my pajamas: "Yes, yes, we're just getting dressed and we're going there, we'll be there in half an hour."
Not a reproach from them, not a comment: I knew I was wrong and that was enough.
P.
And Ramón Mendoza?
[President of Real Madrid between 1985-1995]
R.
He called me the next day.
I told him it was better to leave Madrid.
He told me that I couldn't do that, and that I had exposed him because he had always defended me.
Then he left a pause and said: "You have to leave the Bernabéu, what balls you have."
Míchel leaves the Hotel de las Letras in Madrid, where the interview is taking place, to be photographed. The day before, she finished reading
La Joven Politica
(Peninsula), by Manuela Carmena. “It's very interesting. He defends politics not as a profession in which to remain forever, but as a punctual act of public service”, says the coach. Míchel speaks of the need to get together with people who are different and not always with equals, to build relationships not based on sectarianism but on discrepancy, that something can be criticized here and there without being strictly labeled. And he regrets, from the beginning of his career, the enormous prejudices about him that he has had to carry. “Then people meet you and ask you: is that you? But that's how things work."
Four people stop him on the street;
many more stay with him when they see him through the windows of the cafeteria.
He is a member of the Quinta del Buitre [with Sanchís, Martín Vázquez, Pardeza and Butragueño], a group of Real Madrid academy players that revolutionized Spanish football in the 1980s. He gave the publication La Galerna an exquisite headline: “I will always be Michel, the one from Madrid”.
Almost thirty years later, people agree with him.
“We were not famous, we were popular, from the people.
The famous is temporary, and the popular is timeless.
People remember us because we have grown up with them in a lot of things.
We were exactly the same as them, except on the pitch."
Q.
What do you do when you get to the Real Madrid first team?
A.
For two years I lived with my parents in a working-class neighborhood in the south of Madrid [Ciudad de los Ángeles, Villaverde].
My mother was a housewife and my father was a typographer in a graphic arts company.
He came home from work and so did I;
he from his company charging 600 euros in exchange and I, 22 years old, from mine, Madrid, charging about 6,000 euros a month without bonuses.
At that age you are not prepared for many things: to collect that amount of money, to be called by a minister to eat with him, to go out on the street and everyone recognizes you.
It gives me chills to think how I was able to manage everything without any training.
And I don't mean cultural, that too, but human.
Q.
La Quinta was a social phenomenon.
R.
It was part of something bigger.
Of course it was another way of understanding football, but in the Spain of the 80s and 90s there were multiple ways of understanding things, from music to literature, from politics to football.
There was an explosion of creativity, and even the intellectuals began to get closer to the sport because until then there was a lot of posturing;
it seemed that soccer was only part of the folklore of the dictatorship.
We were, those of us who grew up in those decades, creative, independent and survivors.
Q.
You had Francisco Umbral as a neighbor.
R.
From 1994 to 2007, when he died.
And he never returned my greeting.
Never!
[laughs] But one day we met at a mutual friend's house, he stared at me and said in that voice of his: "You're the soccer neighbor."
Nothing more.
We continue to live next to María España, his widow, a wonderful woman.
The moment Messi set foot in Paris, even though it is a great city and a great club, he realized that someone had not told him the whole truth.
Q.
You retired at age 34.
Soon.
R.
Not at that time.
A friend of mine says: “We always have a year to spare in football, and it is better that you choose that year”.
P.
What does a person do who at 34 years old knows that he will never do what he does best in his life?
A.
This is a profession you played when you were little.
Being a footballer is a childhood dream.
A childhood dream that lasts so long is a privilege.
I injured my knee when I was 31 years old and that was good for me, because it was a way of preparing for the future.
I retired in 1997 and almost everything I did after that was related to football.
I always tried that my vocation did not become just a profession.
Because that energy I had as a child makes me want to give back to football everything it has done for me.
P.
Talk to me about fear in the field.
R.
Semifinals of the European Cup, you jump into a full stadium and you have Paolo Maldini in front of you, on your band.
And what are you doing?
Because that guy is a beast.
You convince yourself that you are ready.
But with fear.
I find it very funny when people say "hey, but you don't notice the pressure" and I tell them "surely I do notice it, but I have a hard time recognizing it".
Because they are many years in the elite.
And fear is what pushes me the most to do things;
If I'm not afraid, it's because I'm not prepared.
P.
Is the ghost of the two leagues lost on the last day in Tenerife haunting you?
R.
No, because the leagues are won and lost from the first to the last day.
We were going to the limit, with a beastly pressure: if we lost we didn't qualify for the European Cup, the club's accounts were out of whack, the beastly disappointment of the fans.
Surely today it would not have happened to us.
Q.
Why?
R.
Because we would play a bit more relaxed: finishing second we would still play the European Cup.
But then we were up to our necks.
Today you can win the Super Cup without winning the League and Cup, and win the Champions League after finishing fourth in the League.
Q.
Are you following Messi?
R.
I think that the moment he set foot in Paris, even though it was a great city and a great club, he realized that someone had not told him the whole truth.
When someone leaves the big stages, the big stages keep filling up and you begin to yearn for that light.
And the Parc des Princes is not the Camp Nou.
P.
What happened to Cruyff with the Fifth?
He turned everything upside down when he went to the Bernabéu.
R.
But that is greatness.
He knew that things were different here and he had no problem changing them.
He was very fond of me.
A friend of mine from the Barça squad told me that, if I played, Cruyff said it would be a 10-on-10 match, because my marker would only play to annul me.
Cruyff and Benhakker knew how to transfer the Dutch essence of the game to the Spanish League.
My wife and I have been together since we were 16 years old.
I would give everything I have to try again what I achieved.
But if I tried again, I would try again with her
P.
A phrase from Maradona that opens Sorrentino's film It Was the Hand of God: "I did everything I could, and it didn't go badly."
R.
I played against him when he was at Napoli, at Sevilla, in Argentina.
And I was unlucky, or good, because I never saw him well in those games.
He always seemed to me like a nostalgic man from another era who was afraid of disappointing, that gigantic expectation he had for being who he was.
Q.
There is a fabulous definition of Maradona by Ignacio Pato in an article in Panenka: “The man who asked for something off the menu.
Where the price does not come out.
R.
"Diego, Diego, Diego", everyone with "Diego" in their mouths as they pass.
From childhood.
When I was a commentator for Spanish Television I found him in a final in Istanbul.
He couldn't even move: “Diego” here, “Diego” there.
I didn't want to bother him, he had enough.
But he saw me and came to give me a hug that was like when the King used to hug you, that you had to keep your arms still because the protolocus ordered that you couldn't give him a hug.
In short, it is incredible that he became Maradona with so many things about Maradona against him.
Q.
A curiosity.
You met your wife, Mercedes Morales, when you were 16 years old.
R.
My first girlfriend.
We have two children and three grandchildren [he was a grandfather when he was 49 years old].
I met her because she played with her brother on the team, and we hung out as a group.
One day I dared and asked him to go out.
Q.
And he said yes.
A.
And he told me no.
But those vacations my mother picks up the phone and tells me: “Who calls you Merche”, and until today.
I look back and think that I would give everything I have to try what I achieved again.
But if I tried again, I would try again with her.
Q.
The secret.
R.
I do not know if there is a secret.
Our great virtue is that at the root we are identical, but in the leaves and in the stem we have been changing, and that has made us value many more things about each other.
You can follow EL PAÍS DEPORTES on
and
, or sign up here to receive
our weekly newsletter
.