‘Live La Muerte!’ or the tiredness of the enraged lion

UNAMUNO: One of those telluric nicknames. In Basque means something like lonely hill. Then came Miguel: Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo, born in Bilbau, at Casco Viejo, on September 29, 1864. It was Basque who spoke and in Basque wrote, but to the end of his life he became quite Salamank. Early orphaned by father, he suffered the damage of difficult days. Fixed the phrase: « Edozein Eginetan Ongi Deritzot », any day is good for me. He studied in Madrid, became a man of principles. Taught the others. He had ten children and saw six die boys. The pain closed him in a hidden place of his chest and fled in letters. Miguel may have been, in a way, a lonely hill. A rock breaking the sea of ​​a spain that lost the colonies, was causing the monarchy, went into cultural decay, and walked slowly and inevitablely to one of the bloody and cruel civil wars that someone has ever seen. On October 12, 1936, at the University of Salamanca, he read in a firm voice what was the most minezing speech of his life: « Unfortunately there are too much crippled in Spain today, » said General Millán Astray, a crippled crippled intelligence. Heard in return: «Mura La Intelligence! Live La Muerte! And the flashes pointed machine guns in his head. He really died, six weeks later: he was faded out of disappointment.
In the previous month of April, the Civil War stopped the Spanish Football Championship. The boys left the pitch to dive into the trenches. Perhaps because fate does not contemplate coincidences and is inevitable by nature, the last Basque champion: Athletic Bilbao. The coach was English for Wolverhampton, Frederick Beaconsfield Pentland, former International for England, who had guided the Olympic team of Germany and had been caught in Berlin at the beginning of the First Great War and stuck in the prison of Spandau. An episode without Ballett …
Mr. Pentland rarely abandoned the cigar and coconut hat. One of those English who are safe that Earth is a planet where England exists, therefore. He brought with him training methods so far not seen in the Basque country and put his players to practice a pass and transfer game, controlling the ball in their progression towards the opposing beacons and, in the final phase of this process, insisting on the strong shots or well -directed centers for the heads of the strikers. In the goal there was a life insurance: the huge Ricardo Zamora. In front of a quintet of spaning a herd of mammoths: gorhostizes, laFUENT, IRARAGORRI, BATH, CHIRRI II and UNAMUNO.
It was precisely UNAMUNO that I wanted to talk about. It seems that I didn’t even say it before, but anyway. Victorio Unamuno Ibarzabal, born in Bergara, Muy Noble y Leal Villa, at the confluence of the paths of Oñate, Elgueta and Zumárga, in the territory of Guipúzcoa. Strong as the Luzea de Zarautz Tower, hard as the rocks of Zumaia, a battler like Basajaun, the wild man of the woods, sagaz like the Iratxoaaks of Basque mythology, Unamuno knocked centrally with the ease with which a pneumatic hammer pies a wall of Adobe. He learned from his father the office of advanced. Then it exhausted it. The biggest of his rivals lived with door, and also wore the same nightgown: Agustín Sauto Arana, The Battle, El León Enraged, who played the place and scored seven goals to Barcelona in a 12-1 that was not again. It was for Seville three years, playing at Betis. And Betis, with him, was champion. It attracted triumphs to the fashion of a magnet. But unlike Miguel, he had an irresistible call inside. It was Bilbau and Las Balbained. Perhaps that moonlight that spreads over the launch mirroring sands, the almost sexual movement of the Siete Calles, the shadows of the birch of Doña Casilda Park. Because of all this, Yves Montand sang: « Vieille Luna de Bilbao that L’amour Était Beau/Vieille Lune de Bilbao Fume Ton Cigare Là-Haut ». He returned and were two: He and Vicente, his brother, Unamuno II. And only a year, champion again. Already the enraged lion had given up fighting…