Saviano and Flea 
A story told by the football great Saviano
BARCELONA - I met him in the locker room of the Camp Nou in Barcelona, \u200b\u200ba huge stadium, the third largest in the world. From the stands but Messi is a spot, fast and uncontrollable. Up close is a skinny guy but hard, very shy, he speaks almost in a whisper a chant of Argentina, her face sweet and clean without a trace of beard. Lionel Messi is the youngest soccer player living. La Pulga, the flea, is his nickname. He has the stature and the body of a child. It was in fact a boy, around ten years, Lionel Messi stopped growing. The other leg stretched out, with clean hands, his voice changed. And Leo was still small. Something was wrong and the analysis confirms this: the growth hormone was inhibited. Messi was suffering from a rare form of dwarfism.
With growth hormone, everything froze. It was impossible to hide the problem. Among friends, in the football field, everyone is aware that Lionel has stopped: "I was always the smallest of all, whatever you do, wherever I went." They say just that: "Lionel was stopped." As if it were left behind, somewhere. At eleven, a few meters and forty, is the large T-shirt Newell's Old Boys, his team to Rosario, in Argentina. Dancing in the huge shorts, shoes, the laces as tight, a little 'strip. It's a phenomenal player: but the body of a little boy of eight years, not a teenager. The very age when, seeing a future, we would have to grow a talent, the primary growth, the arms, torso and legs, it stops.
For Messi is the end of hope that nourishes itself from its very first debut on a football field, five years. He feels that with the growth has ended any chance even to become what he dreams. The doctors, however, realize that its deficit could be transient, if thwarted in time. The only way to try to intervene is a hormone therapy "gh" years and years of constant bombardment that will enable them to recover cm needed to face the giants of modern football.
it is a very expensive care that the family can not afford: syringes five hundred euro each, to do every day. Playing football in order to grow, grow to play: it becomes henceforth the only way. Lionel, a way of healing that does not concern the love of his life, football, can not even imagine. But those damn
care only if a club can afford a certain level takes him under his wing and gave them pay. And Argentina is sinking into the devastating economic crisis, by which escape the first investment, then even the people whose savings evaporate with the collapse of government bonds. Grandchildren and great grandchildren of immigrants grew in prosperity seeking safety by migrating to their countries of origin of their ancestors. In that situation, no company in Argentina, while realizing the talent of Messi small, bring himself to bear the costs of such a bet.
Even if you grow a few inches more - this is the reasoning - in modern football now without a powerful physique is not nothing. The flea will be crushed by a massive defense, the flea can not score goals in mind, the flea will not stand for the efforts required to anaerobic striker today. But Lionel Messi continues to play the same in his team. Sa required to do so as if he had ten feet, run faster than a colt, to be unbeatable ball on the ground, whether to have any chance of becoming a true player, a professional.
During a game, it sees an observer. In the life of the players are all observers. Every game you watch, consider any punishment he performed perfectly, every kid who decide to follow, every parent with which they speak, means drawing a destiny. Draw the general lines, to open a door, but in the case of Messi, what is offered, is much more. Not only he is given the opportunity to become a football player, but the possibility to heal, to get in front of a normal life. Before it, the observers that they hear about him are still very skeptical. "If it is too small, no hope, even if it is strong," they think. But: "It took five minutes to realize that it was predestined. In a moment it was clear what that guy was special." This affirms Carles Rexach, the Barcelona sporting director after seeing Leo in the field. It is so obvious that Messi has a unique talent in his feet, something that goes beyond football itself: to look at is playing as if he felt the music, as if in a low-cut mosaic tile return each affixed.
Rexach wants to stop him once: "Anyone been there, he would bought their weight in gold. "And so do a first contract on a paper towel, a towel bar open. Firman him and the father of the flea. handkerchief That is what will change the lives of Lionel. believes in Barcelona the eternal child. He decided to invest in the treatment of hormone that cursed is jammed. But to heal, Lionel should move to Spain with his family, which leaves him with Rosario undocumented, without work, trusting in a contract drawn up a towel, hoping that within that body child can truly be the future of all. Since 2000, for three years, the company provides the necessary medical assistance to Messi. Do you think a kid willing to play football to save from has a life of hell inside the fuel that makes you rarely get anywhere.
care, however, broken in two. You always have nausea, vomit the soul. The hair in your face that you do not grow. Then you hear them burst into muscles, bones crack. Everything you stretches, expands in a few months, a time that would be instead of years. "I could not afford to feel pain," said Messi, "I could not afford to show it in front of my new club. Because they had everything." The difference between someone who spends their talents to develop and those who play everything on it is abysmal. Art becomes your life not in the sense that everything adds up, but that's just your art, you can continue to live, to ensure the future. There is no Plan B, any alternative on which to fall back.
After three years finally convene Barcelona Lionel Messi and his family know that you will not be able to play as expected, the difficulties to get along will be insurmountable. In Argentina and Spain have lost everything have nothing yet. And Leo, then, falls on their shoulders. But the flea plays, all anxiety vanishes. Train hard with the support of the team, Messi can grow not only in skill, but also in height, year after year, inch by inch squeezed by the muscles honed bones. Every inch gained suffering. No one really knows what measure now. Someone gives him just above the five feet, some below, some website speaks of a Messiah who has come to continue to grow and sixty meters. Official estimates change, gradually giving him a few inches more, as if it were a merit, won a prize in the field.
fact is that when the two teams are in line before the starting whistle, the eye looks at all the heads of the players more or less the same height, but to find that Messi should get at least the shoulders of his companions. For a sport which has more power and for a striker Ibrahimovic almost two meters and one meter and eighty-five of Beckham are now the norm, Lionel continues to resemble a flea dangerously. As says Manuel Estiarte, the strongest water polo all the time: "It is true, we must calculate the probability of bait Messi defeated by a melee impact are high, as high is the risk of being totally overwhelmed by the defenders. But only ... a condition must first be able to reach it. "
In fact no one can keep up. The center of gravity is low, the advocates oppose him, but he does not fall or move. Continue to hold the race, bouncing ball and chain, does not stop, dribbles, crosses, slips, escapes, fake. It is elusive. In Barcelona malign the star of the defense of Real Madrid, Roberto Carlos and Fabio Cannavaro, I never got to see Lionel in the face Messi because they can not chase it. Leo is very fast, darting away with his little feet that look like hands able to take the ball, to control every movement. For its fake, useless opponents stumble overall size of their feet number forty-five.
In an advertisement where he was invited to draw with a pen his story is funny and sad to see Messi portray himself as a tiny tot in the forests of long legs, lost there in large balloons that fly too far. But when you touch the ground, he engages them fast and small as it can pass between the legs of all go to the door. When there are throw-ins and opponents pause for breath, is Just at that moment that he shoots and surpasses them, so when you imagined, the markers, to have him behind his back, but if you already found five meters below. The great player is not what you do, do, but what they do not get to tend no tripping. See
Messi means to observe something that goes beyond football and coincides with the beauty itself. Something like a momentum, like a shiver of awareness, an epiphany that allows those who are there to see him kick and play with the ball, of not being able to perceive no separation between himself and the show is seeing which of merge fully with what he sees, much to feel at one with the movement unequal but harmonious. In this the play can be compared to Messi played by Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, with faces of Rafael, the trumpet of Chet Baker, the mathematics of game theory of John Nash, to everything ceases to be sound, material, color, and becomes something that belongs to each element, and to life itself. Without further separation, distance. It is there, and you can not live without. It has never lived without, except that when you discover for the first time, when for the first time observed so as to remain hypnotized, the emotion is inevitable and you will come to nothing but to perceive themselves. A look into its background.
Listening to sportswriters who comment his ride would be enough to establish its epic juggler. During a meeting Barcelona-Real Madrid, the reporter saw him besieged by attempts to do stops and starts describing the scene just met: "Do not go down, not go down, not to be giuuuuuù. During another battle between the historic archrivals, the lone ecstatic "Messi, Messi, Messi, Messi" receives "a" supplemental that will be on him: the Messiah. This is the other nickname that the Flea has gained with the grace of mocking its advanced, with the almost mystical awe that raises his game. "The man made and God sent his prophet," so say the writing of a television service dedicated to El Mesias, and who as a divine incarnation of football before him: Diego Armando Maradona.
seems impossible but when playing Messi has played in the head of Maradona, as well as a chess player at a given point in the game, often inspired by the approach of a teacher who found himself in a similar situation. The masterpiece that Diego Armando had made June 22, 1986 in Mexico, voted the best goal of the century, Lionel manages to repeat almost the same, almost exactly twenty years later, April 18, 2007, in Barcelona. Leo also starts from a hundred feet from the door, he rejects two midfielders in a single stroke, the air then accelerates towards the penalty area, where an opponent tries to throw that had passed down, but he can not. Messi huddle around three defenders, and instead of aiming at the door, he slips away to the right, discards the goalkeeper and another player ... It is the goal. After scoring, there's an incredible scene with the players of Barcelona petrified, with his hands on his head, looked around as to not believe it was still possible to see a goal like that. Everyone thought that one man was capable of so much. But it was not so.
The press immediately invented the nickname "Messidona," but there is something in the likeness of the two samples are similar Argentinian passes and makes the chills. In a sport that seems epic stage having allowed behind the exploits of Messi resemble the repetition of a myth, not a myth any, but what is more strongly at odds with our time: David against Goliath. Physically tiny, poor neighborhoods, inability to see themselves differently than when they played in the playgrounds, always the same face, anger is always the same as un'accidia take you inside. Virtually all had enough to go wrong, everything just enough to lose, everything is not enough to please anyone and not to play. But things went differently.
Messi, when Maradona scored that goal in Mexico, was not even born. Born in 1987. And the reason why I followed in Barcelona, \u200b\u200bto the point of wanting to meet, has its origin in this: Being raised in Naples in the myth of Diego Armando Maradona. I will never forget the lot of the world in 1990, Italy took an awful lot of Azeglio Vicini and Toto Schillaci to play the semifinal against Argentina in Maradona's own St. Paul. When Schillaci scored the first goal, the stadium rejoice. But he feels that something is wrong in the curves. After the goal of rooting Caniggia not Neapolitan - non-native - began to pick on Maradona, and something happens there that does not happen again in the history of football and never happened until now: the fans take sides against their national football team . Supporters of the curve Neapolitan begin to scream: "Diego! Diego." On the other hand were used to doing so as blame and how to identify with others? Although it should be dear to the national team, Maradona is at the moment is that the fans of St. Paul more than one national players from other cities of Italy, from Rome, Milan, Turin.
Maradona was able to subvert the grammar of supporters. And they pay it to him in Rome during the Argentina-Germany final, where the public revenge for the elimination of Italy in the semifinals of defections and created within the fans, he began to whistle the national anthem. Maradona expects the camera in the roundup on players, arrives on his lips, to launch a "hijos de puta" fans who do not respect even the the hymn. A terrible end, where Naples tifava all, of course, for Argentina. But then the moment of doubt rigor absolutely destroys any hope. Germany, however, clearly in distress must win and avenge Italy beat. Doubt a penalty for a foul on Rudi Voeller, Andreas Brehme realizes it. And the Argentine reporter's comment was: "Only in this way brother ... the only way you could win against Diego".
I remember those days. I was eleven years old, and hardly ever come back to see what kind of football. But something seems to come back, at that time. Mexico's goal against England, scoring two decades later remade by fleas, marks one of the unforgettable moments of my childhood. I wonder wonder and vertigo that would see Messi play at the San Paolo, he, in the same Maradona said: "Seeing Messi is playing better than sex." And Diego, both, they will be. "I like Naples, I want to go there soon," says Lionel, "Start to a little 'to be beautiful. Argentine For it feels like home."
The most amazing moment of my meeting with Messi is when I tell him that when he plays is like Maradona - "like" because I do not know how to express something repeated a thousand times, although I have to tell him the same - and he answers: " Verdad? "," Really? ", even more so with a smile and happy. Moreover, Lionel Messi has agreed to meet not because a writer or whatever else, but because they told him that I come from Naples. For him it's like for a Muslim born in Mecca. Naples for Messi, the Barcelona fans and for many, is a sacred place of football. It is the site of the consecration of the talent, the city where the god of football played the most beautiful years, where he started from nowhere to defeat the big teams to conquer the world.
Lionel is the opposite of how you expect a player is unsure of itself, does not use the usual phrases that suggest to say, you walk down the red, or begins to chew his nails of the index and thumb to his lips when do not know what to say and he is thinking. But the history of the flea is even more extraordinary. Lionel Messi is the story of how the legend of the bumblebee. It is said that the bumblebee could not fly because the weight of his body is disproportionate to the lift of its wings. But the bumblebee does not know it and fly. Messi with his little body, with his little feet, those little legs, small bust, all its problems of growth, could not play in modern football all muscle mass and strength. Except that Messi does not know. And that is why it is the largest of all.
