He wasn’t even supposed to be on the pitch. It was his older brother’s game. They were a player short. Salvador Aparicio looked over at the stands and saw a small boy playing by himself, in private communion with the ball. When he asked his mother if he could borrow him, she said he didn’t know how to play football.
“He controlled the ball and took off diagonally across the middle of the pitch, dribbling,” said Aparicio. “He dribbled past anyone in his path.” There’s a video of the coach telling this story as an old man, fluttering his hand like a fish whipping through water. Then he stops talking and pulls a face that can only be described as a kind of shrug, as though even at the end of his life he was still struggling to accept the cosmic logic of what came next.The greatest player ever to kick a ball wasn’t ready to do the thing he was put on this Earth to do. The gift was there even before his left foot was.