The story of Tomás Felipe Carlovich, the strongest Argentine footballer we have never seen.
The living room, cramped but cozy, despite being a few meters from the tropical humidity of the Paraná river, has the walls and the ceiling covered with wooden slats, it looks like a chalet on the ski slopes of Bariloche: behind the man who is telling himself , spiritualist medium in session with the past, the body abandoned on an uncomfortable chair. You can see a disused vase, from which timid red petals emerge. A large icon of Christ hangs on the wall. Not far away a black and white photo, which immortalizes eleven players, half of whom crouched. That man is called Tomás Felipe Carlovich, he is one of the footballers in the photo. A voiceover asks him: “What would you give to get back to being twenty?”. Carlovich has a moment of bewilderment, of yielding. His eyes are shiningexactly as those who wrote down the question, leaving it for last, expected. “I’d like to play again,” he replies. “Sure, to hear people. But it is a thought that makes me mad, what can you do about it?
The next moment, in which the voice breaks and you seem to be able to feel, under the shirt unfastened on your chest, the heart of Carlovich shattering, makes the noise of the myth that crumbles, of the hero in the Homeric sense who realizes his own transience . The moment in which the legend returns, rarefying, to its human nature. To understand how it is possible that the term legendended up stuck on the shoulders of a complete stranger we must start from the assumption that Tomás Felipe Carlovich is much more than a former footballer: even if not many know him outside Argentina, or perhaps even in the Santafesina area, drowned in the mare magnum of the never-definitively-emerged ones, Carlovich is nevertheless the simulacrum of an underground, elective cult, the epicenter of a minor narrative that is clustered around the reverberations of his plays, his choices, his crossroads. A symbol, which transcends the iconicity of a t-shirt to somehow become the starting point and crossroads of a kind of Camino de Santiago fútbolero , which sanctions an initiation.
For those who write about football, sooner or later, the time comes to get carried away by the Argentine epic. And we end up talking about Rosario, which is not only the “cradle of the flag”, but also of a way of understanding fútbol different from that of Bonera, that is, far from the glories of Boca, the River. And writing about football and Rosario inevitably pushes you to tell the story of Carlovich. It is an axiom. “El Trinche” arouses research, arouses documentary instincts: the academic field to which its existence refers is no longer football, but anthropology, sociology, literature. There are figures who concentrate all the topos in themselves- as David Foster Wallace said in “How Tracy Austin broke my heart” – which tickle the greed of those who are passionate about the lives of athletes. “We want to hear of humble origins, hardships, precocity, determination, discouragement, tenacity, team spirit, sacrifice, homicidal instinct, liniments and pains”. Sometimes the result – just as DFW complains in his essay – is mediocre. In other cases, the story becomes literature in an all too perfect way . It doesn’t always depend on the athlete per se . Certainly not in the case of Tomás Felipe “el Trinche” Carlovich.
Romantic symbol
Carlovich took twenty years to come into the world in the city his parents chose as their home when they left Yugoslavia, during the 1929 crisis. He is the youngest of seven children, born in the General San Martín barrio of Rosario, which everyone knows as La Tablada: it is the neighborhood where the city’s slaughterhouse was in the 1930s, and as often happens the highest concentration of immigrants who sought in the stench of beasts the primordial material with which to build their dreams, and with which stench to stifle ghosts.
Tomás says that at school he was a good draftsman: however he preferred football, in that barbaric form that is played in the potrero , the improvised pitch on the street, the ideal cradle of entire Argentine football generations. In the Carlovich family, football had a concrete consistency, almost like factory work: one of Tomás’ brothers, “el Chancha”, came to train with the first team of River Plate. “It was so strong that today you wouldn’t have had enough money to buy it,” says Tomás. But then, to count in the family, it was above all the work, the hard one, the kind of work with which you live, like the one that Tomás does on the assembly line, until he is twenty-two. That is when he is already, in some ways, a professional footballer, under contract with Rosario Central.
By Felipe Tomás Carlovich, Jorge Valdano makes an important annotation. He says, “He found himself at the wrong time in the right place.” Because the football that “el Trinche” meets is already different from the one he met on the street, the only one that did not make him feel, as he himself says, “a salami “. At the beginning of the 70s in Argentine football the athletic trainers appeared: a figure that completely revolutionized the way of understanding fútbol, until then totally focused on the thaumaturgical power of talent.In Rosario, on the Central bank, the coach is Miguel Ignomiriello, a shot at the modernization of work and preparation techniques in the field. With “el Trinche”, it is an incontrovertible fact beyond the causes, there is no feeling. Tomás takes the field with the ” Canallas ” for two games, then disappears. He is twenty-two, he says he has also thought about quitting. Nobody, except perhaps Ignomiriello and Tomás, know the real cause of the early breakup: money, indolence, (mutually) unfulfilled promises, a certain reluctance on the part of Tomás to follow the away team, because he wanted to sleep at his house . The reasons are many, and all – almost all – credible.
With the light-heartedness of someone who has nothing more to ask for his career, Tomás decides to accept the proposal of a brother-in-law, who asks him to audition with Central Córdoba, the third team – and the least prestigious, after Centrale and Newell’s. Old Boys – by Rosario, who plays in Segunda, the second series. Tomás, in the first game, plays like a Greek deity, according to the tales of the vulgate, and also to his own. “I found it all too easy from the start. It must have been for this. ‘ History, they say, is written by the winners. In Tomás’s case, however, for some reason the winners are the proponents of his chronic indolence, and as such a bohemian, his contentment .It could have become the brightest star in the Albiceleste firmament . Instead it turned into the most adamantine crystallization of the what if theory . If we look for the primordial soup of its legend, it’s all there.
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«He was someone who played in perfect“ rosarino style ”», Julio César Menotti says of him: «A carrier of the genetics of this city. He was the classic potrero player : immigrants, in the end, had nothing but potrero ». At the Gabino Sosa, the Central Córdoba stadium, on the evening of the first match of the “Trinche” in the Rossoneri jersey, a spark lights up that the bellows of legendary would have blown to make Carlovich a bestiary character, which many swear they have seen but whose existence, after all, you never cease to doubt. As in a bacterial palingenesis, it is said that the mold of the myth of “el Trinche” took root quickly: the refrain would soon become “el Trinche play tonight”, and faithful would flock from every corner of Rosario to assist ecumenically in the exercise of its function. Among them, among Trinche’s loyalists, there is also Marcelo Bielsa, who will tell Valdano that he has followed him for four years, every Saturday.
«His legend is a commonplace in Rosario», says Valdano, «it is part of the iconography of the city. And it has turned into a romantic symbol of a type of football that no longer exists ». Not necessarily a positive symbol. “El Trinche” Carlovich is to Argentine football as the Santa Muerte to the world of Mexican mala.
Shrouded in mystery
One of the scenes that most impressed me, while I was viewing documentaries to find answers to my thoughts on the history of the “Trinche”, is the one in which two university students go in search of material at the headquarters of Central Córdoba, and an executive, a little angry, he takes the trouble to point out that “Central has given him at least as much as he has given Central.” After all, on the one hand there is a club with 103 years of history; on the other a player of which we keep not even two seconds of filmed images, these:
It is a fragment of a scene from a film that is irrelevant in the history of cinematography called ” El curro “: the number ten that is seen dribbling, with a style more embossed than elegant, yet somehow of a superior technique compared to the opponent, it would be “el Trinche”. The hologram of his presence was constructed with other means, far from the image and more colluding with the sphere of evanescent memory, of testimonies. How do you tell a footballer of whom we only have this frame? We must trust the words of the people who saw him play, hoping that the time, the emotion of the moment, does not distort the memory too much. The cult of the myth of a minor player like Carlovich says much more than what we we’re looking for us , in football’s mythical sphere, compared to what you really lies.
Obviously it has a lot to do with the mystery. Diego Borinsky, editor-in-chief of El Gráfico, tells how, in the 1970s, in the editorial office, there were folders on every single player in the Primera and Segunda Liga. The most prominent men had four, five for one. In Carlovich’s there are no more than thirty photos. In one he has a mustache, a shirt unbuttoned to the breastbone, flared trousers. He looks more like a rock star than a footballer. Tzvetan Todorov wrote that “the fantastic only lasts as long as a hesitation”. The hesitation is that of the moment in which you have to decide if, in a work, what you perceive is more or less “real”, at least in the common sense. If you are convinced that what you are seeing is of this world, then the work will be “strange”. If, on the other hand, you admit the creation of new laws of nature, by virtue of which the phenomenon can be explained, then you slip into the field of the “wonderful”.
In many ways, Carlovich’s story is a strange work. He never undressed with his companions, but with the warehouse workers. To one of them he gave his shoes: the studs bothered him, he asked him to pass them on the plane until they were very short. With those shoes he played on all kinds of terrain. But for others, Carlovich is definitely a “wonderful” narrative object. “El Trinche”, for its time, was an unknown phenomenon. Something that, while happening in the present, would be realized in the future. Before Carlovich we can only suspend the judgment. «When a player has a superior technique you realize it from certain plays. A strange ball comes, and they kill it, block it, and you wonder how the fuck he does it, ”says Carlos Aimar, his contemporary, symbol of the Rosario Central.
The mythical tale, in many ways, is a private matter. Everyone has a memory of the “Trinche”, and each a referent to compare it to in order to make it clear the general traits to which he has never seen. El Gráfico defined him like this: «he was an elegant, virtuous and somewhat angry central midfielder. From the slow pace, but with the mental speed inversely proportional to its progress ». Roberto Fontanarrosa, writer from Rosarino, explained how Carlovich had anticipated “things that we would later see again in Borghi”. According to Menotti, “he played intelligent games, but without disdaining aesthetics”. Some say that what Maradona did, which Messi does today, was already done by “el Trinche”.
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Let’s circumscribe more: the game of “Trinche”, someone else argues, was the game of Redondo. Carlovich was tall, imperious, not a monster of speed. But he had quick thoughts. “I had this gift,” he says, when asked, and they often ask him because there always comes a time when someone comes to ask for what you have been; “A few seconds before the balloon arrived I could already see where I was supposed to send it, and the guy who was supposed to receive it was always there.”
It is said that before the start of each game he would lift his shorts up to his groin to “warm up his leg.” With that leg he generated numbers that are difficult to imagine on a professional pitch: pisaditas , tunnels, chest stops that moved the ball on the shoulder. Performances from talent show more than playing on the pitch. And then the legendary caño doble , the double tunnel, round trip, the greatest football personification of irreverence. His trademark. Carlovich, on the pitch, was a bignami of football from potrero .
Attachment
Eduardo Quinto Pagés, goalkeeper of that Central Córdoba, says he kept his clean sheet for 606 minutes. But the credit, he continues, was all of the “Trinche”, who always kept the ball in the opposing half of the field. Among Carlovich’s submissions is the one according to which he would hold the record for the maximum consecutive minutes in possession of the ball: ten minutes, without interruption. “My main virtue was to want the ball, at any time. If I didn’t have it, I was desperate. ‘ I’m not sure that today, if we really had the chance to see him play for a full game, we wouldn’t end up redefining him as a player, finding him boring, too slow , too haughty.
The main accusation that has always been leveled against “el Trinche”, which over time has transformed into something to be welcomed as if one daydreamed, and which instead seems to me an indelible flaw, is that he lacked the professionalism of which you need if you play football professionally. Then the moment will come when we will stop for a moment to reflect on why we like the lazy so much, what kind of charm they exert on our imagination. “He hasn’t dedicated himself enough,” replies Carlos Aimar when asked if he thinks Carlovich is more one of those who did not want or of those who could not . “He has never made any effort to adapt. This is why, in addition to being a legend, it is also a symbol ”, explains Jorge Valdano promptly.
The “Trinche” liked only some aspects of the game, more specular than we can imagine. The first, fundamental, was the fun. Jonathan Wilson, in “Angels with dirty faces: the footballing history of Argentina”, asks himself an interesting question about Carlovich: someone accustomed to potrero , when he takes the field in front of sixty, one hundred thousand people: how does he like him ? Was professionalism, for Carlovich, a betrayal of his own intellectual roots? The other aspect, however, and it is strange for him that it is the quintessence of individualism, was the belief that it was always the team, as such, that made the difference. Perhaps, in the collective, Carlovich saw an escape from expectations, from responsibilities.
April 16, 1974
I fantasized a lot, while writing this article and talking with Maximiliano, who would have illustrated it, about what could have happened if Carlovich, for example, had arrived at Boca, at River, if he had played the World Cup at home. If he had raised his arms to the sky after a goal in the final instead of Mario Kempes. L’Albiceleste and Tomás Felipe Carlovich, on the other hand, never loved each other, wanted each other, not even observed from a distance. They collided, yes. Once, only once, in Rosario, on April 16, 1974.
The photo that Carlovich has hung up in the living room, who knows if always, or only when they interview him, is the photo of the Rosario team’s formation that evening: five players from Rosario Central (including Mario Kempes), five from Newell’s. And then he, who was not yet the attraction of vaudeville, the freak to exhibit, but not even the most interesting prospect to discover. He was simply the embodiment of the spirit of a city that wanted, through him, to make an impromptu and football transubstantiation. The newspapers said it would be an opportunity to know his extraordinary nature.
That match was a strange match for Selección. In two months she would fly to Germany to play the World Cup, but she was not in brilliant form. The federal leaders had given a kind of ultimatum to CT Ladislao Cap, “el Polaco”. AFA president Fernando Mitjans had told him to play well and win, otherwise they would have fired everyone. It ended badly: not as much as Mitjans had feared, but in any case in a fool, because the rosarines disrespected the national team from the first minute, and after half an hour they were already at 3-0. The legend, which always magnifies every detail, even the most insignificant, says that Cap has repeatedly asked, with different degrees of desperation depending on who tells it, to remove that cursed five from the field.
“The truth is that I would never have been able to play badly that evening,” says Carlovich, always the same, in every interview, as if reciting a script sent by heart “with those comrades”.
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Denial
The most interesting part of the narrative about the “Trinche” Carlovich is the way in which the object of the narration, instead of abstracting itself on the shields of mythization, awkwardly wanders in the not at all trivial process of trying to self-destruct, at least a little. “Here in Rosario a lot of things have been invented about me,” he fades. «But they are not true… Rosarines like to tell stories . I may have done some caños , but not so many … ». Why, when we hear a myth deny itself, bring itself back to its earthly being, do we feel the desire not to stop praising it, and indeed we feel prone to adoration ?And what if “el Trinche” had never existed, and the man everyone goes to interview was just an actor engaged in an impromptu and Dadaist play that has lasted for forty years?
“What does it mean to break through ? I broke through : I had no other ambition than to play football, and I succeeded », he says. Isn’t that too comforting? “If they still gave me ninety minutes and a full stadium, I swear, play and die happy,” he confesses. Is it not definitively acquittal? Are these tricks of a seasoned screenwriter really enough to make us move, romantically, for the story of Carlovich?
Does “El Trinche” know that his place in the world was – or did it end up becoming? – more like a Harleem Globetrotters basketball player than an NBA champion. They invited him to demonstration matches, to performances like the one he played against Milan, in ’74, with a Selection of the Mendoza area. It was the passepartout for the show, a pretext that became an end: once he forgot the documents for recognition before entering the field, and the managers of the opposing team guaranteed for him, because for their fans it was the only opportunity to see on the pitch a suggestion, before a footballer.
Menotti says that when he became coach of Albiceleste he pre-convened him for a series of friendlies, but Carlovich says he doesn’t remember it. Menotti insists, however, and adds that he had found an excuse, even a trivial one, that the river was in flood and he could not cross it, in order not to go.
In choosing the territory over which to exercise their undisputed sovereignty, “el Trinche” has always been incredibly specific: the Tablada barrio , where everyone greeted him when they met him on the street. Or the town of Mendoza. “People still surprise me. Everywhere. The other time I was in Mendoza and I hadn’t been back for twenty years: people came out of the shops, in the restaurant where I ate when I played there they had always kept a table for me, there were three thousand people at the stadium. And then come guys, who have never seen you play, and they tell you that you are their idol. Only because his parents or uncles told him about it. ‘ He didn’t care to go away, to drag the mythical shadow behind him, held with two fingers, like a jacket in spring. It is said that Inter, Paris Saint Germain, the New York Cosmos had looked for him, where none other than Pele, frightened by the idea of finding another prima donna on the pitch, had vetoed his arrival. If it sounds implausible to you, well, it is.
The few games he played in Primera, Argentina’s top flight, were with the Colón shirt. He had never been injured in his entire career: in the third match with “el Sabalero” he injured his adductor. His coach, Urriolabeitia, believed he was doing it on purpose, pretending to be injured, that it was all a mental problem. He showed his leg to the doctors, they shook their heads in disbelief. “Then I just pulled up my pants and left. I would never come back. ‘
The epilogue of his career, of course, was once again at Central Córdoba. He was 37 and a few months later Maradona would be consecrated as the best player in the world, in Mexico. The last match was on the field of the All Boys: the day before, when the team bus was about to leave for Buenos Aires, the only one absent from the roll was “el Trinche”. He showed up the next day, a few hours before the match, at the gathering of the fans, ready to move to Floresta. He emerged from Avenida San Martín wearing torn jeans, slip-on shoes, a canvas bag. An apparition, like that of a hippie Christ. Four hours later he was on the field.
Indulge yourself
“I would do everything I’ve done again, because I’ve always enjoyed myself,” Carlovich always says. Perhaps, however, more out of respect for the figure that the imagination of others has painted around him. His life hasn’t changed much: it was a phenomenon to be observed on the pitch, it continues to be outside. «I’m alone, I don’t want to do anything. Julio Grondona told me that I was his favorite footballer, that he would personally take care of my pension. But then the poor man died, and now I have to do it all by myself ».
In 2002 the city of Rosario named him “Illustrious sportsman”. A donation of $ 150 a month to cover the expenses of the rent, and a collection to ensure that he could treat osteoporosis in the hip with the installation of a prosthesis. He is a marked man: under the wrinkles he hides the same gaze as always, a little indolent, a little resigned. He has the sad face of one who recognizes, with awareness, that he has not been up to par. Walks caracollante for the barrio Tablada, and makes ends meet, trivially, indulging. It is the Edward Bloom of “Big Fish” who, behind the hyperbole, basically reiterates to us William his own vision of the world. Obviously, they often ask him who his favorite is, between Maradona and Messi. When he talks about Leo he always calls him “that of Barcelona”.
I’m not sure he’s bothered by all the attention they give him, continuing to interview him, trying to unhinge a definitive answer to the whys of his mystique. Indeed, he seems somewhat pleased with it. If there is something he has learned, in which he has become a true professional, it is that every myth feeds on the same material it is made of. The one and only process that allows a legend, even a minor one, to perpetuate itself, indefinitely.
