For no particular reason at all, I woke up this morning thinking about Guti. Well, I woke up thinking of my favorite footballers who were lost in the passage of time because they weren’t the few otherworldly ones who will be remembered forever.
Guti and the way we remember sports’ imperfect and long-forgotten stars
Some athletes are so great that their exploits will never be forgotten. But what about the middle class of stars and their moments of brilliance?
Guti is one of them.
Football is full of these players. They are the middle class, who can be wonderful and entertaining in their time but, because younger talent inevitably replaces them, the memories of their careers erode quickly. The further we traverse the cycle of seasons, the harder it is to recall those middle-class players. But each of us has players from that middle class who we love, and even if we can’t remember every game they played exactly, there are still a few moments we cling to and cherish.
I woke up this morning thinking of Guti’s pass to Zinedine Zidane against Sevilla from the 2005-06 season:
Looking for that pass led to my spending some time watching videos of him on YouTube. I wanted to watch him saunter around again, his bow-legged running, the way he drifted past opponents untouched. I wanted to see how many of his great moments I still remembered, and which ones were being forgotten or simply condensed into videos of highlights.
When I was younger, I used to tease my older brother, a Barcelona fan, that Guti was the only midfielder with the surname Hernandez who truly mattered. It wasn’t an argument about overall quality: Xavi was much more refined, and, in the end, became one of the never-to-be-forgotten greats.
My argument was instead one of personal affection. I loved Guti precisely because he never could fully realize himself. I loved him because he was imperfect: incredibly talented, but arrogant, snobby, and the closest thing to a Mean Girl football has ever seen. A man capable of the incredible who looked and behaved like a rockstar. I still remember and cherish the memory of him refusing to come on as a substitute against Malaga in 2009, a tantrum which saw him dropped the next match by Juande Ramos.
The pass to Zidane against Sevilla is one of those rockstar moments. It was everything great about him: ridiculous vision, ability, and the courage to try something that spectacular.
Guti and his pass (and that other pass against Deportivo) are wonderful reminders of what makes the game of football so enthralling. Within these endless seasonal cycles where trophies are won and lost, where players come, go and are forgotten, there are moments of beauty that just take the breath away. Moments, for instance, when a prissy left-footed midfielder laughs off the sensible thing and decides instead to do the unexpected. Those moments feed precious memories, and then, one day, a fan who adored that midfielder can wake up and be filled with joy just from recalling the deft brilliance of the pass.
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