Football, Tango, Malbec
and the KWF Gringos
By Carlos Prieto ’02
Heads up for real football!
As an Argentine sports reporter who, like the rest of the country, is mad for football, I think the best way to describe how the Knight-Wallace Fellows approached my country is to tell you about how they dealt with the real thing.
I say this to distinguish football from whatever kind of sport I saw at the University of Michigan’s stadium.
One day during the Fellows’ visit in December, dinner had been underway for almost two hours when Fellow Matthias Schepp arrived at the elegant restaurant in Recoleta with a big smile on his face. For a brief time he had been “home” watching the real thing-—the final game of the South American Cup—at Boca Juniors’ stadium. Next to the importance of that event, being rudely late for the gathering was nothing.
Although about half of Schepp’s colleagues had already left Buenos Aires, he and others stayed on to absorb more of the essence of our country. He is German, so for him the attraction to football was nothing new. That was not the case for most of the group (as part of the program, Fellows have visited Argentina annually since 2000). However, one way or another, all of them have to deal with the national passion for a kind of “football” played with feet and no helmets—not the decaf activity that soccer moms take their kids to in the United States.
The way each group connects with real football varies from year to year. In December 2001, under the supervision of the local Fellow—me—17 people witnessed a game played by the imminent league champion, Racing Club. What did they make of that event, so central to our hearts? The Fellows—my “fellow Fellows!”—were most enthusiastic about learning the lyrics of Racing Club fight songs, which are filled with filthy language of great descriptive power.
Charles Eisendrath doesn’t much care for American football and has a lot of ideas about our kind. They are completely wrong. He didn’t even go to the game in my Fellowship year and has been trying to discourage full engagement of the Fellows with real football ever since. He seems to make an exception, however, when sport mingles with politics, which he understands very well. I suppose that is why the ’05 group met with Mauricio Macri, president of Boca Juniors, the current champion, and a contender for mayor of Buenos Aires in 2003. It turned out that he agreed with Eisendrath about American football. “Everyone runs and only one player thinks,” he said, while the director nodded approvingly, “and sometimes the one who is supposed to be thinking is just receiving orders by the radio.”
The only spectator sport the director favors for the Fellows’ trip is of all things, polo! Not exactly a mainstream option, but I have to admit that the aristocratic atmosphere that surrounds a polo game is worth sampling by a bunch of curious outsiders. But this has its limits. Ten minutes or so after the game starts, half of the group, including Eisendrath, left their seats to take long walks. They had something to eat, something to drink. Some didn’t return until the end of the afternoon. The field is big, the ball is small, and horses have all those legs! It’s almost impossible to know which team is winning except by watching the scoreboard. The equivalent of a half-time “show” is a little army band playing out of tune and a gaucho who makes his horse lie down on its back at mid-field, well beyond the vision of anyone without binoculars.
For sure, not all Fellows are interested in local sports but almost without exception, “tango” is one of the key words they have in mind when they arrive in Buenos Aires. Dozens of good shows, specialized music stores and places where visitors can take dancing lessons give them the opportunity to feel tango’s shimmering glamour. But what often confounds their expectations is everyday porteños’ relationship with tango. Some Fellows can’t hide their disappointment when they receive a majority of No’s to the question, “Do you dance tango?”
There is another field, however, where disappointment is completely unusual: food and wine. Argentine beef always meets expectations, and the wines of Mendoza exceed them. The first time that Fellows have a juicy bife de chorizo on the table in front of them with a glass of Malbec, their expressions usually resemble that reserved for a fine work of art. It must be said that in this field, unlike spectator sports, the program shows impeccable good judgment. If eating and drinking are important to understanding culture, which is certainly true in Argentina, a great deal of understanding is achieved.
The mastery of a foreign culture is never without difficulties, however. With Argentine cuisine, this begins with our achuras, the family of sauces and other strange “beef arrangements” of which we are justifiably proud. After seeing them on tables for a few days, sooner or later, before trying them, one of the Fellows asks, “What is this?” We then explain—and before the end of the explanation the probability is high that this particular Fellow will decide to become a vegetarian. In December, one of the ’05 Fellows asked during the visit at the estancia what a morcilla (blood sausage) was. “The waiter said that, if explained, morcillas would probably remain untouchedon the table,” remembers Fellow Sergio Danishewsky ’05.
When conversations come to politics, we local Fellows know that a very difficult question will arise: “What exactly is Peronismo?” or “Why did you have three Peronist candidates running against each other for president?” Fellows never think that the answers are clear. This demonstrates that their mission to Argentina is a great success and that they have grasped the essence of Peronismo, which is that none of us agrees about the exact legacy of Peron’s leadership.
No man steps twice into the same river, and no Fellowship group steps twice into the same Argentina. In February 2000, the ’00 Fellows were received by the newly elected president, Fernando de la Rua, at Casa Rosada. Just two years later, in December ’01, the ’02 Fellows participated in the riots that ushered him out of office. As the vans threaded their way to the airport through mobs and tear gas, the president, who had exchanged pleasantries with their predecessors in the presidential Pink House, was quitting.
Ricardo Kirschbaum, the editor of Clarin, summed up these experiences at a lunch in the newspaper’s boardroom. “We always give the Knight-Wallace Fellows a surprise,” he said. “One year it’s a chat with the president. Another year it’s the coup against him. This year is no different...”
He looked around the room as Fellows were squirming, thinking maybe that another coup had begun while they were contemplating the meal before them. “This year the surprise is... normalcy!”
But who knows what river ’06 Fellows will find?—Carlos Prieto ’02 is a reporter for Clarin.
