Readers’ letters: Jorge, the longing for normality; always the same people; cenotaph

Lionel cries and wonders how he will go on without Jorge. He knows he will go on because that is what Jorge taught him: you must always keep moving forward. But he says he does not know how. Perhaps he will find part of the answer in his children. Losing a father can make a person feel even more deeply what it means to be a father.

Jorge was ordinary and exceptional at the same time. He believed first in himself and in his ability to turn a dream into reality. He raised a son, football raised an idol, and the present gave the world a human being known for his almost superhuman precision in sending a ball into a rectangle.

Jorge will not be remembered for football, social, political, geopolitical or economic statements. What we will learn about his life is simpler, and perhaps rightly so: he was a normal father, a family man from Rosario, normal even at the moment of his death. He negotiated his son’s multimillion-dollar contracts without theatrics. He guided and supported a child who encountered hard work before pleasure, becoming a successful manager and a decisive force in the early stages of his son’s professional career.

He also helped ensure that his son played football as a game, not merely as a profession. The 39-year-old man who cried on the pitch at the certain prospect of his father’s death was already mourning the impossibility of taking his champion’s ball back to a father withdrawn into the final stage of life. He could no longer offer the fitting confirmation that life is a game and the ball belongs to the one who plays it best. Death, however, darkened that power, and “his legs could not carry him,” nor could his heart.

Jorge leaves behind a quiet ethical legacy. He showed that a private life is possible even for the father guiding the first steps of what the article calls the greatest football player in history, and perhaps the sport’s most humble human being when success is measured against self-glorification. Jorge chose to let his son’s goals testify to his work.

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his legs could not carry him