Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Now It
May Never Come.
The Spanish striker Aritz Aduriz seemed to have been given the perfect way
to say goodbye to his 20-year career. Then the pandemic struck, and now he
may just fade to black.
By Rory SmithPublished May 19, 2020Updated May 20, 2020
Aritz Aduriz is still ready to retire. The pandemic may have stolen his chance
to say goodbye.
Aritz Aduriz has thought, every day, about the goodbye he might never have.
It is not his first thought: That, of course, is his family, his wife and daughters,
locked down with him in their apartment in central Bilbao, Spain. It is not his
priority: That is hoping the deaths cease, the coronavirus crisis eases, and one
day they might all be able to go outside again.
But at times, his mind drifts, and he starts to wonder about his own, personal
ending. He has, for some time, felt privileged. Lucky, even. He is 39, almost
impossibly ancient for a soccer player. His career as a striker stretches back
almost two decades, far longer than he had ever thought possible. Last
summer, though, he decided this would be his final season.
Aduriz knows that is not how it ordinarily works. “Normally, football leaves
you before you can leave it,” he said.
Aduriz, though, was able to choose his where and his when: at the end of his
contract, on June 30, and at Athletic Bilbao, the club where he has spent most
of his career, the club he could never quite leave. “It feels like closing a circle,
retiring at the same place where I started out,” he said. “I’ve been very
fortunate.”
It had seemed clear for a while how it would end, too. Early in February, F.C.
Barcelona visited Bilbao in the quarterfinal of the Copa del Rey. Athletic
scored a late winner. The same night, Real Sociedad eliminated Real Madrid.
In March, both teams booked places in the final, scheduled for April 18, in
Seville.
This would be the perfect way to leave: a derby between the two biggest
clubs in the Basque Country, the team Aduriz has devoted his life to against
the team from San Sebastián, the city where he grew up, the team his wife’s
family supports. Neither has won either of Spain’s major trophies since the
1980s.
Barely two weeks later, though, the game was postponed, indefinitely. The
Spanish soccer authorities remain determined to somehow finish the
country’s league season, but the fate of the cup final is a secondary
consideration. Aduriz’s goodbye is on hold.
“It is possible, maybe even probable, that we cannot play,” he said. “Things
are changing so quickly.
If he has a regret from his final suspended season, it is that he has not scored
again. He would have liked, he said, at least a couple more goals. But that has
not diminished his enjoyment of his farewell tour.
He has tried to savor everything: the days spent at Lezama, Athletic’s
training facility; the visits to the stadiums he would play in again; the sound
of San Mamés. “I knew these moments would not come back, but that meant
I could enjoy them more,” he said. “It has been more happiness than
sadness.”
Through it all, he has been convinced that something special was waiting for
him at the end. Long before Athletic qualified for the Copa del Rey final, he
was telling his teammates that they could win something this season. That, to
almost everyone in Bilbao, would have been the ending Aduriz deserved.
The bond between Athletic’s players and its fans is an uncommon one. The
club is an exception in the hyper-globalized marketplace of world soccer in
only recruiting players born or raised in the Basque Country. The policy
means that players are only rarely, expensively and begrudgingly, allowed to
leave. It gives the club the feel, Aduriz said, of a “neighborhood team taking
on the world.”
Even by those standards, though, Aduriz is special. There is something in his
story that makes fans hold him close to their hearts, that helps his people see
something of themselves in him.
Perhaps it is that he was a late bloomer. As a child, his parents preferred to
take him out into the Pyrenees for cross-country skiing, rather than allow him
to play soccer. It was not until he was 19, late by most standards, that he was
first noticed by Athletic. It was only when he was 23, and had spent a season
playing for Real Valladolid in Spain’s second tier, that he finally believed he
could make a living from soccer.
UPDATE: A day after this article published, Aduriz announced that he was retiring
effective immediately. Doctors, he said, had told him he needed a hip replacement “to
go about my everyday life as normally as possible.”
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