BarcelonaOn June 5, 1932, the Corts stadium was packed to see the first leg of the semi-finals of the President’s Cup between Barça and Celta de Vigo. Before the game, which would end with a 3-0 victory for Blaugrana, Armand Martínez Sagi went out on the grass looking elegant to do the honors service from the middle of the field. He was given a standing ovation, as he was a former player of the club who had scored goals there, at Les Corts. That day they paid tribute to him, as a few weeks earlier he had been proclaimed world champion in artistic billiards. And curiously, another former Barcelona player, Claudi Puigvert, had finished third in the same tournament. He too would become world billiards champion, two years later. This is the forgotten story of football players who shone on three sides.
Almost a century ago, Barça already filled stadiums, but Catalan football fans also passionately followed other sports that are now more minority, such as billiards. When Martínez Sagi proclaimed himself world champion of artistic billiards in 1932, the press announced the arrival time of his train from French lands and hundreds of people waited, euphoric. In fact, billiards was so popular that a year earlier, in 1931, a native of Puigverd, in the Segrià, who lived in the Catalan capital, Enric Miró, proclaimed himself the world champion of three-way billiards in Barcelona in front of ‘a crowd that followed the competition live filling the room to the brim to see the tricks of the world’s best specialists. Miró worked in a shop in Gràcia selling stockings and underwear for “50 duros a week” and had already played for Puigverd when he was young, although it would be in Barcelona where he would start competing and participate in the 1930 World Artistic Championships in Amsterdam, no luck This player would emigrate after the Civil War to Argentina, where he would proclaim himself the South American billiards champion and run a business with a lot of tables in Buenos Aires. He, Martínez Sagi and Puigvert would star in the first golden age of Catalan billiards.
A versatile athlete
Born in Barcelona on April 28, 1906, Armand Martínez Sagi was part of a very sporting and very Barcelona-loving family. His cousin Emili Sagi Liñana, popularly known as Sagi Barba, would be one of the best footballers of his time, in that front where Samitier, Piera or Paulino Alcántara shone. Emili Sagi’s father was the famous singer Emili Sagi i Barba, who achieved great success both in opera and in zarzuela, in Europe and Latin America. If the Sagis were artists, the Martínezs were a very Catalan bourgeois family. Josep Martínez, the father, was a textile entrepreneur who would become friends with Joan Gamper, which is why he would be part of one of Barça’s first boards of directors. At that time, every upper or middle class youth played a lot of sports. And Armand started with both football and tennis, and formed a pair with the racket with his sister Anna Maria. Anna Maria Martínez Sagi, by the way, stood out as an athlete, and became champion of Spain in the javelin throw, in 1931. She would also be a poet and the first female director of Barça, in addition to serving in the ERC . One of the most fascinating personalities of Barcelona at the time.
Armand Martínez Sagi, as the newspaper reporter demonstrated after rummaging through a bunch of files Sport David Salinas was the youngest player to debut and score a goal for Barça in official competition, ahead of the legendary Paulino Alcántara. Martínez Sagi made his debut under British coach Jack Greenwell in 1920 at just 14 years, 6 months and 15 days in a Catalan Championship draw against Internacional (2-2). His first goal would come in the first leg of the final of the same competition against Avenç: he scored twice in the Blaugrana’s 3-1 win. He wasn’t even 15 years old and he was key in the Blaugrana comeback, which had started by losing that game. He looked like great promise, playing as a winger, but he didn’t establish himself. He would play 14 official matches from 1920 to 1925, in which he would score five goals. That Catalan Championship of 1921 would be the first of the four titles he won as a Blaugrana player, although he did not play in the Copa del Rey success of 1922 and 1925. After leaving Barça he would continue to play for Júpiter, first, and Alfons XIII de Palma, the club that would eventually give way to Real Mallorca. Here he would win a Balearic regional championship in 1928.
Martínez Sagi already played pool, for fun, when he was a footballer, but once he had returned from Mallorca he took it more seriously, and showed himself more and more at Club Billar Barcelona. Fundat el 1928, aquest era un club pioner que va arribar a tenir a les seves oficines la seu de les federacions Catalana i Espanyola durant uns quants anys, ja que, bàsicament, els seus membres van ser els pares del billar de competició a l’ state The federations ended up leaving the premises, but the club remains in its usual place, at the bottom of Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes 595, in the Coliseum theater building. Many Barcelona residents walk past the Teatre building every day without seeing the side door that gives access to the temple of Catalan billiards. There, Martínez Sagi began competing alongside Claudi Puigvert, who had been one of the founders of the club and would be one of its teachers. Born in 1887 in Barcelona, Puigvert had played for Barça in the 1909/10 season, when the team won three titles: the Catalan Championship, the Spanish Cup and the Pyrenees Cup, a tournament played against French clubs. Of course, Puigvert only participated as a forward in two games in the Catalan championship. He would stand out in billiards: he would be proclaimed champion of Spain in three-way billiards eight times between 1929 and 1946. Founding member of Club Billar Barcelona, of which he would become president in 1940, in 1946 he would return to his Barça when Agustí Montal and Galobart asked him to become part of the Barcelona board.
The triumph of Lilla, thanks to another Catalan
In the late 1920s, the first international billiards competitions began to be organized. In 1928, the French city of Reims was home to the first three-way billiards World Cup, won by the Egyptian Edmond Soussa, a true legend who lived for many years on the money he earned from doing exhibitions. Soussa, who would live his whole life in France, was admired and respected by the Catalan players, who went from learning from him to being able to defeat him. In 1929, the World Cup of free carom was held in Cairo in honor of Soussa, and the Catalan Raimon Vives finished third. Vives would be, along with Puigvert, one of the key figures to be able to start organizing world championships in Barcelona as well, like the one won by Miró in 1931.
That year, the French organized in the city of Vichy a first championship in the form of artistic billiards, although it was then called “fantasy billiards”, because it is about making caroms with three balls in the most aesthetic way possible. A Spaniard, Luis Sevilla, would participate without luck in an edition won by the Portuguese Alfredo Ferraz. In 1932 the city of Lille hosted the second edition of the tournament, with the presence of Luis Sevilla, Martínez Sagi and a Claudi Puigvert who initially went only as a manager, but would end up participating. Before leaving, Martínez Sagi would explain to the press that he had an ace up his sleeve: his friendship with Lluís Garriga Nogués, a Catalan businessman who was then living in Paris, where he had excelled at artistic billiards. Lluís Garriga was a member of the family of bankers who had the Garriga Nogués house built on Carrer Diputació, a beautiful modernist building by the architect Enric Sagnier i Villavecchia, where, of course, there is a billiard room. As Martínez Sagi would explain, Garriga mastered the tricks so much that the organizers of the World Cup in Lilla had asked him to be the one in charge of programming the contest, with the mandatory strokes that each finalist had to do. By the way, he himself would have declined to participate in the World Cup when he saw how the International Federation left out of the competition the strokes that he considered more complicated. Now, he did agree to train and accompany Martínez Sagi in person. In the tournament, the Barcelona player would prevail over the Egyptian Soussa. The Barcelona native was awarded a gold watch and a Brunswick brand cleat. Puigvert finished third in a tournament where despite not having to compete, he became the leader on the first day thanks to his tricks.
In 1934 it would be Puigvert’s turn, who prevailed in the three-way World Cup organized precisely in Barcelona. In 1936, Puigvert himself would become European champion in the same discipline, just the same year that Martínez Sagi would finish as world runner-up in artistic billiards. After the war, when Puigvert had to go into hiding because he was politically conservative, he continued his career as a billiards player and, especially, as a manager, until his death in 1952. Armand Martínez Sagi would die on July 11, 1997 in Montevideo, in Uruguay, where he emigrated after the Civil War, just as Enric Miró had done, in his case in Argentina.
In 1932, another Catalan would be proclaimed world champion in the United States
Catalan billiards experienced a golden age in the 1930s, with the curious fact that in 1932, when Martínez Sagi proclaimed himself the world champion of fantasy billiards in Lille, another Catalan, Isidre Ribas, won the fantasy world championship in the United States. Yes, two World Cups were played in the same year because they were organized by two different federations, one European and the other American. The first was amateur. In other words, he considered that you couldn’t charge money to play. The American was professional. Both tournaments were won by Catalans that year. Ribas was a son of the town of Vendrell, where he was born in 1877. At the age of 15, he was already playing to kill time, but he was discovered by a teacher who competed and who encouraged him to join the federation. The jump to the United States would come thanks to the composer Pau Casals, who knew him, and in 1918 he would encourage him to travel with him to the United States so that he could compete with the world champion of fantasy billiards, Charles Peterson. And precisely in 1932 he would proclaim himself world champion of fantasy billiards by defeating Peterson, who had not wanted to play with him in 1918. Ribas would settle in Argentina for a few years, before returning to Vendrell in 1947.
the european,
