Torelló“It was planned that this space would be occupied by the match between Madrid and Barcelona, but the unexpected death of Julio César Benítez has made it impossible as its celebration has been postponed. Today, the Barça flag flies at half mast due to its death from a fulminating disease not entirely well determined”said the No-Do of April 7, 1968. It was a Spain in black and white: the day before Joan Manuel Serrat had not been able to perform at Eurovision because TVE had decided to withdraw his candidacy because he wanted to sing The, the, the in Catalan. Finally Massiel went.
Madrid dominated state football with figures like Paco Gento, who lashed out at Barça’s defenses until the arrival of Benítez: kryptonite against their gallops. “He retired it”, emphasizes one of Barça’s great goalkeepers: Salvador Sadurní (l’Arboç, 1941). On Wednesday 3 April 1968 he celebrated his 27th birthday under the posts at Wembley, in a defeat to England.
According to his widow, Pilar Ruiz, in 2008 a The vanguard, Benítez and she went to spend the Sunday of the selection stop in Andorra with another couple: the owners of the Hotel Vallvidrera. “At night he noticed itchiness on one side and on his back, and he said to me, ‘I’ve already been given a poorly lit towel,'” Ruiz recounted. When they arrived in Barcelona he was no longer feeling well and she called an emergency doctor, who prescribed some pills. He went to train for two days, but was unable to complete the session on either day. “Our doctor told me it wasn’t hives, but purpura,” she said. And he remembered: “Wednesday night he went into a coma. His body creaked as if it was wrapped in cellophane paper. He came back to himself for a moment and kept delirious.” On Friday he was admitted to the Red Cross hospital in Barcelona. The doctors told Ruiz that her husband was beyond salvation, but it was the last attempt they could make.
Julio César Benítez died aged 27: he is the only Barça player to have died while active
The Barça dressing room, concentrated in the Rey Jaime I Hotel in Castelldefels, waited for news with uncertainty and anxiety. Although the press didn’t say too much beyond pointing out that she would surely be out for Sunday’s classic, key to the resolution of the League. In an interview with Sports world on Saturday, the coach, Salvador Artigas, said that Benítez was in bed “with a fever of 40 and a strong infection”. Carles Rexach (Barcelona, 1947) recalls: “We went from “We don’t know if he will be able to play” to “It seemed like it was nothing and now things are complicated”, to “This is serious”, to “You know that can he stay?”, to “He won’t leave””. Benítez, born in 1940 in Montevideo, died on Saturday, April 6. With 27 years. He is the only player in the history of Barça to die while active.
“It was a drama. You can’t even imagine it. It was just impossible. It seemed impossible that he was dead,” says Rexach, sighing. Sadurní continues: “It was a very hard blow. How could it be that a beast like that could die like that, all of a sudden? You didn’t believe it, you didn’t understand it, it didn’t enter your mind. “What happened here “Is it possible that we will never see this man again?” 150,000 people passed through the burning chapel of the Camp Nou, from 10 am on Sunday to 3 pm on Monday. The players took turns to watch over the corpse. “There were terrible queues. I’ve never seen anything like that. It wasn’t like a funeral, no: one was shouting, another was clapping, another was jumping over him to hug the box, everyone was crying,” he recalls Rexach.
The players themselves carried the coffin on their shoulders to the Corts cemetery, accompanied by thousands of people. The newspaper archive says that Gento cried: when Benítez died, Madrid was already in Catalonia, concentrated in Sant Andreu de Llavaneres. The classic was finally played on Tuesday, with a draw that ended up deciding the title in favor of the visiting team.
Over time, the mystery surrounding Benítez’s death grew. The death certificate stated that “the etiology of death could not be established due to the rapidity of the picture”. The hegemonic version said that he had died of poisoning after eating some spoiled mussels, but it was also said that he had died of pneumococcus. He ran, too, that he had been poisoned. “It was even said that I had poisoned him by giving him cyanide little by little,” his widow pointed out in The vanguard. “How was I supposed to kill the hen that laid the golden eggs?”, he replied. He also denied that they had eaten mussels in Andorra. And he added that he had suffered two hepatitis.
“A withering gas grenade”
Rexach continues: “Everyone had their say, because no one understood what it could be. I always thought it was a liver problem, cirrhosis or something like that.” Sadurní certifies that he didn’t take good care of himself: “I remember that one day Dr. Alcántara went to Benítez’s house because he was still convalescing from hepatitis and he found him eating seafood. “I don’t want to go there anymore, to his house, if he doesn’t believe me”, he said.” “He had a round belly like a melon,” he adds. It was said that he could eat up to twelve cannelloni and that he drank. On the Wednesday of the week he died, he still went to the Anahuac bar, on Carrer Tuset.
Sadurní remembers that there was also talk of a poorly placed injection that would have introduced an air bubble into his body that could have caused, or accelerated, his death. Rexach remembers that shortly before he died, during the break of a match, Benítez told him that he was peeing on Coca-Cola. “It was a car with a great chassis and a lousy engine,” Dr. Joaquín Tornos Solano said after his death. The club’s website testifies that Benítez, “one of the best defenders that Barça has had” died “due to a fulminant gas gangrene”. As a coach he played 259 official matches.
Sadurní concludes, with melancholy: “He had come here, to my town. From time to time we would have a calçotada and almost the whole staff would come. We would also throw at the plate. I still have a photograph of Benítez with a lamb in his arms. Then we we ate it. We made calçots and roasted meat.”
