Gay Talese preferred to write about losers than winners. Sports, Talese said, are about people who lose, lose and lose, not about automatons of precision. This is how he wrote one of the best profiles in journalism, not just in sports: that of the boxer Floyd Patterson, a winner who had the luck (bad or good, depending on how you look at it) to coincide in time with Sonny Liston and Muhammad Ali. “It is easy to do anything in victory,” Patterson once said, “it is in defeat that a man reveals himself.” In Talese’s portrait of Patterson, which appeared in the magazine Esquire In 1964, the boxer told him how he used to keep a fake beard, a mustache, a hat and glasses in his backpack, and how when he lost he would put them on so that no one would recognize him on the street. He feared shame more than beatings.
I remembered Patterson watching the magnificent series Jakarta. The protagonist of Jakarta is Joserra, played enormously by Javier Cámara, an abandoned, ailing guy, once a badminton competitor in the Barcelona Olympic Games. Joserra is now a frustrated gym teacher who dreams of finding the next badminton star who will take him to Jakarta. And on that trip to nowhere through municipal sports cars, roadside bars and hotels with two single beds with primitive brocades, he meets Mar, a budding talent, played by a wonderful Carla Quílez. But behind Joserra’s facade, behind the seemingly simple story of just another suburban loser, lies the scourge of child abuse in sports and its inexorable consequences.
“In children’s sports things are emerging that we were not aware of when I was a child, now we are more aware that there are dynamics between coaches and their pupils that can have a lifelong impact on a moral and ethical level. Normally we think that in the classrooms, in the noble and recognized subjects, there is the education of young people, but I believe that in the gyms and playing fields, in the small dynamics of sport, there are hidden ethical values that will haunt us more than a geography lesson,” he said in this newspaper Diego San José, creator of the series. The most sinister thing about these dynamics of abuse is that they never expire, they become a very powerful internal narrator.
In recent years we have learned heartbreaking stories about the physical, sexual or emotional abuse that some athletes have suffered when they were minors at the hands of their coaches, and how the same institutions created to protect them failed miserably in their work. Sport simply provided mass access to girls and boys without any protective structures or, worse still, with deliberate silencing structures.
That choreography of silence sneaks into Jakarta through badminton, a sport that, despite Carolina Marín, preserves the aura of a parish gym with damp ceilings. In Jakarta Badminton acts as a metaphor: that of accepting defeat to move forward. Accepting defeat is not romanticizing it, not out of cowardice, but out of accuracy of reality. The thing is, most of us are losers at some point: imperfect, inadequate, unfair, biased, even a little phony.
My favorite moment in the series is when Joserra meets another loser in one of those impersonal hotel lounges. He is an imitator of Julio Iglesias who invites him to a drink while he sings part of I forgot to live: “Because I wanted to be the first in everything / I forgot to live / The small details.”
