«You’re going to make me cry, damn it!», warned Rui Borges, when the penultimate question of the interview with Sporting TV asked him about the importance of his grandfather Zé, who has already left.
The Leo coach then went back in time, to the times when he was a teenager, to talk about a simple man, a shoemaker, who worked until he was very old and who had a great influence on him.
«I think he’s up there very proud of what his grandson is doing», he began by guaranteeing. «He will always be a very special person to me, because he showed me what it means to value things, and small things.»
After that, Rui Borges explained that there is one of those little things that he never gives up, after so many years, precisely because it reminds him of his grandfather and the way his grandfather loved him.
«I love pomegranates, I eat them every day and luckily here at the Academy I have that possibility. My grandfather never had many possessions, but he had a pomegranate tree at home and he would bring me bags of pomegranates, which was his way of showing that he loved me. We rarely tell our family that we love them and I wish I had told my grandfather more often that I loved him. Maybe because of my adolescence, because of my way of being, I never said it very often,” he said.
«Maybe what my personality is today, what my being is today, has a lot to do with my grandfather, who, when he was very old, put soles on his shoes to earn maybe 500 escudos.»
