Jose Sanfilippo
Argentine Primera División Top-scorer (4 times): 1958 (28 goals), 1959 (31 goals), 1960 (34 goals), 1961 (26 goals)
Copa América Top-scorer: 1959
Copa Libertadores Top-scorer: 1963 (7 goals)
1957–1962 Argentina 29 (21 goals)
EDUARDO GALEANO “Soccer in Sun and Shadow”
Dear Eduardo,
I’ve got to tell you about this. The other day I went to the Carrefour supermarket, the one built where San Lorenzo used to play. I was with my childhood hero Jose Sanfilippo, who was San Lorenzo’s leading scorer four seasons in a row. There we were, walking among the shopping carts, surrounded by pots and pans and cheese and strings of sausage. All of a sudden, as we head for the checkout, Sanfilippo opens his arms and says “to think that it was right here where I rammed it in on Roma with a half-volley in that match against Boca.” He walks in front of a housewife pushing a cart filled to the brim with cans, steaks and vegetables and he says “It was the fastest goal in history”.
He concentrates, as if he were waiting for a corner kick, and he says to me “I told the centre-half, a young fellow, as soon as the ball is in play send it to me in the box. Don’t worry, I won’t make you look bad. I was older and this kid, Capdevilla was his name, was scared, thinking “what if I don’t come through?’ And then Sanfilippo points to a stack of mayonnaise jars and screams “He put it right here!” People are looking at us like we’re nuts. “The ball came down behind the halfbacks, I stumbled but it landed ahead of me there where the rice is, see?” He points to the bottom shelf, and all of a sudden he starts running like a rabbit in spite of his blue suit and shiny shoes. “I let it bounce and boom!” He swings his left leg in a tremendous kick. We all spin around to look at the checkout, where the goal sat thirty odd years ago, and it’s as if we all see the ball hit the net up high, right by the batteries and the razor blades. Sanfilippo raises his arms to celebrate. The shoppers and the checkout girls pound their hands applauding. I’m practically in tears. “Baby” Sanfilippo scored that goal from 1962 all over again, just so I could see it.
-Osvaldo Soriano
JONATHAN WILSON “Angels with Dirty Faces”
I met José Sanfilippo in a café in Caballito, the geographical center of Buenos Aires, but he refused a coffee, insisting on orange juice. “I only drink coffee before noon,” he said, his tone making clear this was a moral as much as a medical decision. Keeping in shape was an obsession for him, and he was scathing of soccer players who drink or smoke. “I don’t eat pastries,” he said. “I take care of my liver. For me, diet was important when I was a player, but nobody listened to me. I’m a self-programmed man, I do the same things every day. I’m like an Englishman . . . like the English buses.¹ . . . And it’s got to be that way. My teammates wouldn’t understand that. After training sessions, they’d disappear, and I’d stay.” Sanfilippo has a reputation as a difficult, awkward man, a television pundit who pulls no punches. It’s fair to say that he places a high value on his opinions.
As we were sitting down, he asked how long I’d been working as a soccer writer and professed outrage that didn’t seem entirely feigned when I told him. “Fourteen years trying to understand the history of soccer, and you only come to see me now?” he protested. He would argue that he simply demands high standards from everybody, from nobody more than himself, his commitment to self- improvement having made him the fifth-most prolific striker in Argentinian history, scoring 200 goals in 260 appearances for San Lorenzo and 21 in 29 for the national side. “I invented the Sanfigol,” he said, “a big cage with a wall the size of a goal that I’d use for practicing, divided into squares of eighty centimeters [thirty inches] by eighty centimeters. The most important corners were the lower ones, la ratonera, the mouse’s nest. Practicing every day was fundamental.
Hitting the lower corners is safer than the upper corners, but you need to hone your precision because you’re giving twenty-one feet to the goalkeeper. So I’d need to know how to aim and hit those lower corners, from every position.” He was seventy-nine when I met him and clearly proud of the fact that he can pass for much younger. At one point he jokingly strangled me, and as his hands closed around my windpipe and didn’t immediately release, I had a momentary panic that he might just keep squeezing and that, if he did, I probably wouldn’t be able to fight him off. With his obviously dyed hair and signet ring on with his initials marked out with diamonds, he had the air of an aging don from a Scorsese film.
The most remarkable aspect of his appearance, though, was his fingernails, which were highly polished, the tips long, white, and square at the corners. The fashion is not uncommon among Argentinians of his generation who come from a working- class background but have made good: having manicured nails shows they no longer have to labor with their hands. Sanfilippo grew up twenty-two blocks from San Lorenzo’s stadium in Boedo, a working-class area noted for its influence over the tango and, in the 1920s, the home of a group of left-wing Argentinian and Uruguayan writers. He was a fan and dreamed of playing for the team, although for him glory was only a partial consideration. “I had humble origins,” he said. “I knew that I was the only one who could drag my family away from that, and I needed to get better in order to do it.” And so he practiced relentlessly, even before inventing his Sanfigol. “When you don’t have an impressive physique, you must develop other skills. I started practicing with a ball a little bigger than a tennis ball, made of plastic and rubber. And I’d use the curb to practice one- twos. I started when I was six, and I did it until I was twenty.” He de- mands similar dedication today from those around him.
One of his sons, he said proudly, had qualified as a plastic surgeon, the other was an accountant, while his wife had just passed her law exams. “In the house of Sanfilippo,” he said, “nobody rests.” He was eighteen when he signed his first professional contract with San Lorenzo in 1953, but he’d been training at the club for sev- eral years before that. The days of el Ciclón may have passed, but they were still a team that finished regularly in the top six. “San Lorenzo had an established style,” Sanfilippo said. “And I did what many people don’t. When I was sixteen, I played with the seniors.” Even before the disgrace of Helsingborg, Sanfilippo was preaching a doctrine of abstinence and self-improvement quite out of keeping with the bohemian ideals of the golden age. “Of all the managers I had, nobody taught me anything,” he insisted. “I learned everything by myself. I only needed the ball on the ground. That was my only condition: crosses or passes, but don’t send me high balls—I knew where my strength lay.” At first San Lorenzo weren’t a side that challenged for titles, but by the late fifties they were improving. Sanfilippo finished top scorer in the Primera four seasons in a row between 1958 and 1961, and, after finishing second in 1957 and 1958, San Lorenzo finally won the title for their fourth time in the professional era in 1959, Sanfilippo scoring thirty-one times. By then he’d pared his game back to the essentials. “Many wondered why I never picked up injuries,” he said. “It’s because I’d never get the ball and try to go past you. My business was shooting, receiving the ball in space, and knowing in advance what I had to do. I would always have two different ways of resolving a situation in mind so I didn’t have to think. Dribbling is only necessary when you feel that you’re surrounded.”
His league form may have been disappointing, but Sanfilippo thrived in the continental competition, scoring a hat trick away to Universidad de Chile to see them through the group and netting again in the home leg of the semifinal, as Boca ousted Peñarol. In the final Boca met the defending champions, Santos, which had crushed Botafogo 1–0 and 4–1 in their semifinal. “We were going to lose it anyway because they were the best team of the moment,” said Marzolini, “and it was like the Maracanã was 200 meters long and 100 meters wide. It was the best against the best, and the best among the best was Pelé’s Santos.” Sanfilippo’s sharpness brought him three goals over the two legs, but it was not enough, Santos winning 3–2 in São Paulo and 2–1 at la Bombonera. Boca ended that season joint third, and there had been signs, in the Libertadores in particular, that Sanfilippo was beginning to come to terms with his role on the side. His time at the club, though, was drawing to a close.
In March 1964 Boca faced San Lorenzo in the Copa Jorge Newbury, a preseason tournament. Sanfilippo, understandably, was desperate to play against his former club, but he was left on the bench by the coach, Aristóbulo Deambrossi, a forward on River’s la Máquina side. The regulations stipulated that substitutions could be made, but only in the first half in the event of an injury (which was easy enough to feign if required). “I was the goal scorer,” said Sanfilippo, “the one who’d scored against all the big teams in the Libertadores. San Lorenzo were one point ahead at the top of the table, so if we beat them, we’d be champions.” He felt he should have been on the field, and shortly before half- time, realizing that if he was going to come on it would have to be soon, Sanfilippo asked Deambrossi how long there was to go. “‘Four minutes,’ he says. And I was thinking, ‘feck this guy.’ The whole stadium was singing my name.” Sanfilippo still thought he was coming on. “Nothing. End of the first half, nothing. He starts going to the center of the field, and I run in his direction, chasing him. ‘Why did you do that?’ I asked. ‘Because managers can do whatever they like.’ And that was it. Pim! I knocked him down. And while he was on the floor, I said to him, ‘You’ll be able to say that you didn’t bring on the great goal scorer Sanfilippo, but you’ll also have to talk about that punch.’
And that’s why I had to leave for Nacional of Montevideo.” It wasn’t only that. He also abused Adolfo Pedernera, then Deam- brossi’s assistant, and condemned the decision to leave him off the side as “a whim.” Few of his teammates were disappointed when Armando backed the coaching staff and decided Sanfilippo had to be sold.
“In the history of soccer,” said the usually genial Marzolini, “there have been three truly great players—Pelé, Maradona, and Messi—but only one great hijo da puta: Sanfilippo.” However good a finisher he was, it can hardly be denied that Boca prospered without Sanfilippo. Boca won the title in 1964, conceding just fifteen goals in thirty games—only six in their final twenty- five—and scoring a mere thirty-five. A year later, playing in a slightly more adventurous way—fifty-five scored, thirty conceded—they retained their crown.
Interview with El Grafico
Who was your teacher, your counselor?
My old man, Horacio. He was a great soccer player, he did not become a professional, among other things because he could not wear booties, he was not used to it, so he started the matches at Bajo Flores, he took them out and threw them outside, he ended up playing barefoot, and he watched here he went crazy, huh. I remember as if it were today, when I was 10 years old, he came home one day and said: "I have something for you". It was a pair of soccer boots. "I do not want what happened to me to happen to you, because I can not use the booties I did not continue in football," he told me. Another one who taught me was René Pontoni, whom I had as coach and partner. He had 5 operations on the knee but a quality to leave the dead ball for you to kick, a crack. Pontoni told me not to always define myself, that sometimes I would see a better placed partner, but I did not do it selfishly, it was so much the confidence that I had, I trusted more in me than in anyone, that's why I kicked. And some goals I did, hey!
What do you remember about the day you fractured it in Nacional?
It was a friendly against Vasco da Gama. The Brazilian Zezé Moreira was the coach of Nacional and had put together a defensive plan with which he became champion. Then they hired me, we went to play in Europe, and in 19 games I scored 14 goals. We arrived here and they took me to the monument of Artigas, a mess of the people, but of course, the team did not win by Zezé Moreira, but by Sanfilippo, then the guy started to jealousy and put me in a friendly against Vasco da Gama and one Fontana, who had already wanted to break Pele, got me a tremendous shot when I was about to kick and broke my tibia and fibula. That was Zezé Moreira.
If he was so good, why did not he play in Europe?
That is a bullshit bigger than a house. I got tired of scoring goals in Europe when I went with San Lorenzo, with Boca, with the National Team. I was close to going to Real Madrid in 1960. In those years, Spain came to play against Argentina and we won 2-0 with two goals from me. I wanted to warm Di Stéfano so he did not tuck us in, then I started shouting at Hacha Brava Navarro: "Hit Di Stéfano, who is a figure there because the Galicians have round feet", ha ha. Di Stéfano was the one who had to give me the okay to buy me, but after those words of mine he did not give it and I stayed here. The following week we played against Uruguay: we won 4-0 and I scored three goals.
Of those you saw, which scorer was better than you?
Puskas, a phenomenon. Di Stéfano defined very well, eh ... And Messi, who does many things that I did, could tell you that he is even better than me. At the time, I grabbed the ball in the middle of the court and went to the opponent's goal, it did not stop, while the stadium stopped, but I must admit that this kid passed all the limits.
The defender who best marked him.
Jorge Bernardo Griffa.
And the one who hit him the most.
Roberto Rogel, a bloodthirsty.
Why did the fight with Maradona start?
Because in a note they asked me who had been better, if Pelé or Maradona, and I answered that Pele, giving an explanation of what had been more complete, and then Maradona called me "vendepatria". As at that time I was Undersecretary of Sports of the City of Buenos Aires, people asked me if it had to do with my function, then I got fed up and I made a judgment. I earned it and Diego could not leave the country if I did not raise it, because it came from other previous judgments against. Then I picked it up and he thanked me publicly, but for Maradona it would have been easier to give me a million dollars than to have to apologize publicly.
http://www.elgrafico.com.ar/2015/05...r-que-yo-este-pibe-paso-todos-los-limites.php
I'm also largely describing 60s Abbadie the RM and not the 50s winger you must be sporting.