Obituaries have been used since the nineteenth century to reflect on the achievements of sportsmen, sportswomen, and their place in the sporting pantheon. In a refreshing departure, this book edited by Pablo Ariel Scharagrodsky and César R. Torres goes further by analyzing the deaths of seven Argentine sportsmen through media coverage of not just their careers but also the funerals and rituals associated with them and how the narratives about their deaths reflected Argentine society at the time and during the succeeding years.Acknowledging the narrowness of sports and gender represented in the book (they are all men), Scharagrodsky and Torres argue that the case studies of Jorge Newbery (1875–1914), Justo Suárez (1909–1938), José María Gatica (1925–1963), Juan Gálvez (1916–1963), Oscar Bonavena (1942–1995), Carlos Monzón (1942–1995) and Diego Maradona (1960–2020) stand out more than others through the ways their deaths impacted the national consciousness.Scharagrodsky begins by analyzing the death of the privileged aviator Newbery, which, he writes, was the first time that elites of the sporting establishment attended a funeral of such magnitude, cementing his status as the “first Argentine sportsman” (33). He notes, “From the twenties and thirties, new figures, with different social and cultural origins, engrossed the Argentine sports pantheon, rivaling his place in terms of recognition, prestige or popularity” (67).Scharagrodsky also investigates the coverage of the death of Suárez, whom he positions as the “first popular Argentine sporting idol” (69). The boxer's funeral was a far more parochial event. It focused on the local identity of his home barrio of Mataderos. Most press obituaries focused on Suárez's perceived criollo traits of courage, integrity, and daring in the ring, “turning him into a national hero” and enabling his social ascent (100). Scharagrodsky concludes that Suárez “expressed and condensed meanings and tensions of the social fabric” beyond the ring, making him such a socially important figure (100).In chapter 3, Daniel Sazbón explores the overt link between sport and politics in the career of Gatica and the Peronist movement in the 1940s and 1950s. Through his courage in the ring and titles won, Gatica was reported to be the physical embodiment of Perón's “New Argentina.” With the shift in Argentine politics, by the time of his death, with Perón in exile, his reputation was revised as he squandered the fortune earned from boxing. Despite this he retained huge popular appeal, as witnessed by the multitudes that attended his funeral.In the fourth chapter, David Sheinin interrogates the decline in the popular imaginary over time through the case study of racing driver Gálvez, who died in a race accident while at the peak of his career, having won nine touring car championships. Despite a crowd of one hundred thousand accompanying Gálvez's funeral cortege to Chacarita cemetery, Sheinin argues that the modernizing nature of motor racing during the 1960s and 1970s, as it became commercial and races moved to enclosed autodromes, meant that Gálvez was viewed as something of an anachronism: “Fans remembered Gálvez with a mixture of admirable nostalgia and statistical disbelief for his many victories” (129).In chapter 5, Scharagrodsky and Torres examine shifting ideas about masculinity in the 1960s and 1970s through the death of Bonavena, whose impressive career ran alongside a chaotic personal life. These were highlighted in the press as a “set of problematisations” in which, on the one hand, Bonavena was a virile model “synonymous with success, recognition, celebration and social ascension,” while opponents held that he “was not the model of an Argentine man to follow” (184–85).Jonathan Palla follows up with the study of Monzón. As one of the greatest Argentine boxers ever, but with a history of domestic violence, including killing his wife, Alicia Muñiz, Palla writes that Argentines questioned the morality of their sporting celebrities: “The press, and other mass media, reported his tragic end copiously, summoning actors from the sports and intellectual fields to build his complex post-mortem biography” (207).The final two chapters deal with the death of Maradona, arguably the most iconic Argentine sportsperson of all time. In the first, Verónica Moreira and Leandro Maseda assess the impact of the footballer's death inside Argentina. Initial press reporting of “the death of God” confirmed the feeling that, in Argentina, Maradona had been transformed into a deity (220). Later, media outlets devoted hours of coverage to debating his legacy as an “imperfect hero” (223), his footballing achievements tempered by the excesses of his personal life which contributed to drug bans.Thousands of Argentines poured onto the streets of Buenos Aires mourning Maradona's passing, despite the country being in the grip of stringent COVID-19 restrictions. Maradona's body lay in state at the presidential palace with the queue of fans waiting to file past his coffin stretching for three kilometers. It was the most impressive expression of public grief since the 1952 death of Eva Perón. When the sheer volume of people waiting to file past Maradona's coffin could not be accommodated, violence broke out and the crowd had to be dispersed by police firing tear gas. As the authors conclude, “It could not be any other way: chaotic, massive, popular and full of controversies, like Maradona in life” (229).In the second chapter on Maradona's death, Pablo Alabarces reflects on the impact across the Atlantic in the city of Naples, where Maradona played between 1984 and 1991. During that time, he transformed Napoli from also-rans to winners of their first league titles. Maradona was revered as the man who broke the northern domination of Italian football in a country where the socioeconomic divide between north and south favors the north. As Alabarces asserts, “On the day of Diego's death, the Neapolitans shuddered as if Vesuvius had erupted. The lights of the San Paolo stadium remained on all night, to illuminate the thousands of people who made the pilgrimage to commemorate him” (250).The writers are to be commended for bypassing, with the exception of the iconic Maradona, the well-worn path of using football to explain sport's role in shaping and reflecting Argentine society.
Mark Orton (Thu,) studied this question.