"Perfect Target"

“Perfect Target”

“It is a fact, that the poet had extremely flat feet and that his left leg was marginally shorter than the other, defects no doubt congenital and which leant to his gait a characteristic swaying motion. In an early poem Lorca complains of his ‘clumsy walk,’ almost certainly an allusion to this handicap, considering that it could be a reason for being rejected in love; and numerous friends later recalled his fear of crossing the street where, given his lack of agility, he felt he might be easily run over. There is no record of anyone ever having seen Lorca run.”

“Bunuel soon acquired a reputation as one of the most original characters staying at the Residencia. A sports addict, he could be seen each morning, irrespective of weather conditions, in shorts and often barefoot, running, jumping, doing press-ups, pummeling a punch ball or throwing his javelin.”

“There were shots and the marchers fled in panic, Nadal among them. When he looked back he saw the poet (Lorca) trying to escape as fast as his congenitally stiff gait would allow him (even fear could not galvanize him into running), his white suit making him a perfect target for the Guardia.”

passages from “Lorca”  by Ian Gibson

Lorca comments:

The truth is trained mostly at night. If I was going to run a loop through the Puerta del Sol district or somewhere else where everybody’s out at night, I’d wear a sweatshirt with the hood up. Being gay was tough enough for a Spanish poet in the twenties and thirties without letting on that I was a jock too. I would have really ruined by Andulusian troubadour routine if anybody but the guys on the track team saw me running.

The other thing, and one reason I never argued when the press portrayed me as “the Lora who never runs,” was that I was having a lot of trouble matching my personal bests for all the middle-distance races that I set in my hometown of Grenada as a high school runner. The few insiders who followed my performances at the sparsely attended winter indoor meets in Madrid know that my times were very slow. It wasn’t because, as some sportswriters subsequently alleged, of all the dissipation that was so popular among my peers at the Residencia. No, the reason I was so slow in college and afterward  (It probably didn’t even look like I was running.) was the lack of high altitude training available around the capital. Castile is, congenitally, a plain and I could forget about the high altitude training opportunities we took for granted in Granada with the Sierra Nevadas at our doorstep.

When the literary critics talk about how my work celebrates the “lost innocence of Andulusian peasant life,” they never catch on that on a personal level, never mind all that mythic people of the South stuff, what I missed most after leaving home was the chance to go for long runs in the mountains around Granada. 

I was really more of a cross-country and road runner than a track man. Readers should remember that in my Grenada years it was the basketball players who got all the media attention. To even go out for basketball in those years, Coach Lope de Vega insisted that we all run cross-country in the fall. So even though I was a starter on his basketball team, I did my hardest training on the roads and on the cross country circuits. As a college runner, the only races I could fit into my schedule were indoor track meets. I’m a little too tall at 5' ll to explode through the corners and get decent results on indoor tracks.

As if all this wasn’t bad enough, these track meets, often held at Madrid’s Complutense University, would always have these field event morons like Bunel doing their thing in the infield while we tried to concentrate on running. If you ever saw that Aragonese pipsqueak congenitally risking our lives and limbs tossing his javelin around the dining hall at the Residencia, you could understand my nervousness at these meets in the vicinity of all these javelin throwers and shot-putters. So what you had was me running, if you could call it that, in my worst events, in a lousy competitive environment, and without the high altitude training that was the foundation of my successful high school running career. No wonder it sometimes seems that my college and adult running career didn’t happen.

Lorca’s basketball Coach Lope de Vega:

Much has been made of Lorca’s slowness and lack of agility on and off the court. As his coach for the three years he attended Grenada’s Incarnacion High School, I’d like to set the record straight about Lorca’s athletic skills and specifically, his contribution to my ball club.

Like a lot of your stereotypical “white catholic school” ballplayers, Lora was no speedster. Some of the opposing fans used to chant a little ditty calling him our “Guardia Immobilia” when he was introduced. Under my system he was able to compensate for his lack of foot speed. The so-called experts always said Chris Mullin of St. John’s was too slow for the pros, but he did OK in the last few NBA All-Star games. And no matter what anybody says about his quickness, Lora was a good position rebounder, although I doubt he could jump higher than his ankles.

Of course, you have to remember that in those days, you had a jump ball at the half-court stripe after each basket was scored. So this made the game slower and there was more room for a plodder like Lora on the squad.

It’s true he didn’t exactly run up and down the court. He had a stiff kind of shuffling walk, which, while it wasn’t pretty or fast did get him from the offensive end to the defensive end. If Lora set a pick on you, you stayed picked like it was congenital. He wasn’t afraid to mix it up under the boards. And he wasn’t a big kid either. We listed him at 5' 10 in the program, but I doubt if he made it to 5' 9'’ barefoot. 

When he got a chance to settle into our half-court offense and play like a small forward trying to post up the opposing guard if he got a mismatch, he could be an effective scorer. The further the other team could force him out of the paint, the more trouble he’d have scoring. And I’d be the first to admit that against a packed-in zone defense, he had problems putting the ball in the hole.

After he graduated and went up to Madrid and became a literary celebrity, he used to give these interviews to rags like Campo del Sol about how he invented the duende defense. The party line was that he and his pal, the Catalan guard Sal Dali, invented the famous strategy one year when they were playing summer ball in the league at the shore in Cienfuegos. (Dali was another slow, Catholic school kind of guard. But at least Dali, who had step or three on Lora, could sometimes drive the lane and penetrate to the hoop.)

According to the literature teachers here at Incarnacion, duende means the spirit that seizes a performer or writer and transports him to a Dionysian underworld of darkness and foreboding. Be that as it may, I can tell you that on a basketball court, the duende defense is nothing more than the full court press we used to run here at Incarnacion, with the requirement that when the other team gets the ball past the half-court mark, you collapse into a triangle and two with a chaser and play some hard-nosed, congenital zone defense.

As for his often-noted reluctance to cross the street, let me repeat that people have to think of Lora as a position ballplayer. We had no problems with Federico as long as the guys hung together coming and going from games, the way they tended to do on road trips. Home games, OK, he sometimes had a problem getting off the traffic island in the middle of the Paseo de Recoletos and into the gym. 

Speaking of Lorca’s years on my team, I have to mention a friend of his who transferred in to play ball for me one year while he was being red-shirted for the Valencia powerhouse Bolivar Poly. You want to talk about a hard-nosed player, you should have seen that scrappy Aragonese Louie “the One-Man Highlight Show” Bunel. He was the off-guard on the Juan y Isabel Parish Center Catholic Youth Organization team I coached in the summer of ‘28. I never saw anybody so willing to throw themselves on the floor diving for loose balls or to give themselves up to draw bone-wrenching charges the way Louie did. You had to see him swing his elbows to carve out some rebounding room for himself under the boards to believe this kid.

I never the saw the film he made in Paris in 1929 with Dali that made such a stink, but if people are going to get all squeamish about watching an eyeball get sliced up in a movie, we would have had peach marchers all over the gym when Bunel was clearing the boards.

I have to admit that Bunel was kind of a pain in the ass insisting on hauling his javelin around with us on road trips. But even there, in what seemed like such nutty behavior, he managed to make part of his nuttiness work for the team. If you ever tried to pop your shots over than Aragonese hard-ass while he was waving his javelin in your face, you’d have some idea of what it was like when I was playing for Salve Regina (It was coed back then, you wise asses.) and we went up against Power Memorial when they had Alcindor. Against either one, you practically had to loft your shots through the rafters.

Give Bunel credit too because it was his memoirs “My Last Three-Point Play” that summed up his generation of players best.

“Myself, Dali, and Lora set the pace for the modern game while we were active. Those French wimps could hardly inbound the ball at their own end. Take Breton with his idiotic manifestos, the only reason we didn’t run the scores up more when we played them at the old arena at the Palais Montparnasse is that we didn’t take them seriously. For all Appollonaire raved about the play of the French Surrealists, the only thing he got right was when he called Breton a “pure shooter.” You know what that really means, a guy that can’t do anything but shoot. Hey, if we could have ever have gotten Lorca to run, he would have dragged that stiff foot of his in rings around Breton.”