ANDOn January 4, 1931, Alavés visited Real Madrid for the first time in a League match. If that Sunday, with freezing wind and fog, was Miguel Gila Cuesta It is not something that is known. But it is very possible that the future genius of Spanish humor ended up entering Chamartín to see Madrid win thanks to a solitary goal. He marked it Mariano García de la Puerta very close to rest.
Gila was then an 11-year-old boy for whom football was a passion and the streets of Madrid had few secrets. One of them, how to enter the Madrid stadium.
“With Mariano García de la Puerta It was not necessary to wait for the ball to leave the field to enter. When he played, we boys would stand at the entrance and when he arrived, we would shout cheers to him. He said: ‘If the kids don’t come in I won’t play.’ It’s that simple. And no matter how much the club directors begged him, either the boys came in or he didn’t play,” Gila said of a player who marked him for life.
The name of Garcia de la Puerta It is not engraved in golden letters in the history of Madrid. In white he played a single season, in which he did not win anything and scored six goals in a dozen games. He was an elegant striker, with great precision in his finishing, but for whom sweat and effort were negotiable.
Despite not reaching the white fans, to Gila, who played, watched and told a lot of football, the man from Barcelona was unique: “Garcia de la Puerta He has been, without a doubt, although forgotten, the best striker in the history of Spanish football. He did things that no player would be able to do today. If there were twenty minutes left in the game and his team was losing by two goals to zero, García de la Puerta would talk to his managers and say: ‘If they give me thirty duros, I’ll score three goals.’ And he put them in…”
The Betis squad of 1932-33, with García de la Puerta last from left to right in the center row.
The comedian was not speaking from hearsay, because Gila shared more things with the Catalan genius than amateur applause and cheers. “He was an idol because he was not only a phenomenon with the ball at his feet. He was also one of the best trampoline jumpers of the time.. He taught me, in the Triton pool, all those jumps that years later allowed me to win the Castilla diving championship at the Samoa pool in Valladolid, two years in a row,” explained a Gila in life who always carried Madrid in his heart.
Quite a character
Mariano García de la Puertaas José Ignacio Corcuera tells in Football Notebooksdied forgotten and almost destitute. Arrested twice in Republican Madrid, this may have been his passport to life when the guns fell silent.
Nicknamed Wonder Due to his brilliant way of playing football, the Barcelona native belongs to that class of indomitable footballers. He left unique, amazing details, but there were more of his scares and disappearances.
Plaque on the house where Gila grew up, on Zurbano street in Madrid..
In his career he wore the shirts of Murcia, Madrid, Betis, Nacional Cantabria, Ferroviaria and Mallorca. And also that of Barcelona. With his hometown team he played in two friendlies in May 1934, against the Austrians of the Wiener. It was just a reinforcement to complete the team.
For every place he passed, Wonder left samples of his skills on a field of game. But also endless acts of indiscipline and anecdotes. Maybe it was Betis the team that enjoyed it the most. And there he left a story that spread from mouth to mouth, from tavern to tavern.
The flying pig on the train
After a match in the capital against Madrid AthleticGarcía de la Puerta barely managed to catch the train back to Seville. To the perplexity of teammates, coach and managers, he showed up with a bag in which he was carrying a piglet weighing about twenty kilos. He put it under the seat, but one of his companions, Francisco González,Paquirrifreed him. And the world cup was set up.
Screams, laughter, scandal. The conductor and his emergency team had to intervene. O’Connell, Betis coach, and the green and white managers tried to give explanations until Mariano He recovered his animal after several attempts.
The conductor told him that he was going to fine him and that he had to hand over the pig immediately. The Betic man responded that nothing of the sort, that the suckling pig was his and that it was meat from the tapas of a baptism that he was going to organize in the Arenal Gate.
None of them gave in, but in the blink of an eye, García de la Puerta opened a window and threw the animal out shouting “I’ll wait for you in Seville!”. Everyone who saw the scene could not believe what they had just seen.
With Madrid, forgotten and Cruyff
Wonder He played 27 games with the Madrid shirt, 16 of them official. In them he scored 10 goals. The last one was signed on May 31, 1931, for Betis. It was the quarterfinals of the Cup and that 1-0 could not beat the 3-0 in Seville.
There are those who place the death of Garcia de la Puerta on June 17, 1983, in Old Apiary. There are traces of him in a nursing home in that Madrid town in the mid-1970s. It is not clear that his death occurred there. What is certain is that after being a soccer star he ended up in almost absolute poverty. And forgotten. There are no references to the disappearance of an old man who watched Cruyff and I didn’t think I was better than he was.
