Ivan, his host, has received nine secrets from the Virgin that he has never shared. He says he sees Mary every day. She has rosy cheeks, blue eyes, and an oval face. She wears a gray dress. Most people come to have their mind, body, or spirit healed. The visionary wouldn’t reveal the reason for Messi’s pilgrimage, so we’re left to wonder. What is broken inside Messi that he wanted to fix? What can’t he buy with his millions or his fame? Of course, it’s possible he just thought it might be a cool scene to check out. Maybe the visionary made up the whole thing. Maybe the paper did, or papers, plural, since the news appeared in multiple places, in multiple languages. Maybe we believe it because we want there to be unseen layers of Messi. We want there to be an explanation for his miracles even if we never hear the explanation ourselves. Just knowing it exists would be enough. That’s certainly why I was in Rosario, driving around, knocking on doors.
YOU CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN . . . RIGHT?
Late one afternoon, we saw three young men hanging outside Messi’s old house. A sleek black Audi sports car with limo-tinted windows sat parked on the sidewalk. Paul and I walked over to them.
“How fast does it go?” I asked, nodding at the car.
“Two hundred and something,” Matias Messi said.
Matias, the middle brother, looked like a professional footballer: tracksuit; rakish beard; spiky, gelled hair; big diamonds hanging off each ear. He resembled Cristiano Ronaldo more than Leo. It’s his job to manage VIP. Next to him was Rodrigo Messi, the oldest, who usually lives in Spain. He wore a hoodie pulled up over his head. The third guy was their cousin, whose mom we left messages for. The whole scene was bizarre. Even though they have other places to be, they have returned to hang out at their old home. Not in the home, just on the street outside. An hour or so ago, Barcelona had finished a game in Spain.
“Two goals from Messi,” Matias said.
That’s what he called him. Not Leo, or “my brother.” Messi. Matias did most of the talking, while Rodrigo and the cousin picked on each other like children.
“What are you looking at?”
“No, I am just looking at you, you idiot, I’ll break your head.”
“No, you idiot, I’m going to hit you, seriously.”
The only time the others really engaged was when Paul mentioned Ronaldo, the flamboyant striker for Real Madrid and Messi’s main rival.
“That’s a bad word around here,” Rodrigo said. “Ronaldo here is a bad word.”
“Excuse me,” Paul said.
“Watch out with that,” Rodrigo said.
“I understand,” Paul said.
“That’s right,” Matias said, laughing. “I don’t know another that’s so vain like that.”
They described the house as the emotional center of a scattered family, and when the brothers looked up at the peeling paint, Matias muttered a Spanish expression that translates as, roughly, “this piece of shit.” In the years since Leo moved to Spain, Matias said, the tangible pieces of home have become more important to Messi than to the family members who never left. This house, and especially his aunt’s house, which Matias describes as a “refuge” for his brother, the big Sunday meals with the family, even the teammates he’s known since childhood—Leo longs for these things when he’s away. He’s trying to fill a hole, this boy who was born in Argentina and came of age in Spain. He never liked robots or toy cars, just kicking a ball. He traded his childhood for the game he now plays with a childish joy. Growing up in Rosario might not have shaped him, but leaving it certainly did.
“What would happen if you sold the house and didn’t tell Leo?” I asked.
“No,” Matias said emphatically. “Because, you know, we were all brought up here. We grew up here. For this more than anything else, we still have it.”
A CONSTRUCTION PROJECT
Messi keeps returning to Rosario, pulled by obligation, to be sure, but likely by something else too. He works at maintaining connections to his hometown. It starts with the way he talks. I grew up in Mississippi, but as I moved around, I left the guts of my Southern accent in the Midwest. Paul’s Irish lilt has been blunted by time and distance. But Leo never lost the very specific Rosarino accent, and he’s lived in Spain almost as long as he lived in Argentina. That’s a choice.
After an injury, when he needed a month of rehab, he came here to do it. And though tabloids once connected him to one supermodel after another—he’s not so childlike that he doesn’t know how to do that—he has settled down with a girl he knew growing up. Her family knows his family, and vice versa, and she is now pregnant with his first child, due in October. Newell’s has already made plans to present the child with a special club membership card.
His long public feud with his old club, and the club’s with him, is ending. He funded a new gym and the construction of a dorm inside the stadium to house youth players. Two days before it opened, I walked through the bowels beneath the grandstands, surrounded by the buzz of saws and the echo of hammers, creating the same sort of academy where he trained in Spain. Maybe, if it’s done right, some future boy with talent won’t have to move across the ocean alone. Five months ago, the club added two small framed photos of Messi in the café beneath the stadium, one of him as an adult with his arm around Maradona, the other in his Machine of ’87 uniform, his eyes focused on the ball, which is actually bigger than his head. A month later, in the lobby of its office, Newell’s added a picture of Messi, next to one of Maradona. This season, for the first time, a group of fans brought a Messi banner to home games. We arrived in the midst of a change, and I wondered what someone repeating my journey in five years might find.
Even in the Barcelona locker room, his mind is often in Rosario. After a recent game—the one we watched at VIP—Messi’s former doctor, Diego Schwarzstein, texted him. He sent the message soon after the whistle. Ten minutes later, Messi replied. All these things, and the many more I could cite, are the actions of a man searching for something. Whatever his motivation, Messi is actively building a relationship between himself and the city that was, for so long, his hometown in name only. It goes beyond simply returning. He is creating roots.
He’s kept the same friends. He’s kept his old house, which Ramírez confirmed is in the family because of Messi. “Lionel does not want to sell it,” he said. “As some kind of memory, he wants to keep it.”
He keeps coming back, even when it’s inconvenient. A while back, Ramírez told us, Messi and the Argentine national team were training at the team’s facility near the Buenos Aires airport. Practice finished one night at six, and Messi got straight into a car and rode three hours to Rosario. He had dinner with his family, went to sleep, and got up the next morning and rode back to Buenos Aires in time to step onto the field.
“Why does he do it?” I asked his old doctor.
We sat in Schwarzstein’s office, where he’d just read me the text messages from the day before. He paused, searching for the right English words, speaking in English, trying to articulate an idea about Messi and the reasons he returns home.
“It was very hard for him, leaving Rosario,” he said finally. “He suffered a lot.”
There it is, at last, beneath a lot of layers: the familiar sight of cause and effect. Something about the pain of Messi losing his childhood seems to make him always be looking for it—or even still living it—whether he’s got a ball at his feet in a packed stadium, or visiting the town where that childhood was lost. I read an interview not long ago with Bruce Springsteen where he said he spent years driving past the house where he grew up, night after night, and a psychologist told him he was trying to go back in time to change the things that happened in that house. Does Messi come back to Rosario because it’s normal for someone to miss his family, or is he subconsciously trying to change something about his past, or is he simply stuck at age 13?
FOREVER YOUNG
Past 1 in the morning, at t
he end of our trip, we crowded around a table in a dark corner of a Rosario hotel. It felt like Havana, haunted by a sort of faded gentility. Juan Cruz Leguizamon sat with us. We’d been talking for almost three hours. It was late.
“What do you think Leo is scared of?” I asked.
“To leave football,” he said.
“I can’t imagine a 50-year-old Messi,” I said.
“The truth is,” his close friend said, “me neither.”
HOME AGAIN
Leaving town, Paul put on a Pogues record. He sang along, thinking of home, and I looked out the window at the roadside stands selling oranges and trucker food. Route 9 parallels the gently meandering Paraná River, which irrigates endless rows of green soybeans. Pastures of cattle stretched to the sky. This is the road that took Messi away when he was a shy, homesick boy and the one that brings him back now that he’s a star. Flags flapped in the wind. Old women hawked produce. Sheet metal windmills pumped water, and I pictured the 13-year-old Messi making this drive with his father. Everything about the exterior of his life changed after that moment, at first for the worse, later for the better, but we can never know what happened inside. We settle for glimpses, like Messi retracing that long-ago drive, three hours each way to spend a fleeting night, chasing the things he lost on this road.
OCTOBER 2012
The Last Ride of Bear and Billy
Thirty years after Coach Bryant’s last season at Alabama, the man who knew him best struggles to remember.
TUSCALOOSA, ALA.—Each rising sun takes a little more from the couple who live in the small brick home southwest of downtown. Something important is being lost. Billy Varner has been married to Susie for 57 years, and as her life was once spent waiting on him to get home from a job that didn’t know hours or days off, now it’s spent managing his dementia. Each day brings its own reality. On the worst, Billy, who is 76, doesn’t recognize Susie. He’ll dress in the middle of the night and try to leave, his pajamas rolled up in his hand. Regularly, he refuses to believe that his old boss isn’t at home waiting for a ride. Billy was Bear Bryant’s driver, bodyguard, and valet, one of the few remaining people who knew him as a human being. As Billy’s memory fades, that knowledge disappears with it, widening the gulf between truth and imagination.
Billy tells Susie that he talks to the coach. Sometimes Bryant visits.
“Coach Bryant isn’t dead,” he’ll say. “Don’t tell me he’s dead.”
“Billy,” Susie tells him, “yes, he is.”
* * *
—
Bear Bryant surrounded himself with people he could trust, and he trusted nobody more than Billy Varner, a tough, barrel-chested African American. Billy was always just around, in the office, on the road, on the sidelines. Over the years, various accounts have given him different titles, but essentially, he was a fixer. He took care of business, and he kept everything to himself, even after Bryant died.
“We knew he’d been offered a lot of money to write a book or help make a movie,” says Linda Knowles, Bryant’s longtime secretary, “and he would have none of that. And no one knew Coach Bryant better than Billy. Even Mrs. Bryant didn’t know him as well as Billy did. He was with him almost 24 hours a day.”
Billy picked him up in the morning. He dropped him off at night. Sometimes they talked. Sometimes they didn’t. Often, Coach read the paper aloud. Once, when a state trooper clocked Varner speeding, Bryant stuck his houndstooth hat in the back window. The patrolman understood and backed off. Billy saw him weak and insecure. He drove him to Birmingham one year before Christmas because Bryant got a letter from a sick girl and he wanted to surprise her. He saw him cry. When Paul took his grandson fishing, Billy came along.
Varner never felt comfortable enough to strike up conversations with Bryant, but he could poke at the Legend of the Bear. Driving through Mississippi one night, they stopped at a catfish house. Bryant bought seafood dinners for everyone there, and Billy cracked later, “It was like you were handing out loaves and fishes.” At the end, when Bryant was sicker than anyone knew, Billy heard the private coughs.
The roots of this bond, like many things with Bryant, are full of mystery, myth, and misinformation. Earlier this month, a retired Alabama assistant coach sat at his kitchen table and gauged how much he could reveal.
“What do you know about the story where Coach Bryant and Billy met?” Jack Rutledge asked carefully.
Rutledge played for Bryant’s first team and was an assistant on his last, and when he realized that he would be sharing new information, he clammed up.
“Well, we don’t hardly know the details,” he said finally. “It was so quiet.”
The official records show Varner started working for the university police in February 1976, but he’d been around for a decade or more by then, floating in the shadows. “There’s not much really you can talk about Billy,” Rutledge said. “His life is as concealed as Coach Bryant’s life.”
* * *
—
The 1982 Liberty Bowl was to be the last game of Bryant’s career, and when the college football media arrived in Memphis, Tennessee, Billy became, for a brief moment, a reflected celebrity. They hoped that through him they might better understand the coach. A few days before the game, as a television crew interviewed him, Bryant walked by and cracked, “Don’t rush yourself, Billy, I’ll bring the car around.”
They’d known each other for more than 20 years by then. They watched the moon landing together, hung out with Bob Hope together. They reached the end together, sitting in a 14th-floor suite of the Memphis Holiday Inn. Bryant grew reflective. He looked out the window at the river and the bridge to Arkansas, which led eventually to the place where his journey began: a four-room house without electricity or running water. He poured a drink and chatted with guests. As always, Varner stood in the background. After an hour and a half, Bryant, looking tired and old, walked into his bedroom. He said he had to rest. Billy was worried. “I just don’t know what’s going to happen to him,” Varner told a reporter. “He won’t make it without coaching.”
After the game, on December 30, Varner drove Bryant back to Tuscaloosa. They made small talk in the car, nothing about the life’s work that had just ended. Twenty-eight days later, on a Tuesday night, Billy’s phone rang. Coach was at Jimmy Hinton’s house and didn’t feel well. Varner drove over, helped get Bryant to the hospital.
The next morning, on January 26, Varner ran errands, taking Bryant’s daughter to the hospital and dropping off a to-do list at the office for Knowles. Billy told her not to worry about Coach. He’d eaten some sausage, and it upset his stomach is all. In his hospital room, Bryant was joking with the nurses.
Knowles began canceling the next two weeks of Coach’s schedule. Varner went home to rest, and that’s where he was when the phone rang again. He rushed back to the hospital, and when he saw the look on the team trainer’s face, he knew. Bear Bryant had died, and as the news went out on the radio—the man’s voice cracked when he said, “Ladies and gentlemen . . .”—Varner stood in the hallway of the Druid City Hospital with nowhere to go.
The local paper interviewed him, and Billy cried. “He could eat pheasant under glass with the president,” he said, “or he could eat cheese and crackers with the boys out by the caddie shack, and he’d enjoy it all just the same. That’s the man I’ll always remember.”
He took a month off, trying to figure out how Coach Bryant would tell him to deal with his grief. When he came back, he was a regular campus policeman. They put him on night traffic, and that first winter, he caught pneumonia. He worked security at games, no longer inside the circle. In 1996, 14 years after Bryant died, he retired from the University of Alabama Police Department. He never talked about the private things he’d seen. The director of the Bryant Museum approached him about writing a book. Varner told him no.
* * *
—
Sus
ie Varner answers the door. Billy is asleep.
The living room takes up the front of the house, with a television at one end and, on the wall, a poem about footsteps in the sand, which ends with God telling a follower: “The years when you have seen only one set of footprints, my child, is when I carried you.”
It’s lunchtime. The lights are low, and the house sits in cool darkness. Susie is short, 77, with gray hair and a walker she pushes around. Her voice sounds exactly like that of comedienne Wanda Sykes, and Susie, in real life and in the pictures around the house, wears a little smirk, as if she knows something you don’t know.
“Billy had a stroke in 1996,” she says, “right after he retired. Sometimes his mind is clear as a crystal. Sometimes it cloud up and rain.”
She sits down and tells the story her husband can no longer tell. They married right out of high school. She was 19. He was 18. Four years later, Billy was bartending at the Tuscaloosa Country Club. That’s where he met Alabama’s new football coach, and when Varner took the same job at the Indian Hills Country Club, where Bryant lived off the third fairway, they became close. Most afternoons, Bryant would slip into the bar and play cards with friends. When the bar was empty, the two men talked. That led to jobs, bartending at parties and running errands, and by the late 1960s, around the same time the coach traded his brown fedora for a hat with black-and-white checks, Billy began working for Bryant full-time. You want a window into Bear Bryant’s power in the state of Alabama? He got his bartender a badge and a gun.
The Cost of These Dreams Page 15