Love, fear and desire – Unravelling the primal emotions that make the genius of Luis Suarez tick
Luis Suárez with his son Benjamin and daughter Delfina
That venerable old institution, the Oxford English Dictionary, defines fear as “An unpleasant emotion caused by the belief that someone or something is dangerous, likely to cause pain, or a threat.”
We all feel fear. And there is, of course, no greater fear than that of not being able to survive – of dying. But for those of us human beings who have a reasonable assurance of such things, fear can transcend these primal survivalist tendencies and become an obsession that shapes our very lives. Especially when it involves the idea of losing that what we love the most.
Luis Suárez is driven by this most obsessively terrifying of fears – the fear that somehow he may be thrown out of the world he has struggled his entire life to get into, back into a life of abject poverty and broken homes; the fear that he will lose that what he never had – the love of his family.
The world’s oldest and greatest motivator – Love
Suárez had a tough childhood – an upbringing which straddled that most cruel partnership of poverty and a broken family. His father had abandoned him when he was young, and his mother used to scrape together a living for the two by scrubbing floors at several houses.
As a young boy he worked as a street sweeper to help his mother in their dreary ordeal of survival, and at the time, the only people he could call family (apart from her) had been the youth team of the great Club Nacional de Football. At the club though, Suárez frustrated his coaches – despite his prodigious talent, there was no dedication. In all senses of the word, the kid was a slacker.
He was frequently pulled up by his coaches, even had one pull him out of bed as he was late for practice, but all that seemed to have little effect. A struggling backs-to-the wall, hands-to-the-floor existence beckoned.
Then, he met a girl. And he fell in love.
Sofia Balbi, the young girl he was in love with, lived a life that Suárez had only known in his dreams – a comfortable one. She admonished, cajoled and convinced him that he was meant for greater things, if only he would apply himself. So he did just that.
With Sofia behind him, and his resulting newfound commitment, the rise of Suárez was as spectacular as it was inevitable. The Balbi family’s decision to uproot and shift to Spain, though, nearly sent the young kid into depression. A month after they left, in November 2003, Suárez got into his first big controversy. Unhappy with referee Luis Larranga’s decision (a wrong one by most accounts) to caution him for a tackle, he got into the referee’s face.
Quite literally. Two seconds of madness later, Larranga was on the ground, nose bleeding “like a cow” (as an eyewitness recounted later). Reportedly, Suarez had head-butted the ref when he (the ref) drew out a red card to dismiss Suárez for dissent/abuse.
It was the biggest match of his young life, and he felt the ref was unfairly denying him his ticket to the senior team – his ticket to success and to Sofia. So he lashed out. And just then, the unsuspecting world had an early glimpse into the overwhelming desire to win (and accompanying bouts of madness) that would consume every fibre of his being and turn him into the Luis Suárez we now know him as.
F.C. Groningen – the gateway to Europe and Suárez’s dreams
Knowing that the pennies he made sweeping the streets of Montevideo would never get him close to the love of his life, Suarez buckled down and dedicated every waking minute to the only career that would conceivably get him to Europe, to Sofia – football.
As he and the people watching him found, he was rather good at the art of kicking a ball around, and one day a scout from Dutch club FC Groningen watched him demolish Defensor single-handedly. The scout had been there to watch another player, but Suárez, like he does so often these days, had stolen the show.
When approached with an offer, Suárez immediately accepted – not for the money, or the fame, or the glamour. He accepted because it was going to get him to Europe, to Sofia.
Suarez faced tremendous difficulty in adjusting to life in the Netherlands, but he wasn’t going to give up after he had got so close to his dreams – he wasn’t going back to the streets of Montevideo. His prodigious talent shone through soon enough, and attracted the interest of that most legendary of clubs, Ajax Amsterdam.
After a touch of the now familiar ‘Suárez drama’, the deal was sealed. Two years later, he would become captain of Ajax, the leading scorer in the Eredivise and be voted the Footballer of the Year in the Dutch League. He had arrived at the big stage.
Those weren’t his biggest successes though, for that year (2009), he would marry his childhood sweetheart. Sofia Balbi was now Sofia Suárez.