Waking up with the news that Jose Modesto Darcourt has died confirms my suspicions that the sunrises here are not as gentle anymore, as certain novelist once wrote. A week ago Santy Feliu left us, and now another tough lefty, that from his songs, this from the box on which he was great, despite being called “Chiqui”.
I feel that, no matter how much soup we eat with a fork, we’re running out tough guys, in the most virile sense of the term. Instead, we have to deal increasingly with legions of cheap tough guys that denigrate the lineage of those players who, like Isasi said, left the soul on the field, or the skin on it, and one of the last tough guys, Carlos Tabares, still does.
Darcourt, victim of cancer at 56, was and will be one of those tough guys we are missing in the game. Intense pitcher, of difficult personality, I remember him wearing the jersey of Metropolitanos and Ciudad Habana in those unforgettable Selectiva championships. Just 12 seasons were enough to carve him out a reputation of “a redoubtable man”, imperfect but courageous, who finished disenchanted of baseball, or rather, of those who directed it.
In popular memory remains a game against Serranos: the Latinoamericano stadium was packed, a difficult situation and Orestes Kindelan was at bat, the fearsome Major Drum. Pedro Chavez, someone of whom we cannot say was lukewarm as a player or as a manager, orders the Chiqui to walk the most feared slugger then, but Darcourt refused. Stubbornly and repeatedly. The “Gago” asked for time and went to the mound to insist on the walk, but Darcourt kept saying no, that he would take on Kindelán. Lazaro Vargas, another courageous player, backed Chávez, but the pitcher did not budge: “I will take him out”.
Chavez had no choice but to let him pitch of take him out, and opted for his pitcher. Darcourt faced Kindelan, and forced him to hit a groundout to third base, where Vargas caught it without the fright and put him out by the classic mile. Memorable. One recalls that, and wonders how this could become what it is now.
As if Darcourt’s death was not enough to overshadow the national baseball scenario, we have what happened at the Victoria Stadium Girón: Demys Valdes hit Ramon Lunar with his bat on the mouth and attacked Freddy Asiel Alvarez, who channeled the frustration of his mediocre pitching by hitting rivals left and right. It was a bad move by manager Ramón Moré, who didn’t take out an out of focus and uncontrolled Freddy; bad move by umpire Osvaldo de Paula who did not call attention in time, bad for Demys, who reacted as if the field were a tenement building, but the worst of all was Freddy, who did little honor to his quality, and looked as an arrogant fool little pitcher, shoddy and useless, instead of regrouping and getting back to them with strikeouts, but opted for dead balls.
One thing is to play hard, at 42 degrees in the shade, as Chavez said they did in the romantic 1960s or even pitching close to intimidate a batter, and another is the cowardice of the assault, the vengeful pitch of anger for anger, to show who knows what manhood, as if they were higher codes of honor of the land, as if there were enough examples of a gentleman as Alejandro Oms, or of a tough guy as Darcourt
Images like Lisbán Correa chasing with a bat rivals at the Huelga Stadium, or Scull and Eriel embraced in a brawl, or Vladimir García and Ramón Lunar wrapped in a stupid brawl that for many was the real cause of Garcia not making Villa Clara to the Caribbean Series are simply pathetic, and have nothing to do with baseball that my father taught me to love in the intense years of the 1980s, and I do not know how to make my son love, if it continues as it goes…
