Michael Robinson would have turned 65 yesterday if life had mercy on us, I’m not talking about him anymore. Or if it contained some kind of meaning that, it is clear, it does not contain. And what remains after the Englishman with the smile from Cádiz is a half hoarse spectacle, like basketball without Andrés Montes or cycling without Pedro González. Even the metal without Lemmy Kilmister, who was from Burslem and seemed to be from Padrón. «The best always leave», is often said at funerals when one does not really know what to say. Three years after his death, no one has yet thought of something better to say about the deceased, surely because the voice of the great occurrences was also his.
“It was authentic, then it was different”, Jorge Valdano would say of him on one occasion. Or he simply left it in writing, because with Argentinean almost the same thing happens as with English: intelligence is more important than accent, something that Valdano himself also said —or left in writing. Not everyone liked his particular style, which consisted of treating soccer as if Monty Python were going to enjoy a day at the races, but invited by Mágico González and Eric Cantona. At first it was difficult for us to keep up with him, as we were used to traditional accents: it was not an easy task to distinguish otitis from imposition. But we soon discovered that morphology is almost never the most important thing, not even that of words. “It was all very much”, it was one of those constructions of his that gradually took over an imagination not used to looking at the margins of football.
Robinson was diagnosed with cancer in 2018, a melanoma with metastasis. It was announced by Carles Francino in La Ventana. «My friend, our friend Michael Robinson, has cancer,» he commented before giving the floor to his friend, to our friend, although most of us never spoke a word to him: who says that friendship should be reciprocal? Sometimes it is enough to be on the other side, enjoying the effort of others to make the world a little more beautiful, to tell us a new story, to score another goal for us. Robin, as his friends with benefits called him, for short, then discovered an implacable truth: that private healthcare is fantastic when you’re not sick at all.
“Month by month”, he joked with his wife when she asked him how they were going to pay the hefty cost of that treatment that did not guarantee much either, as he himself would reveal in another interview: «I’ll try to die soon so you don’t stay naked.» And it is that, among the many benefits that he used to point out to us as a country (often without the Spaniards themselves giving them much importance) was the right to good public health, which is often not much more than being born between clean sheets and dying without feel fleeced.
The other day, watching a parody of the current electoral campaign based on As Bestas, the acclaimed film by Rodrigo Sorogoyen, it occurred to me that this could be a good way to summarize Robinson’s time in this life or, more specifically, for this country: «Are we boring you, English?» I think I know the answer even without having tried it, that I don’t know. In any case, what I would really be interested in knowing is what he would ask himself, or what he would ask us, now that the world thinks it has answers to everything.
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