BATIGOL BIG GAME HUNTER
“Jorge, what exactly have you seen in this kid?”
When Marcelo Bielsa was introduced to Gabriel Batistuta, he couldn’t have been more suspicious. Jorge Griffa, the eminent scout, had invited the young striker to join Newell’s Old Boys. For Bielsa, he was an enigma. A chubby enigma.
“He scores goals with ease, Marcelo. Give him a chance.”
Before he became a superhero, Gabriel Batistuta was just an ordinary citizen of Reconquista, a small agricultural city 800km north of Buenos Aires. Unlike in most tales of wonder, his daily routine provided no hint of any footballing superpower whatsoever. He had no clue of what was about to happen.
On the verge of finishing secondary school, the 17-year-old son of Gloria and Omar was thinking about what to do next. He didn’t like the idea of working with the crops, as his dad did every day, waking up at 4am. He fancied becoming self-employed. Maybe he could be a mechanic, he thought. He could set up his own workshop, open late, take naps, fix cars. That sounded good. Perhaps even a doctor.
He was extremely shy, but also capable of leaving roses by the front door at Irina’s house. The girl he liked would later become his wife, and the mother of four sons – and the roses were from her front garden, which didn’t impress Irina’s mother. “Can’t this kid cut someone else’s roses?” she would ask.
In the early years of Batistuta, football was never part of the picture – at least, not an important one. He liked a kickabout with his friends, just as he liked to go fishing or play basketball, but he was never hugely into football. Batistuta would watch only the games in which he was playing. When asked about a striker he admired, he would answer Mario Kempes – but the last time he’d seen Kempes in action was probably back in 1978, when Batistuta was nine. Watching football on television was nearly impossible outside of a World Cup. He supported Boca Juniors, but he couldn’t name their starting line-up.
While Dennis Bergkamp, also born in 1969, joined Ajax at the age of 11, Batistuta arrived a virgin to the top flight when he was 19. His story is as intriguing as it is anachronistic: it’s hard to believe today that
