Miracle in the Andes Page 2

  Watching out the window, I noticed that wisps of fog were gathering, then I felt a hand on my shoulder.

  “Switch seats with me, Nando. I want to look at the mountains.”

  It was my friend Panchito, who was sitting in the aisle seat beside me. I nodded and rose from my seat. When I stood to change places someone yelled, “Think fast, Nando!” and I turned just in time to catch a rugby ball someone had tossed from the rear of the cabin. I passed the ball forward, and then sank into my seat. All around us there was laughing and talking, people were moving from seat to seat, visiting friends up and down the aisle. Some friends, including my oldest amigo, Guido Magri, were in the back of the plane playing cards with some crew members, including the flight steward, but when the ball began bouncing around the cabin, the steward stepped forward and tried to calm things down. “Put the ball away,” he shouted. “Settle down, and please take your seats!” But we were young rugby players traveling with our friends, and we did not want to settle down. Our team, the Old Christians from Montevideo, was one of the best rugby teams in Uruguay, and we took our regular matches seriously. But in Chile we would be playing an exhibition match only, so this trip was really a holiday for us, and on the plane there was the feeling that the holiday had already begun.

  It was a fine thing to be traveling with my friends, these friends especially. We had been through so much together—all the years of learning and training, the heartbreaking losses, the hard-fought wins. We had grown up as teammates, drawing from each other’s strengths, learning to trust one another when the pressure was on. But the game of rugby had not only shaped our friendships, it had shaped our characters, and brought us together as brothers.

  Many of us on the Old Christians had known each other for more than ten years, since our days as schoolboy ruggers playing under the guidance of the Irish Christian Brothers at the Stella Maris School. The Christian Brothers had come to Uruguay from Ireland in the early 1950s, at the invitation of a group of Catholic parents who wanted them to found a private Catholic school in Montevideo. Five Irish Brothers answered the call, and in 1955 they created the Stella Maris College, a private school for boys between the ages of nine and sixteen, located in the Carrasco neighborhood, where most of the students lived.

  For the Christian Brothers, the first goal of a Catholic education was to build character, not intellect, and their teaching methods stressed discipline, piety, selflessness, and respect. To promote these values outside the classroom, the Brothers discouraged our natural South American passion for soccer—a game that, in their view, fostered selfishness and egotism—and steered us toward the rougher, earthier game of rugby. For generations, rugby had been an Irish passion, but it was virtually unknown in our country. At first the game seemed strange to us—so brutal and painful to play, so much pushing and shoving and so little of soccer’s wide-open flair. But the Christian Brothers firmly believed that the qualities required to master the sport were the same characteristics one needed to live a decent Catholic life—humility, tenacity, self-discipline, and devotion to others—and they were determined that we would play the game and play it well. It did not take us long to learn that once the Christian Brothers set their minds to a purpose, there was little that could sway them. So we set aside our soccer balls and acquainted ourselves with the fat, pointed pigskin used in rugby.

  In long, tough practices on the fields behind the school, the Brothers started from scratch, drilling us in all the rugged intricacies of the game—mucks and rauls, scrumdowns and lineouts, how to kick and pass and tackle. We learned that rugby players wore no pads or helmets, but still we were expected to play aggressively and with great physical courage. But rugby was more than a game of brute strength; it required sound strategy, quick thinking, and agility. Most of all the game demanded that teammates develop an unshakeable sense of trust. They explained that when one of our teammates falls or is knocked to the ground, he “becomes grass.” This was their way of saying that a downed player can be stomped on and trampled by the opposition as if he were part of the turf. One of the first things they taught us was how to behave when a teammate becomes grass. “You must become his protector. You must sacrifice yourself to shield him. He must know he can count on you.”

  To the Christian Brothers, rugby was more than a game, it was sport raised to the level of a moral discipline. At its heart was the ironclad belief that no other sport taught so devoutly the importance of striving, suffering, and sacrificing in the pursuit of a common goal. They were so passionate on this point that we had no choice but to believe them, and as we grew to understand the game more deeply, we saw for ourselves that the Brothers were right.

  In simplest terms, the object of rugby is to gain control of the ball—usually through the combined use of cunning, speed, and brute force—and then, by passing it deftly from one sprinting teammate to another, advance the ball across the the goal or “try line” for a score. Rugby can be a game of dazzling speed and agility, a game of pinpoint passes and brilliant evasive maneuvers. But for me the essence of the game can only be found in the brutal, controlled melee known as the scrum, the signature formation of rugby. In a scrummage, each team forms a tight huddle, three rows deep, with the crouching players shoulder to shoulder and their arms interlocked to form a tightly woven human wedge. The two scrums square off, and the first row of one scrum butts shoulders with the first row of the opposition to form a rough closed circle. At the official’s signal, the ball is rolled into this circle and each team’s scrum tries to push the other far enough off the ball so that one of its own front-row players can kick it back through the legs of his teammates to the rear of the scrum, where his scrum half is waiting to pluck it free and pass it to a back who will start the attack.

  The play inside the scrum is ferocious—knees knock against temples, elbows rock jaws, shins are constantly bloodied by kicks from heavy cleated shoes. It is raw, hard labor, but everything changes to lightning once the scrum half clears the ball and the attack begins. The first pass might be back to the agile fly half, who will dodge the oncoming defenders, buying time for the players behind him to find open field. Just as he is about to be dragged down, the fly half fires the ball back to the inside center, who sidesteps one tackler but is tripped up by the next, and as he stumbles forward he passes off to the trailing winger. Now the ball moves crisply from one back to the next—flanker to winger to center and back to the winger again, each man slashing, spinning, diving, or bulling his way forward, before tacklers drag them to the ground. Ball carriers will be mauled along the way, rucks will form when the ball falls free, every inch will be a battle, but then one of our men will find an angle, a small window of daylight and, with a final burst of effort, dash past the last defenders and dive across the try line for a score. Just like that, all the plodding grunt work of the scrum has turned to a brilliant dance. And no single man can claim the credit. The try was scored inch by inch, through an accumulation of individual effort, and no matter who finally carried the ball across the try line, the glory belongs to us all.

  My job in the scrum was to line up behind the crouching first row, my head wedged between their hips, my shoulders butting their thighs, and my arms spread over their backsides. When play began, I would surge forward with all my might and try to push the scrum forward. I remember the feeling so well: at first the weight of the opposing scrum seems immense and impossible to budge. Still, you dig at the turf, you endure the stalemate, you refuse to quit. I remember, in moments of extreme exertion, straining forward until my legs were completely extended, with my body low and straight and parallel to the ground, pushing hopelessly against what seemed like a solid stone wall. Sometimes the stalemate seemed to last forever, but if we held our positions and each man did his job, the resistance would soften and, miraculously, the immovable object would slowly begin to budge. The remarkable thing is this: at the very moment of success you cannot isolate your own individual effort from the effort of the entire scrum. You cannot te
ll where your strength ends and the efforts of the others begin. In a sense, you no longer exist as an individual human being. For a brief moment you forget yourself. You become part of something larger and more powerful than you yourself could be. Your effort and your will vanishes into the collective will of the team, and if this will is unified and focused, the team surges forward and the scrum magically begins to move.

  To me, this is the essence of rugby. No other sport gives you such an intense sense of selflessness and unified purpose. I believe this is why rugby players all over the world feel such a passion for the game and such a feeling of brotherhood. As a young man, of course, I could not put these things into words, but I knew, and my teammates knew, that there was something special about the game, and under the guidance of the Christian Brothers we developed a passionate love for the sport that shaped our friendships and our lives. For eight years we played our hearts out for the Christian Brothers—a brotherhood of young boys with Latin names, playing a game with deep Anglo roots under Uruguay’s sunny skies, and proudly wearing the bright green shamrock on our uniforms. The game became so much a part of our lives, in fact, that when we graduated from Stella Maris at the age of sixteen, many of us could not bear the thought that our playing days were over. Our salvation came in the form of the Old Christians Club, a private rugby team formed in 1965 by previous alumni of the Stella Maris rugby program to give Stella Maris ruggers a chance to continue playing the game after our school years ended.

  When the Christian Brothers first arrived in Uruguay, few people had ever seen a rugby match, but by the late 1960s the game was gaining in popularity, and there were plenty of good teams for the Old Christians to challenge. In 1965 we joined the National Rugby League, and soon we had established ourselves as one of the country’s top teams, winning the national championship in 1968 and 1970. Encouraged by our success, we began to schedule matches in Argentina, and we quickly discovered that we could hold our own with the best teams that country had to offer. In 1971 we traveled to Chile, where we fared well in matches against tough competition, including the Chilean national team. The trip was such a success that it was decided we would return again this year, in 1972. I had been looking forward to the trip for months, and as I glanced around the passenger cabin there was no doubt my teammates felt the same. We had been through so much together. I knew that the friendships I’d made on the rugby team would last a lifetime, and I was happy that so many of my friends were on the phone with me. There was Coco Nicholich, our lock forward, and one of the biggest and strongest players on the team. Enrique Platero, serious and steady, was a prop—one of the burly guys who helped anchor the line in the scrum. Roy Harley was a wing forward, who used his speed to sidestep tacklers and leave them clutching air. Roberto Canessa was a wing, and one of the strongest and toughest players on the squad. Arturo Nogueira was our fly half, a great long passer and the best kicker on the team. You could tell by looking at Antonio Vizintin, with his broad back and thick neck, that he was one of the front line forwards who bore most of the weight in the scrum. Gustavo Zerbino—whose guts and determination I always admired—was a versatile player who manned many positions. And Marcelo Perez del Castillo, another wing forward, was very fast, very brave, a great ball carrier and a ferocious tackler. Marcelo was also our team captain, a leader we would trust with our lives. It was Marcelo’s idea to return to Chile, and he had worked hard to make it all possible; he had leased the plane, hired the pilots, arranged the games in Chile, and created tremendous excitement about the trip.

  There were others—Alexis Hounie, Gastón Costemalle, Daniel Shaw—all of them great players and all of them my friends. But my oldest friend was Guido Magri. He and I had met on my first day at the Stella Maris School—I was eight years old and Guido was one year older—and we had been inseparable ever since. Guido and I grew up together, playing soccer and sharing a love of motorcycles, cars, and auto racing. When I was fifteen we both had mopeds that we had modified in silly ways—removing the mufflers, turn signals, and fenders—and we would ride them to Las Delicias, a famous ice cream parlor in our neighborhood, where we would drool over the girls from the nearby School Sagrado Corazón, hoping to impress them with our souped-up scooters. Guido was a dependable friend, with a good sense of humor and an easy laugh. He was also an outstanding scrum half, as quick and smart as a fox, with good hands and great courage. Under the guidance of the Christian Brothers, both of us grew to love the game of rugby with a consuming passion. As seasons passed we worked hard to improve our skills, and by the time I was fifteen we had each earned a spot on the Stella Maris First XV, the team’s starting lineup. After graduation, both of us went on to join the Old Christians and spent several happy seasons pursuing the high-octane social life of young rugby players. That rowdiness came to an abrupt end for Guido in 1969, when he met and fell in love with the beautiful daughter of a Chilean diplomat. She was now his fiancée, and he was happy to behave himself for her sake.

  After Guido’s engagement I saw less of him, and I began spending more time with my other great friend Panchito Abal. Panchito was a year younger than I, and although he was a graduate of Stella Maris and a former member of the school’s First XV, we had met only a few years earlier when Panchito joined the Old Christians. We became instant friends and, in the years since, had grown as close as brothers, enjoying a strong camaraderie and a deep simpatía between us, though to many we must have seemed an unlikely pair. Panchito was our winger, a position that requires a combination of speed, power, intelligence, agility, and lightning-quick reactions. If there is a glamour position on a rugby team, winger is it, and Panchito was perfect for the role. Long-legged and broad-shouldered, with blazing speed and the agility of a cheetah, he played the game with such natural grace that even his most brilliant moves seemed effortless. But everything seemed that way for Panchito, especially his other great passion—chasing pretty girls. It didn’t hurt, of course, that he had the blond good looks of a movie star, or that he was rich, a fine athlete, and blessed with the kind of natural charisma most of us can only dream of. I believed, in those days, that the woman did not exist who could resist Panchito once he’d set his sights on her. He had no trouble finding girls; they seemed to find their way to him, and he picked them up with such ease that it sometimes seemed like magic. Once, for example, at the halftime break of a rugby match he said to me, “I have dates for us after the game. Those two there in the first row.”

  I glanced to where the girls were sitting. We had never seen these girls before.

  “But how did you manage this?” I asked him. “You never left the field!”

  Panchito shrugged off the question, but I remembered that early in the game he had chased a ball out of bounds near where the girls were sitting. He only had time to smile at them and say a few words, but for Panchito that was enough.

  For me it was different. Like Panchito, I also had a great passion for rugby, but the game was never effortless for me. As a small child I had broken both my legs in a fall from a balcony, and the injuries had left me with a slightly knock-kneed stride that robbed me of the nimbleness required to play rugby’s more glamorous positions. But I was tall and tough and fast, so they made me a forward on the second line. We forwards were good foot soldiers, always butting shoulders in rucks and mauls, rumbling in the scrums and jumping high to claw for the ball in lineouts. Forwards are usually the largest and strongest players on the team, and while I was one of our tallest players, I was thin for my height. When the large bodies started flying, it was only through hard work and determination that I was able to hold my own.

  For me, meeting girls also required great effort, but I never stopped trying. I was just as obsessed with pretty girls as Panchito was, but while I dreamed of being a natural ladies’ man like him, I knew I wasn’t in his class. A little shy, long-limbed and gangly, with thick horn-rimmed glasses and average looks, I had to face the fact that most girls did not find me extraordinary. It wasn’t that I was u
npopular—I had my share of dates—but it would be a lie to say that girls were waiting in line for Nando. I had to work hard to catch a girl’s interest, but even when I did, things did not always go as I planned. Once, for example, I managed, after months of trying, to get a date with a girl I really liked. I took her to Las Delicias and she waited in the car while I bought us some ice cream. As I was returning to the car with a cone in each hand, I tripped over something on the sidewalk and lost my balance. Stumbling and weaving wildly toward the parked car, I fought to keep my balance and save the cones, but I didn’t have a chance. I have often wondered how it looked to that girl inside the car: her date lurching toward her in a wide circle across the street, hunched over, his eyes like saucers, his mouth gaping. He staggers toward the car, then seems to dive at her, his cheek smashing flat against the driver’s window, his head bouncing hard off the glass. He slips from view as he slumps to the ground, and all that remains are two dripping blobs of ice cream smeared across the window.

  This was something that would not have happened to Panchito in five lifetimes. He was one of the gifted ones, and everyone envied him for the grace and ease with which he glided through life. But I knew him well, and I understood that life was not as easy for Panchito as it seemed. Beneath all the charm and confidence was a melancholy heart. He could be irritable and distant. He often sank into long dark moods and ill-tempered silences. And there was a devilish restlessness in him that sometimes disturbed me. He was always provoking me with reckless questions: How far would you go, Nando? Would you cheat on a test? Would you rob a bank? Steal a car?

  I always laughed when he talked this way, but I could not ignore the hidden streak of anger and sadness that those questions revealed. I did not judge him for this, because I knew it was all the result of a broken heart. Panchito’s parents had divorced when he was fourteen years old. It was a disaster that had wounded him in ways he could not heal and had left him with much resentment. He had two brothers, and a stepbrother from his father’s previous marriage, but still, there was something missing for him. I believe he had a great hunger for the love and comforts of a family that was happy and whole. In any case, it did not take me long to realize that despite all the natural gifts he had been blessed with, all the things I envied him for, he envied me more for the one thing I had that he could only dream of—my sisters, my grandmother, my mother and father, all of us together in a close and happy home.