Francisco Varallo, Last Livng Player in the 1930 World Cup
June 24, 2010
I’ve been bogged down with research for a new book for the last couple of weeks and regret letting time slip between posts. Of course, I still found time to watch World Cup soccer and relish yesterday’s sensational climax, with Landon Donovan’s 91st minute strike. As has been much noted, the last time the U.S. made the leap out of group play was 80 years ago at the 1930 World Cup.
In February “Little Canon” Francisco Varallo, the last living member of the second place team from Argentina, was honored by Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) at celebration of his 100th birthday.
He was also the youngest player in that first World Cup, played in Montevideo, Uruguay. Argentina lost the final game 4-2 to the hometown team.
Here’s a more recent photo.
“It was like a dream come true,” Varallo told FIFA’s World magazine for it’s March issue. “I was just a boy and I was in awe of players like Luis Monti, Manuel Ferreira, Guillermo Stabil. In those days the coaches barely spoke, and it was the most experienced players who decided on the starting 11. On the day of my debut against France, I asked the captain, Ferreira, how I should play, and he replied: “Play the way you know how, do what you want.”
Varallo injured his knee during a match against Chile and had to sit out the semi-final match in which Argentina defeated the U.S. team. “I was in pain and I shouldn’t have played in the final,” but he was determined to play for his country. “I played my heart out in the second half and I could feel it in my knee. We were down to ten men, and as the match went on, another was injured, and another. There were no substitutions then: we were left with eight players on the field. But they beat us fairly and squarely, what can you do?”
Training was much different in the 1930s. They practiced only three days a week, sometimes less often. The only nutritional advice Varallo’s coach offered was not to eat salami sandwiches. “I always ate very well, a variety of things. I had a typically Argentinian diet, with a lot of meat. And before a match I would ask for seconds. Roberto Cherro used to ask me, ‘Panchito, how come you eat more than the rest of us?’ And I would explain ]If I don’t, I won’t score any goals.’ He didn’t smoke or drink alcohol or carbonated beverages.“It must have been a good diet because I’ve still got my own teeth,” he said. “Some of that is down to genetics, of course, but I was never fat and I maintained my muscles. I also never had a medical check-up during my career. The advances that have been made in that area are fantastic. I never fully recovered from the injury I sustained at the World Cup in Uruguay. Nowadays, players recover in no time from operations – it’s extraordinary, they walk out of surgery!”
After the historic final match, played at the Estadio Centenario, Varallo went on to glory with Boca Juniors, where he scored 181 goals in 210 matches – a record that remained unshattered until 2008.
“I find it incredible that young people know who I am,” he mused. ” When I was in France, people from Germany, Poland, England, Switzerland ... they all wanted to meet me, with a lot of passion and respect. They still send me letters to my house. And some even send presents. They are unforgettable gestures that make me very happy. And it’s all thanks to football! Here in La Plata, everybody knows me: old folks, young people, children…they all say hello to me. I was named an ‘illustrious citizen’. Now that I’m old, more tributes are being paid to me than before. It seems I’m still important!”
Phillies Venerable Jamie Moyer, 47, Quiets Yankee Bats, Salves Childrens’ Hearts
June 16, 2010
Let us praise, let us celebrate the enduring arm—and giving heart— of the Philadelphia Phillies pitcher Jamie Moyer.
On Wednesday night, at the venerable athletic age of 47, he became the oldest pitcher ever to beat the New York Yankees.
In a convincing two-hit performance at Yankee Stadium days after one of the worst starts of his career, the venerable, left-hander earned his 265th victory in his 680th regular season appearance after facing his 16,977th batter. His pitch speed was often a mere 77 miles an hour, but his location was precise and his craft cunning as he went seven innings in the 6-3 victory. The gray stubble on his chin had a mythological sparkle to it.
His win came on the 24th anniversary of his debut on June 16, 1986 at Wrigley Field, when he defeated the Philllies and Hall of Famer Steve Carlton. He has since earned one World Series ring, with the 2008 Phillies, and twice placed among the top five candidates for the Cy Young Award, the highest achievement for a pitcher in Major League Baseball.
Now, I confess it. I’m a Yankee fan. But I’m even a greater fan of endurance, passion, and guts. And beyond demonstrating those qualities, Moyer is also a man of considerable caring.
With the help of his wife, Karen, The Moyer Foundation has created 225 different programs that help children in distress. The foundation has also created and funds Camp Erin, the largest network of bereavement camps in the country for children and teens who are grieving a significant loss. “It’s a privilege and an honor to be a professional athlete,” Moyer, who has earned tens of millions of dollars throwing a baseball, said the other day. “But I’m also privileged and honored to be able to give something back.”
Tao Porchon-Lynch Turns Age On Its Head With Yoga And Dance
June 7, 2010
Ninety-one year-old yogi and competitive ballroom dancer Tao Porchon-Lynch isn’t balancing herself in front of her classes like a human teeter-totter these days. But that’s only because she recently broke her wrist and isn’t quite ready to put full weight on it, she explained during an early morning class in Hartsdale, New York.
Following her in Down Dog, Half Moon, and Warrior Pose, a gawking visitor half her age was quickly disabused of any doubts. Porchon-Lynch, who was raised in French Pondicherry, India, pretzeled a leg behind her neck and demonstrated how far she’s come since she had a hip replacement in 2003 and despite a surgical pin that was implanted in one leg in the late 1980s. She credits the spinal twists of yoga practice, which she does in the morning with her students and at night before bed, with staying lithe.
CNN video:
Tao Porchon-Lynch
At the time of her injury, skeptical doctors warned, ” ‘You won’t be able to do this, you won’t be able to do that.’ And I said, ‘I don’t want to know what I won’t be able to do. I won’t improve that way,’ ” she recalled. A few weeks later, Porchon-Lynch sent a photograph to her physician of herself practicing mayurasana, or peacock pose, balancing her body on her hands, with her nose pointing to the ground and her straight legs arrowing up.
“Just like nature does, you can renew every part of your body,” she tells her students now as she exhorts them in a whispery voice to use their fingers and particularly their “lazy little toes.”
Porchon-Lynch began practicing yoga during her childhood in India, but she didn’t teach her first yoga class until she was in her 40s, and then informally. She didn’t land her first paying gig as a yoga instructor until she was 50, when Jack LaLanne spotted her giving classes at a health club he was buying and offered her $15 a week.
By then, she had already lived a storied life. During World War II, she worked in the Resistance in France with an aunt before escaping to England. She danced London’s nightclubs and acted in shows, cast for parts by Noel Coward, who, she remmebered, taught her English with such phrases as, “I presume that your presumptions are precisely incorrect and your sarcastic insinuations too obnoxious to be appreciated.” A glamorous beauty, she modeled haute couture in post-war Paris, modeled hair permanents for Lever Brothers in the United States, appeared in several Hollywood movies, wrote screenplays and, in the 1960s and 1970s, documentaries in India. She was also hired by UniTel to help establish TV stations in India in the 1960s.
Yoga has not only helped her maintain her flexibility of body and mind, it’s kept her wardrobe costs down. While she may no longer have a 17-inch waist, thanks to her unwavering practice of yoga and her minimalistic vegetarian diet, she can still wear the size 2 dresses of her Parisian youth. “I don’t eat much and I don’t get tired,” she said.
After her Indian mother died in child birth, her French father gave her to his brother and sister-in-law to raise in India. She studied yoga with Indra Devi in Pondicherry and, in Pune, was one of the first women to study under B.K.S. Iyengar, credited with popularizing yoga in the West. Since founding the Westchester Yoga Institute in 1982, she has trained and certified hundreds of instructors. She also maintains a demanding schedule of teaching yoga classes at the Fred Astaire Studio in Hartsdale and the JCC in Scarsdale, NY, giving workshops at such yoga centers as the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health in Lenox, MA, and the Satchidananda Ashram-Yogaville in Buckingham, Va., and leading trips to India and Sri Lanka.
And then there’s competitive dancing. “I dance as much as I can afford to,” said Tao Porchon-Lynch, who will demonstrate the Argentine Tango and other dances with a 22-year-old dance partner on June 12 in Tarrytown, NY, at the Fred Astaire Dance Studios regional New Comers competition. “I’d rather dance than eat. Dancing with someone who likes to dance can make you feel at one. It turns on the energy and lights up your body.”
Author Harry Bernstein Celebrates 100th Birthday and Closes In On Fourth Book
June 1, 2010
Literary late-bloomer Harry Bernstein celebrated his 100th birthday on Sunday with a bash in Brooklyn Heights, announcing to a gathering of awed friends and relatives that, recuperated from a rough patch of health, he was on the verge of completing the fourth volume of his family saga.
“It’ll take me about two more months to finish,” a robust Harry told me while waiting to greet a roomful of family and friends at the Park Plaza Restaurant.
His acclaimed first memoir, The Invisible Wall, was published in 2007 and compared for the strength of its prose about his difficult early life in the poor milltown of Stockport, England with the works of D.H. Lawrence and Frank McCourt. It was followed in succeeding years with two more volumes about his life in America.
Harry’s first short story was published in 1928, the year Mickey Mouse debuted in movie theaters and Herbert Hoover was elected presidents. He was soon heralded as one of America’s most promising young writers, but instead would face the rejection of more than 40 novels over seven decades before the publication of his first memoir following the death of his wife, Ruby.
When I first interviewed Harry, in 2007, for What Should I Do With The Rest Of My Life, he explained his sober response to the accolades he received, “Remember, there were circumstances of writing that book I would rather never have happened. It would have made all the difference for Ruby to be here.” I doubt that I had ever heard anyone speak, at any age, of love with such transcendent, transporting, and true emotion.
I noted as much when I was asked to say a few words on Sunday. I also read personal messages of admiration and birthday wishes written to Harry from all of the other subjects of my book, including a note from inventor Myrna Hoffman, who wrote, “I’m happy to be ‘between the covers’ with you, Harry!”
While recuperating in Brooklyn and unable to sit at his typewriter for the last several months, Harry has been dictating a fourth volume of his family’s story, this one focused on his radical sister, Rose, a seamstress.