Our game. The world’s game.
No. 02
Libertad, the first football entered on a Colombian register. Monguí, Boyacá, 1938.
Monguí, a cold stone town at ten thousand feet in the Colombian Andes, is known for two things: a poet who memorized a hundred and fifty poems, and a ball. A conscript came home from the Amazon with a stitch, taught it to twelve farmers the town still calls the twelve apostles, and in 1938 registered Libertad, the first football Colombia ever recorded.
No. 01
Joseph Édouard Gaetjens, b. Port-au-Prince 1924; d. Fort Dimanche 1964.
A Haitian dishwasher scored the only goal in the United States’ 1-0 defeat of England at the 1950 World Cup. He had never finished becoming a citizen of the country he scored for. Fourteen years later the Duvalier regime took him to a prison called Fort Dimanche, and he was never seen again.
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