How rugby played a profound role in the life of Che Guevara
Revolutionary fell in love with game aged 14, but his name is absent from honours board at his club
San Isidro Club, where England have trained over the past couple of weeks in Buenos Aires, are among Argentina’s most famous teams. Inside the rickety old clubhouse, are lists of their former captains, coaches and internationals dating back to the 1930s.
Yet there is one name missing from the honours board: a feisty scrum-half who would become the continent’s most celebrated revolutionary, Che Guevara. Even though Guevara played competitive rugby for only a few years, the sport’s influence on him was profound. Alberto Granado, his childhood friend who partnered him on a road trip that would later be immortalised in the book turned film, The Motorcycle Diaries, wrote: “Courage, combativeness, tenacity, will, all these qualities that true men possess were in him. Rugby allowed him to develop them by giving him more confidence.”
Ernesto Guevara de la Serna Lynch was born to a wealthy family in Buenos Aires in 1928 but because he was a chronic asthmatic, they moved to Córdoba for its cleaner climate. Despite his condition, Guevara was a talented sportsman playing golf, fencing, skating, Basque pelota and tennis. At 14, however, he fell in love with rugby when he started playing for Estudiantes in 1942.
He quickly earned a reputation for his hard-hitting style earning the nickname El Fuser – a play on the Spanish word for raging. Granado told an interviewer: “A lot of teams didn’t want him because he was asthmatic. Despite his scrawny figure, he was surprisingly strong and a very good tackler.” Another of his team-mates, Francisco Ventura Farrando, recalled: “He was a talented man, extraordinarily intelligent. His playing style was the hallmark of his game.”
In 1947, the family returned to the capital where Guevara started playing for San Isidro, a club founded by his father, Don Ernesto. Now playing against fully developed men, his parents feared for his safety. Every 20 minutes, he would have to leave the field either to inject himself or use his inhaler to combat his asthma. When Don Ernesto asked his son to stop playing, he is supposed to have replied: “I love rugby. Even if it kills me one day I am happy to play.”
Don Ernesto took matters into his own hands and asked the club president to ban him from playing. Guevara promptly joined Club Ypora and in a delicious, although possibly apocryphal twist, scored the winning try against San Isidro in a 6-3 victory. It was also reported that he had a fight with Mario Dolan, the San Isidro captain, who told him he was no longer welcome there.
Such was Guevara’s passion for rugby that he founded a magazine, Tackle, with his brother and friends that spanned 11 issues in 1951. Writing under a pseudonym, “Chang-cho” – the Pig – Guevara, a medical student, railed against what he saw as Argentina’s conservative style of play compared to the more expansive European teams.
“When the French and English teams come to Argentina, we all admire the quality of that rugby and we have discovered some new things: well played rugby is highly spectacular,” Guevara wrote. “In our provinces, usually a closed game is seen. If these people could see the teams playing an open game, then rugby would win many supporters.”
In another extract, Guevara called for the need to spread rugby beyond its traditional heartlands: “If you do all that, Argentina could have its place in the international hierarchy.” It would be 71 years before the Pumas were admitted to the Rugby Championship.
Somewhat inevitably, Guevara started writing political polemics about the elitist tendencies of Argentine rugby. That brought him to the attention of the local police, who shut the magazine down on grounds that it was spreading communist propaganda. It was at this point that Guevara and Granado decided to jump on the back of a Norton 500cc motorcycle and begin the road trip around South America that would change the course of 20th century history. The poverty and inequality that Guevara witnessed would further inspire him to become a revolutionary in Cuba and beyond.
Even now he remains both reviled and revered in Argentina, which is partly why there is no acknowledgement of his presence at San Isidro. Yet his legacy lives on. Forty years after his death, another feisty Argentine scrum-half, Gus Pichot, defied the establishment as he dragged the Pumas to third place at the 2007 World Cup.
“He was always present for me about leadership and ideas,” Pichot, now vice-chairman of World Rugby, said. “Later he went towards a more violent way and a Cuba system that I don’t support. What I respect is that he always stood up for his beliefs and against what he saw as injustice and inequality. He would die for whatever he really felt. I always have him very present.”