Higuain opens up about loss of his mother, early struggles, ping-pong
Gonzalo Higuain remembers being so happy that April night in Philadelphia, finally enjoying Major League Soccer after a rough start, and making history with his older brother Federico as the first siblings to score in the same MLS game.
The Argentine brothers, reunited after more than a decade chasing their careers on different continents, leaped into each other’s arms and celebrated Inter Miami’s 2-1 win over the Philadelphia Union in the City of Brotherly Love.
But the Higuains’ world came crashing down upon arriving back in South Florida. They received the phone call they had been dreading since their mother, Nancy Zacarias, was diagnosed with cancer five years ago. She had finally lost her battle at age 64.
Gonzalo, deeply devoted to his family, had been very close with his maternal grandfather, Santos Zacarias, a renowned Argentine boxing trainer. He has a great relationship with his father, Jorge (“El Pipa”), a famous central defender in Argentina and France in the 1980s. He loves his three brothers dearly. The eldest, Nicolas, is his agent. The youngest, Lautaro, works in finance.
And he adored his mother, who was a successful artist. The news of her death crushed him.
“She was my everything,” Higuain said Friday in a phone interview from Portland, where Inter Miami faces the Timbers on Sunday (5:30 p.m., FS1). “You have to ask, ‘Why is the world so unfair?’ A selfless woman who did everything for her family to be taken so young. But I am left with wonderful memories and all the lessons she taught me.
“She taught me to be nice to others, to be loving, to be affectionate and grateful and to give without expecting anything in return. It took me a while to understand. I used to be more tight-lipped, more cold, grumpy. With time I started to change and realized that she was right. If you do good, good will come back to you.”
Higuain said he has a message for all his fans: “Take care of your mother, appreciate her, tell her how much you love her, because once she is gone, you can’t tell her anymore.”
After he lost his mother, he temporarily lost his motivation to play soccer.
“They say when you step on the field you forget about the outside world, but I don’t think that’s true,” he said. “When my mother died it hit me so hard. It’s impossible for that not to affect you and not lower your performance. It drowned me psychologically. I had 15 days where I did nothing. When I came back, I couldn’t help the team. My head was not there.”
He struggled through May, and asked coach
Phil Neville for a hiatus.
“I sat down with Phil, and we decided it was best to skip two or three games and recuperate from the days I lost,” Higuain said. “I promised him I would change, and I would get in peak form, because if not it would be a disastrous year. I didn’t come here for that. I am now seeing the results of that work. I have more endurance. I’m happy and motivated to help us get to the playoffs.”
He got a major boost when his wife Lara and 3-year-old daughter, Alma, joined him in Fort Lauderdale in August after eight months apart.
“To see my wife and daughter smile is the cure for this huge pain that I am forced to live through,” he said. “I have to find the strength to live for them. They are the most important people to me.”
Higuain leads Inter Miami with 10 goals and four assists in 23 games this season, a notable turnaround from his debut season.
He joined the club from Italian giant Juventus amid much fanfare in September 2020, becoming the league’s thirdhighest paid player at over $6 million per year. He had a reputation as a clinical finisher after scoring more than 225 goals for Real Madrid, Napoli and Juventus, plus 31 for the Argentine national team.
But he struggled on American soil, scoring just one goal in his first nine games, on a free kick. Higuain concedes that adapting to MLS was harder than he expected.
“I knew it would be a competitive league, but I thought it would be an easier transition,” he said. “Once I got here, I was surprised. It’s a very difficult league. Teams play an aggressive style, maybe a little less organized tactically [than in Europe], but players here are fast and strong. It’s a league that can wear you out physically because you have to run back and forth all the time. When I got here, I wasn’t sure how I would feel about it, but I grew to appreciate it and love it.”
Higuain’s early frustrations showed on the field. He hovered around the box waiting for teammates to serve him the ball, and when the passes didn’t arrive, he threw up his hands or shot disapproving glances. With time, he began to retreat deeper to get more involved in the attack and help defend.
He bonds with teammates over the locker room ping-pong table that was installed over the summer. Ping-pong and padel are his two biggest passions outside soccer. “I could play padel and ping-pong all day and never get bored,” he said. He is ranked No. 1 in the team’s unofficial pingpong standings. Other contenders include his brother Fede, Brek Shea, Sami Guediri, Leandro Gonzalez Pirez, Indiana Vassilev and Robbie Robinson.
Gonzalez Pirez, one of five Argentines on the team, has known the Higuains since they were kids. Although Gonzalez Pirez is four years younger than Gonzalo, they played for the same 5v5 youth club and had mutual friends. He said Higuain plays “otra cosa” – something else, at a different level.
“I spoke with him a lot about the league and club before he came to Miami,” Gonzalez Pirez said. “For us, Gonzalo is super important. He has incredible quality. Very few times in my career have I seen a player like him. He has great touch and footwork and body movement.
“Our job as teammates is to try to understand him, help him, keep him happy on the field and boost his confidence because we know when he’s happy we have a very good chance to win.”
Higuain has one year left on his contract. After that, he won’t say.
Asked about his future, he said smirking: “Rafa [Cabrera, the team’s media relations director] has a gun to my head and won’t let me answer that. I am focusing on day by day, game by game. And we’ll see what happens.”