Tag Archives: conde nast

The Last Matador for GQ (unedited)

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Padilla at home (Photo Zed Nelson/GQ/Condé Nast 2012)

It was the last bullfight of the Spanish season, held, as it has been for centuries, in the 250-year-old plaza de toros in Zaragoza in north-eastern Spain.

Juan José Padilla, a 38-year-old matador from Andalusia in the south, was fighting the fourth bull of six (he’d also fought the first.)

The bull, ‘Marqués’, was a 508kg (1,120lb) toro bravo born 5 years and 8 months previously on the ranch of Ana Romero, also in Andalusia. Before entering this ring it had lived wild, ranched from horseback, and had never before seen a man on the ground.

Padilla passing a bull with the magenta and gold two-handed capote, ‘cape’ (Photo: Alexander Fiske-Harrison)

Padilla was midway through the second of the three acts of the spectacle. He had already caped the bull with the large, two-handed magenta and gold cape, the capote, then the picador had done his dirty work with the lance from horseback, tiring the bull and damaging its neck muscles to bring its head down.

Now Padilla, rather than delegate to his team as other matadors do, was placing the banderillas himself, the multi-coloured sticks with their barbed steel heads. He had put in two pairs and was on the third. He ran at the bull with a banderilla in either hand, it responded with a charge, Padilla leapt into the air, it reared, he placed his sticks in its shoulders and landed.

Juan José Padilla ‘places’ the banderillas (Credit: WENN US / Alamy Stock Photo)

Running backwards from the charging bull, his eyes were focused on the horns coming at him in an action he had performed tens of thousands of times before. However, this time his right foot came down slightly off centre and in the path of his left, foot hit ankle, and then he was down.

In a breath the bull was on him and its horn took Padilla under his left ear, cracking the skull there, destroying the audial nerve, and then driving into the jaw at its joint. It smashed up through both sets of molars and ripped through muscle and skin before exploding his cheek bone as surely as a rifle bullet, stopping only as it came out through the socket of his left eye – from behind – taking his eyeball out with it, shattering his nose and then ripping clean out of the side of his head.

There is an image I will never lose, much as I wish I could. It is of a man standing with half his face held in his right hand. Cheek, jaw and eyeball, like so much meat, resting in his palm as he walked towards his team uncomprehending, and they, with looks of absolute horror, grabbed his arms and rushed him to the infirmary of the ring.

The second worst image

And yet here, in the amongst the carnage inflicted on a human body by a half ton of enraged animal, is the key to Juan José Padilla. The clue is in the phrase “stood up.”

Soccer players are stretchered off the field from a tap to the ankle. Boxers go down from a padded glove. This was more than half a ton of muscle, focused into a pointed tip that ploughed through his skull like a sword through snow. And the man got up and walked.

Then came coma and intensive care and surgery after surgery. Continue reading →

“He came to Seville, and he is called Manzanares”

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Matador José Mari Manzanares dances a ‘chicuelina’ with the 510kg, 4-year, 10-month-old J P Domecq bull ‘Rasguero’ (Photo: Alexander Fiske-Harrison)

Gregorio Corrochano, the bullfighter critic of the influential newspaper, A. B. C., in Madrid, said of him, “Es de Ronda y se llama Cayetano.” He is from Ronda, the cradle of bullfighting, and they call him Cayetano, a great bullfighter’s name; the first name of Cayetano Sanz, the greatest old-time stylist. The phrase went all over Spain.

from Ernest Hemingway’s Death In The Afternoon (1932)

In this year’s Feria de San Miguel in Seville I watched the new hero of that city return to the sand to confirm yet again his supremacy in a mano a mano with another very skilled young matador named Alejandro Talavante.

* * *
Note

From here on in, I shall refer to what we English call a ‘bullfight’ as a corrida de toros (literally ‘coursing of bulls’) or just a corrida, and bullfighters as toreros (lit. ‘those who deal with bulls’). All activities involving bulls in Spain come under the blanket term fiesta de los toros, aka the fiesta brava or fiesta nacional or just the Fiesta, the activity of bullfighting is called tauromaquia – we have the old word tauromachy in English – and the art, technique and style of bullfighthing is called toreo.

Continue reading →

GQ magazine on the comeback of the bravest bullfighter in Spain: Juan José Padilla

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My British GQ article on the comeback of the now one-eyed bullfighter Juan José Padilla is online here. The US edition of GQ sent there own author to interview him afterwards, which was silly, as she hadn’t the first idea about bullfighting – whereas I’ve been doing it since 2009 – nor Padilla and his place in that world – whereas as I had the man as my first teacher. The photo below is of the two of us during one of those lessons. We were both very different men then. He had two eyes…

Fiske-Harrison and Padilla training with a young fighting bull in 2009.

By coincidence, Claire Danes, the beautiful actress on the cover of the issue on which the article appeared is a dear friend whom I thanked in the acknowledgments to the book that came out of those two years in Spain Into The Arena: The World Of The Spanish Bullfight in the first five chapters of which Padilla is so central. So I must thank her once again in the acknowledgments to this article, this time for providing such glamorous packaging.

Padilla is a man of great dignity, aesthetically and internally, but he isn’t exactly pretty. And, as Zed Nelon’s wonderful spread which opens the physical edition of the article shows, he ain’t no cover girl. The photo is in his house, which we went to the day before his comeback ‘fight.’

Please note, should you read the article, that, GQ holds the view, in common with many other publications, that when you pay a writer for his words, you have also bought the right to put words in his mouth.

I, personally, could not write a phrase like “my dread boiled.” (What I actually wrote was “I was worried.”) My dread just doesn’t boil (anymore).

Nor could I have written that the Spanish financial bailout was £80m. I used to work for the Financial Times and know a million from a billion.

Nor did I write the paragraph below, which appeared twice, once as a pull quote. I don’t even really agree with it.

Just so you know. (Bullfighters do not compare bull’s horns to “a Louboutin stilleto”. Ever.)

Anyway, much of the article is mine, and all of Padilla’s words are his own, which on their own would make it worth reading. However, if you come across something in the article that feels wrong, then it probably is, and probably didn’t come from me.

Anyway, if you want to know Padilla’s whole story, and much, much more, read my book Into The Arena: The World Of The Spanish Bullfight. You can purchase it as an eBook via GQ on their website where it tops their recommendation list here. (It was also shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award, “the world’s richest sports’ writing prize”.)

If you live outside the UK or want it as a physcial book, other options are here.

Alexander Fiske-Harrison