The Best American Sports Writing 2013 Read Online Free PDF Page A

later swears he can’t remember. Tears run down his cheeks. He’s survived 27 gorings himself, but what he sees in Zaragoza makes him consider quitting the profession.
    Cornadas
—gorings—are so common that every plaza is legally required to have a surgeon on site. Bullfighters now routinely survive injuries that would have killed their fathers and grandfathers. Good luck, now, excellent luck: Carlos Val-Carreres is the Zaragoza surgeon, one of the best in Spain.
    â€œI’m asphyxiating,” Padilla gasps as they bring him in. Many hands guide him into the shadowy infirmary. Someone scissors off his clothing. Someone inserts a breathing tube into his windpipe. Val-Carreres understands instantly that this is a potentially fatal
cornada
, one of the worst he’s seen in 30 years, and one they are ill equipped to handle in the infirmary. Padilla, now tracheally intubated, is loaded into an ambulance.
    Pronóstico muy grave
, Val-Carreres tells reporters.
    At 7:52 P.M ., half an hour after the goring, Padilla arrives at the emergency room. He presents with multiple fractures to the left side of his face, a detached ear, a protruding eyeball, and hemorrhage at the base of his skull. A five-hour operation saves his life. The surgeons rebuild his cheekbone and eyelid and nose, with mesh and titanium plates. But they are unable to repair his split facial nerve, which has been divided by the bull’s horn, because they cannot locate the base of the nerve. Padilla wakes up from the anesthesia to discover that he can no longer move the left side of his face. It is paralyzed.
    When he comes to, his first words to his manager, Diego Robles, are: “Don’t cancel any of my contracts in South America.” Padilla has November bullfights in Venezuela, Peru, and Ecuador.
    His first words to his youngest brother, Jaime, who is also a bullfighter, a
banderillero
, and scheduled to perform in two days’ time: “Don’t cancel your fight. You have to do it for us. You can’t let this get the best of you.”
    His first words to his wife, Lidia: “Where is my eye?”
    The eye is back in its proper place, but sightless—the optic nerve has been elongated and lesioned by the horn. He’s also deaf in his left ear, and the entire left side of his face is purple and bloated, like something viewed underwater. His eyelid is sealed shut. His mouth curls inward like a wilted leaf.
    â€œI was there when he saw himself for the first time after the accident,” recalls Diego. “He saw the reality in front of him. He said,
‘Es que no soy yo—’
”
    No. That’s not me
. Here is a vertigo a thousand times more destabilizing than his slip in the plaza: he does not recognize himself.
    There is the physical pain, which the doctors reduce with morphine, and then there is the terror. They’re telling him he might never again wear his “suit of lights.” Never stand before another bull. If he can’t return to a plaza, he’ll be exiled from his life. Evicted from his own skin.
    In his hospital room, as soon as he can move again, he begins to rehearse bullfighting moves with the sheets. And on October 19, less than two weeks after the accident, he gives a press conference in a wheelchair with his face uncovered.
    â€œI have no rancor toward this bull or toward my profession,” he slurs into the mike. He makes the following pledge: “I will return to dress as a
torero
.”
    Â 
    II. The Wild Feast and the Matador’s Famine
    Â 
    A millennium and a half after Moorish cavaliers rode into Spain and began to cultivate the bullfighting tradition, a few hundred years after trendy nobles staged bullfights to celebrate weddings and Catholic festivals, nearly a century since the golden age of the matador, when Juan Belmonte and Joselito “the Little Rooster” pioneered the mad modern style of “artistic” caping (working