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

Pepe reacting in real time to the goring makes the scene exponentially more horrifying. Suddenly the tiny bullfighter is no remote cartoon of pain but a fully dimensioned human: their son. After Marques spears Padilla, his mother’s face erupts in sobs. Pepe doesn’t think he will ever recover from his son’s accident.
    â€œI thought that I had killed him,” he says in a raw voice. “I thought that I had murdered my son. I was the one who encouraged him in this profession . . .”
    Pepe Padilla has raised three toreros. (Oscar, the middle son, retired as a banderillero the day after Juan Jose’s goring and now runs a chain of pet-supply stores.) Pepe coached his sons after school, caping cows with them in the green hills around Jerez. He once dreamed of being a matador himself. As a teenager, he was a
novillero
, a matador in training. “But I was a coward,” he says, smiling. “Not like my Juan.”
    Today, Pepe is a charmer in his sixties with uncorrected teeth, gold jewelry wreathed by silver chest hair, and one droopy eyelid. For decades he worked as a baker in Jerez, sleeping three or four hours, heading back out before dawn to support his seven children. (Seven children! Franco years, he grins, shaking his head. Everything scarce and hard-won, including condoms.) Juan Jose appeared on May 23, 1973; Pepe says he was born to
torear
. When he was eight, he was written up in a bullfighting journal for having “the courage of a 30-year-old matador.” When he was 12, he killed his first bull. At 21, he became the first and only man in his family to achieve the rank of professional matador.
    â€œAll of my sons were good,” Pepe says. “But Juan had something special.” He stares into space for a long time, as if seeking the precise descriptor for this ineffable quality.
    â€œHuevos!” He grins. “Cojones!”
    Later, as Juan Jose made his bones as a young matador, he earned a reputation for fighting the world’s most difficult and aggressive bulls: Victorinos, Pablo Romeros, and especially Miuras, a strain of fighting bull notorious for maiming and killing many toreros. Padilla’s style was defined by his incredible—and lunatic—valor. He did moves nobody else would dare. He was one of the few matadors to put in his own banderillas, to cape bulls on his knees. One consequence of this bravura is that Padilla might well be the record holder when it comes to bullring injuries: before the Zaragoza goring, he had already been seriously wounded by the
toros
38 times. He nearly died in Pamplona in 2001, when a Miura bull gored him in the neck.
    Â 
    Overnight, Padilla’s story flies around the globe: he’s a hero in Spain, elsewhere a grotesque footnote to the “real” daily news. A Twitter sensation: #Fuerzapadilla. His shattered face becomes the public face of bullfighting.
    Once the media storm dies down and his condition is stabilized, Juan travels home to the seaside pueblo of Sanlucar, where he lives with Lidia and their two children, Paloma, eight, and Martin, six. At home, he is left to relearn kindergarten skills in private, miles from any bullring. How to chew and swallow. How to ride his bicycle and grocery shop, cycloptically. The ringing in his left ear never stops. It hurts to talk. Unable to train for a corrida, some days he can’t stop crying. Prior to the accident, he was a joyful, open, easygoing guy. Which is not to say that he was necessarily an even-keeler. He has always had a strong character, just like the noble bulls he fights, Pepe explains, “because of his
raza
,” his fiery lineage. Juan Jose can be tempestuous, irritable, “and then there’s nothing to be done, you have to leave him alone!”
    But the mood that sucks him under in October is something new. Like the eye he can’t open, it’s black and unchanging.
    â€œI fell into a great depression,” says