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BEFORE GETTING TO the alleged mob hit or the mystery of the missing referee, there should be an explanation about how this quest began. An assigned profile of Luis Suarez led to a stack of things to read about his past. Whether it was a tabloid calling him Cannibal! or The New York Times calling him Luis Alberto Suarez Diaz, the portrait is of a cheat and a lunatic. If someone breathes on him near the goal, he falls down like he's been knifed. He has bitten an opponent. Twice. And, back in his childhood in Uruguay, there's an oft-reported incident that serves as explanation, or maybe proof, that he is, in fact, batshit crazy. When Suarez was 15, overcome with anger, he headbutted a referee and received a red card in a youth match, making the man's nose bleed "like a cow," as a witness said.
ESPN FC home No soccer player in the world provokes such a strong emotional response as Liverpool's striker, with less of an understanding of what lurks beneath the surface. His recent injury, which puts his World Cup fitness into doubt, makes him more intriguing. Yet knowing Suarez is difficult, since he seems to not know himself, and, regardless, he wouldn't talk to me. The best path to that knowledge would have to be a journey through his past, looking for clues. That was the plan: talk to people who knew him and let their memories paint a picture. Those who met him during his early years, especially the first person he ever assaulted, might offer slivers of insight. So in addition to visiting Suarez's mother, friends and neighbors, I wanted to sit down with the referee.
Nobody I called knew his name. I went to the bottom of the Internet in English, then paid someone to do the same in Spanish. Neither search revealed the man. He was never identified, not in a news story, not in the comments on a news story, not even in message boards. For a reporter, or even an experienced reader, something not being on the Internet sets off alarms. Further reading raised more: The referee story first appeared in one of the often sleazy London tabloids and spread from there, like fact-checking syphilis. One person told one reporter, and all the other stories repeated the anecdote. It bore all the telltale symptoms of origin myth.
Part of me wondered whether the referee ever existed at all, and that led to more questions, and ultimately, this odd little quest. Either I'd knock down a myth, which is journalist crack cocaine, or I'd come face to face with someone who'd been on the receiving end of the initial Suarez meltdown, which spawned, and perhaps would even explain, all that had happened since.
THE SEARCH BEGAN in Uruguay's capital, Montevideo, which curves around a long bend in the coastline. The water sparkles. I passed the impressive hotels and apartment buildings rising above the sea. The challenge of the phantom referee had drawn me to this beautiful city, where the rich live magical lives and, in the shadow of the main bus station, the poor live a century in the past. That's where Suarez grew up in a broken family and came of age as a football player.
Everyone defended Suarez. On the first day, my translator, Felipe, met me in the lobby of my hotel, and as we started making calls, a referee warned him that I had bad intentions. Why else would I want to find someone attacked by Suarez, if not to use the referee to bludgeon their favorite son?
People who should know didn't, and the first tremors of obsession began. A high-profile local attorney escorted us into his book-lined office. His socks and tie matched. His name was Enrique Moller, and when Suarez was 15, he was the judge who reviewed all youth league disciplinary problems. He remembered an incident involving Suarez but couldn't recall details. For sure, he said, he didn't remember an assault.
Moller hadn't kept any of his notes or a dusty file about the case. Felipe and I checked out stacks of old newspapers at the national library. The librarian retrieved our materials with a tiny Otis elevator. We took the bound volumes of El Pais and El Observador into the soft, yellow light of the reading room. Neither of us found a story about youth football or a mention of a 15-year-old phenom named Luis.
Someone told us the football federation would have records, but it didn't. The press officer gently admonished us, saying that there were thousands of incidents involving youth players, some minor and some serious, and we only cared about this one because it involved a kid who grew up to be Suarez. So, to recap, he didn't know whether there was an incident, and, if an incident did happen, it was surely minor, and, if it wasn't minor, it still didn't matter and our interest was proof of our own moral failings. At Nacional, the club where Luis played youth football, an employee disappeared down the dark halls of the facility to look for game-by-game stats, or even an old schedule. He emerged empty-handed.
The phone proved more useful than trekking around Montevideo. We started with a famous Uruguayan international referee, a man named Martin Vasquez, whom we caught up with in Chile, where he was working a match. He remembered rumors and whispers about an incident involving Suarez but didn't know a name. The Uruguayan referee community is small and tight, and he suggested other soccer people to call. We worked down the list, quickly explaining what we wanted and why. By the third or fourth call, we found a referee who remembered hearing about a confrontation involving Suarez, but, instead of a headbutt, it was a thrown cup of water. Two people told Felipe they remembered the alleged victim's identity.
EVERYTHING ABOUT LUIS SUAREZ is viewed and judged through his reputation, which, although familiar to fans around the world, might not be as clear in the relative soccer wastelands of America. Putting him in an American context is difficult because he transcends the sports page. Imagine the tabloid fodder of Lindsay Lohan's life with Jennifer Lawrence's acting chops. That's the unique place Suarez occupies in the European pop culture firmament. In April, the English Premier League named him player of the year. He has carried the reborn Liverpool side on his shoulders. And yet, despite his widely acknowledged greatness, people hate him.
A more responsible newspaper, the Toronto Star, toning down the rhetoric, said this: "He's the diviest, whiniest, annoyingest player on Earth. Though there are plenty of aspirants, he is easily the most hated man in football. ... North of his feet, there is nothing good about Suarez. He couldn't be more awful if he came out of the tunnel twirling mustachios."
The two most well-known examples of said awfulness are, of course, the two times he bit opponents on the field. In November 2010, playing for Ajax in Amsterdam, he bit midfielder Otman Bakkal on the shoulder during an argument. Suarez never played for Ajax again. Less than three years later, now with Liverpool and jockeying in front of the goal in a match against Chelsea, he sank his teeth into the right forearm of Branislav Ivanovic. Both times, Suarez responded to the normal action of the game with a completely inappropriate, nutty overreaction.
Beyond the biting, he dives, famously and often, flailing on the ground if a defender even thinks of touching him, and there's the entire debate in England about whether he's a racist. Playing Manchester United, he reportedly called Patrice Evra negrito -- "little black" -- and, after finishing serving his suspension for racially abusing an opponent, he refused to shake Evra's hand before a match. The same newspaper, the Toronto Star, in the same piece, also wrote: "He will do something insane at this summer's World Cup -- mark it down. ... Eventually, he'll punch a baby."
Those were the things I'd internalized about Suarez by the time I arrived in Uruguay. His reputation prepared me to believe any sort of wild story, and, while Felipe worked the phone looking for more information on Larranaga, a wild story is exactly what I found. We sat in the lobby, and I searched the web for Luis Larranaga and Luis Suarez. Nothing.
One link led to a local blog about the hidden mafia running Uruguayan football, about drug cartels using the sport to launder money. The author across many posts built a case for systemic corruption. In the middle of the allegations, there was a story about how, in 2003, the head of youth soccer, Nelson Spillman, threatened a referee named Luis Larranaga.
Spillman, according to the story, tried to pressure Larranaga into changing a postmatch report to the disciplinary committee -- the one chaired by the lawyer with the matching tie and socks. Larranaga had given a red card to an unnamed player who then physically assaulted him. Quick math said that Suarez would have been 16 then, not 15, so either the timeline didn't work or the news reports were off by a year.
The story got weirder. An investigative reporter broke the news about Spillman threatening Larranaga. Less than a month later, a hit man shot the reporter at the door of his house. The hit man had been paid $500. The assassination failed, and Nelson Spillman and his brother, Daniel, who reportedly drove the getaway car, went to jail for the botched hit.
TO SUAREZ'S DETRACTORS, the headbutt story provides a structure for the biting and the other horrible behavior, taking distinct incidents and organizing them into a narrative. The headbutt sounds true. Well, it sounds true to soccer fans in Europe. In Uruguay, where Suarez is a treasure, the story doesn't fit into the nation's image of the star. To Wilson Pirez, the scout who discovered Suarez as a poor, skinny 9-year-old kid, the rest of the world is wrong.
Pirez met us at a steakhouse near the Montevideo docks, where dark bars offer cheap international calls and cheaper drinks to sailors rushing off the container ships. Daylight dies a few feet inside the lawless saloons, and everything is for sale. At the restaurant, thick cuts of grass-fed beef cooked on open wood fires, and the whole place smelled like melting fat and salt. Pirez told us about how a reporter from England misquoted him. Suarez had read the comments and called his friend to basically find out, you know, What the hell, man? Pirez assured him he hadn't said those things, then called the newspaper to rant. But the scout knew the drill. "They ask me, 'Was he that bad when he was a kid?'" Pirez said. "Searching for the answer that suits their story, which is 'Suarez is violent.' I get angry. Why are you searching for that?"
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