SAID HE HAD A BAD BACK
Photo by Lewis Mitchell [lewismitchellphoto.photoshelter.com]
Megan Feringa
Is this necessary? Ruminating over the history of a 32-year-old human’s body part, a body part dangerously encroaching legend status? Because surely Gareth Bale’s back deserves such a rank, sat up there with his glossy man bun and sinewy tree-trunk legs, a few steps down from his left and right feet but steps nonetheless.
In case you missed it, Bale’s back seized headlines again, after Real Madrid’s 4-0 victory over Espanyol on Saturday evening. The triumph officially sealed Real’s title as La Liga champions, the club’s 35th title in its history, along with sealing manager Carlo Ancelloti’s status as the first manager to win the league in all five of Europe's major leagues.
If you were looking for a carousing Bale amongst the revelry, you’d be hard pressed. Bale tweeted his congratulations to his team afterwards, followed by an admission of “devastation” that he could not join in on the celebrations due to a “bad back spasm”.
Cue bedlam.
Bale’s bad back is no new controversy. What is new is the blatancy with which Bale has addressed it.
Because even after Bale missed Real Madrid’s humiliating 4-0 El Clasico defeat last month —pulling out last minute due to an unspecified injury that Spanish reports boiled down to “bad back” — Bale never explicitly owed anything to his back in the days after while he warmed up with Wales, miraculously back-pain free. Instead, Bale refused to offer up any clarity, stating no matter what he said, trouble would commence.
Trouble did, predictably, as it did on Saturday evening, which only naturally begs the question: When was the last time, if ever, a man’s vertebrae simultaneously incensed and inspired an international football audience to this extent? Has any one managed to conjure up such simultaneous rancour and reverence along a single corporeal fault line?
Because there is a perceptible fault line. Upon which side one falls depends on one’s allegiance: to Bale or to Real Madrid. To the man who has provided football so many magical moments but has since, ostensibly and unedifyingly, faded into the annals of history? Or to one of football’s greatest ever clubs?
It is worth at least attempting to remember where the root of this all lies, following that fateful invitation from Team GB for the 2012 Olympics. Bale ruled himself out due to a recurring back and hip injury suffered while running. No harm, no foul - that is until he played for Tottenham on their pre-season tour of the United States, scoring against LA Galaxy in Carson, California, just weeks later.
Such was the starting pistol, the moment Bale’s back suddenly became synonymous with snub. Only then, seemingly, the phenomenon began to take on a life of its own, one that not even its owner could have envisaged. How could he? How was Bale to know Wales fans would turn the perceived snub into a six-word refrain in a pro-Welsh battle cry hinged on his legacy? How was he to know his back would become an icon in its own right, a source of national pride, a verbal statue, one impossible to defame or vandalize or strip away from those determined to sing it to the heavens? It mattered little, if at all, if the back was actually bad. The damage was done, the legacy written.
But then, perhaps it is microcosmic of Bale, whose own stature and essence has tumbled into something wholly larger than he could have ever have envisaged for himself. A god of epic proportions for Wales football fans, their modern-day atlas, the man who made Wales relevant, the man who made them believe.
Of course, we are talking about a man’s back, 24-33 small bones on average. Then, when has anything Bale done ever been plainly average?