BajaNews - 7-1-2006 at 12:21 PM
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/13614816/
By BERNIE WILSON
June 29, 2006
TIJUANA, Mexico (AP) -Santiago Gonzalez takes a jittery final puff of a cigarette, a last swig of lemonade and abandons the shade of a eucalyptus tree
to walk shoulder-to-shoulder with five fellow toreros into the rustic bullring beyond the backstretch of a once-famous racetrack.
Among the 300 or so spectators are his wife and several friends from Southern California. His two children, 12-year-old Santiago IV and 11-year-old
Victoria, form half of a flamenco guitar group that plays during and between the six bullfights.
Family pride, as well as avoiding the animal's sharp horns, is important.
"Sometimes that can be heavier than the bull,'' says Gonzalez, one of the world's top amateur bullfighters, who is introduced as "El Santy.''
Bullfights in which bulls are killed are prohibited in the United States, although bloodless bullfights are held in places such as California's
Central Valley.
Not so in Tijuana. There are two big bullrings where the professional matadors do their fighting, and private festivals for amateurs such as Gonzalez,
a painting contractor from San Diego's funky Ocean Beach district who also helps run a bullfighting academy.
The Festival Gran Taurina is held once a year at the old Caliente racetrack, now home to dog racing, a casino and a sprawling private zoo owned by
mayor Jorge Hank Rohn, who favors lions, tigers, bears, camels, monkeys and ostriches.
Gonzalez tosses his round, flat-brimmed hat over his shoulder onto the ground, which means he's dedicating the fight to the crowd. The previously
wounded bull charges for several minutes and the torero stylishly passes it close to his body, first with his capote - a magenta cape - and then his
muleta - the red cape.
When it's time for the kill, Gonzalez lowers his muleta to get the bull to drop its head, then reaches his sword over the horns with his right arm. He
wants a perfect thrust between the shoulders that will sever the bull's aorta, but instead strikes bone and is clearly angry at himself. A second
thrust drops the bovine.
Deeming that Gonzalez has fought well, the president of the bullring awards him the animal's left ear as a trophy. While circling the ring to
applause, Gonzalez spots some surfing buddies from Ocean Beach. His wife has told him she doesn't want any more bull's ears at home, so he tosses it
their way. One catches it in his baseball cap.
Gonzalez receives many compliments on his fight, but isn't happy with the way the bull fought.
"I'm pleased with a lot of the stuff I did, but it's like I wanted to eat myself a double-cheeseburger and I got a hamburger. I wanted more. I wanted
the bull to do more,'' he says.
The hamburger analogy is figurative, not literal.
Gonzalez usually donates the meat from the bulls he kills to orphanages or retirement homes. But the six bulls killed on this sweltering Saturday
afternoon, El Santy is told, will be fed to the mayor's lions.
---
The 38-year-old Gonzalez was born in Chicago, where his father worked for Motorola. His family later moved back to Mexico, where his father,
grandfather and uncles had been toreros of various skill levels. His grandfather took him to his first bullfight. Intrigued, he learned the
centuries-old art of fighting bulls, or toreo.
"I feel like I can express myself a lot doing it,'' Gonzalez says. "It's a challenge in a way that when you first start, you get this adrenaline rush
and then after you're done, you're so drained. I think in a way you get addicted to that feeling, you know, feeling that sense of rush. You get closer
to God, you get closer to your family. You're reflecting whatever you have inside of you with this. You're getting all your feeling inside when you
hear the music and you feel the bull.''
Gonzalez, who is 5-foot-7 and 149 pounds, has felt the bull in more ways than one. He has scars on his left knee and forehead from horn wounds. He
says he once was gored in the groin, an injury that would make any man wince.
Gonzalez moved to San Diego after the 1985 Mexico City earthquake, and discovered overlapping cultures. While learning to surf north of the border, he
hooked up with bullfighting clubs south of it. He also met Coleman Cooney, a screenwriter who runs the California Academy of Tauromaquia out of his
home in Alpine, on the eastern edge of San Diego's suburban sprawl.
Gonzalez was briefly one of the academy's students, until Cooney, a San Diego native who lived in Madrid, Spain, for eight years, realized how good he
was. Now he serves as the academy's technical director.
The academy opened in 1997 and has educated about 1,000 students from all over the United States.
"I was a fan in a kind of a traditional San Diego way, in that when I was a kid, I was taken to the bullfight several times and pronounced it good,
interesting, like most kids do,'' Cooney says.
Cooney teaches toreo de salon, which is practicing the cape work without bulls present. Students are then turned over to Gonzalez for a trip to a
Mexican ranch for a tienta, where they test - but don't kill - pedigreed yearling fighting bulls.
It costs about $900 for a student who lives in San Diego and trains for three months. Out-of-towners can take classes that last a weekend or a week.
By the time they've killed their first bull, students have spent around $2,000.
"It's easy to spend a lot more,'' says Cooney, who leads trips to central Mexico and Spain.
Cooney says he's killed eight bulls. Gonzalez estimates he's killed 50 bulls in the last 10 years, including some in Spain.
"Santiago has tasted triumph as an amateur. He's been at the top of the amateur thing,'' Cooney says.
---
In his 1932 novel "Death in the Afternoon,'' Ernest Hemingway described Spanish bullfighting as "a decadent art.''
The bulls fought by amateurs such as Gonzalez aren't the thundering beasts Hemingway wrote about, but at 550-600 pounds, they're still angry and eager
to gore.
After being released into the ring, a bull first is speared by a picador, a man on horseback, to weaken its shoulder muscles and make it lower its
horns later in the fight. It then has up to four banderillas, or colorful barbed sticks, stuck in its back, which are supposed to enliven and focus it
for the final, deadly act.
The first two fights at the Festival Gran Taurina, both involving locals who are not connected with Cooney's academy, go poorly. The first torero, a
chubby man, needs 11 sword thrusts to kill his bull, which looks like a sickly milk cow with horns.
In the second fight, the torero's suit has been smeared with the bull's blood, and then he falls and almost gets gored by the wounded animal. After
the fifth sword thrust fails to bring down the bull, an elderly American man begins to heckle: "Get a gun. Get a hammer.'' More sword jabs, and the
bovine is still standing. "Whack him ... hit him with a stick,'' comes the catcall. An assistant finally applies the coup de grace.
"Adios,'' the gringo yells.
"In the amateur field, there's the pathetic and also the sublime,'' Cooney says later.
Gonzalez's traje corto, or traditional suit of black trousers and a short, wine-colored jacket, stays clean, although he has to fend off the bull a
few times with his hands.
"Santiago did very well,'' Cooney says.
---
Gonzalez has heard the arguments that bullfighting is cruel.
"I think it's a lot more dignified to die in a ring fighting for your life, getting a chance to get a guy or two, than from behind the back with an
electric shock or something like that,'' he says.
Cooney's academy has a clientele because Americans have "a big, latent interest in bulls,'' he says. "They're attracted to them for the same reasons
people around the world are - they're big, powerful, beautiful, violent animals that have this exotic air to them. You can see them in advertising and
things like that - bulls, bulls, bulls. It's like we want them, but we're not sure how to get them.''
Then again, not all bulls die.
Gonzalez won a major international festival in January in Leon, Mexico. He says he fought the bull for a half hour, and it gave him pass after pass.
The judge wanted him to kill it, but the crowd whistled for it to live. He also heard his son yell, "Dad, don't kill him.''
The judge relented and Gonzalez led the bull out of the ring.
"The most noble animal I ever fought,'' Gonzalez says. "If you're like a surfer trying to find a perfect wave, this was like my perfect wave.
"I usually, after a fight, get really drained out,'' he says. "I feel like I don't want to do anything, you put so much into it, the stress of the
days before, the next day you are down. This time I felt very high. It was really a real, real big reward. It was very satisfying.''