First things first: If you haven't seen Lionel Messi's most famous goal, watch it now. You don't have to follow soccer to get a rush when the smallest guy on the pitch turns a routine possession pass into a 60-meter goal, slicing past six defenders. Few athletes in any sport dominate others with this kind of elegance.
Messi can be just as elusive off the pitch.
Some athletes work the media, cashing in on endorsement money. Some just enjoy the attention. Messi is too reserved for either and good enough to remain indifferent. Even after five months of planning my visit with FC Barcelona's international public relations director, I spent days waiting for Messi in the press room at Camp Nou. Some days the club arranged alternative interviews. Others I left empty-handed.
I don't know how Barcelona's soccer media get any work done. Outside the daily news conferences, the room was always crowded with soccer pilgrims on the stadium tour. The FC Barcelona museum draws more visitors than any in the region -- 1.2 million went there in 2008 -- and a good number take the tour. I heard Dutch, German, Italian, Portuguese and the queen's English. One day, a radio journalist snapped, begging security to give her 10 minutes of relative silence. That's all she got.
This was my second trip to Barcelona last year. The first time, I profiled NBA draft prospect Ricky Rubio, snooped for signs of Ronaldinho's alleged nocturnal habits and got the ball rolling for the Messi interview. So I found some things to do while I waited, reporting on this blog from an unusual bullfight and an obscure slam dunk competition. I also caught up with Rubio's agent, former ACB league tough guy German Gonzalez. He outfitted me with a drum and a hat, then suggested I just follow his lead.
The stake-out was easier with good coffee. I passed on the city's overpriced, undersized hotels and rented a third-floor studio on a narrow medieval street in the Sant Pere quarter. Every morning, I'd drink café con leche at the coffee bar around the corner, on Carrer de Sant Pere Mes Alt near Carrer de l'Argentera. If you see a stalled electric train set up on a shelf near the ceiling and your barista is a sarcastic Argentine with long brown hair and a gap-toothed smile, you're in the right place.
If you're in Barcelona, I recommend this arrangement. The neighborhood was a wedge of normalcy, short on tourists but dense with immigrants. I got concerned looks from the men who crowded the storefront mosque two doors down, but the halal storekeepers were friendly, and the Pakistani barber loved talking soccer.
When I finally sat down with Messi, he was polite but distracted. Clearly, interviews were not his favorite activity. But on the subject of soccer, he waxed almost zenlike and circular. His debut with the first team, he said, "was beautiful, for all that it was." The pressure to win at Barcelona, he said, "is also a beautiful pressure. I am calm. Everybody at Barcelona feels that pressure because of the club that it is. This club has to win." He had little to say about his assist to Eto'o against Betis, or a later play when he took three bodychecks in the area on one play, even pawing at the turf with his hand to stay on his feet. I asked about the grid of pinprick scabs on his calf. "Somebody stepped on me," he said, shrugging.
Is Messi the best player in the world? The debate itself is more interesting to me. For weeks, I asked soccer fans to make their case: Who is the best player in the world? Bobcats center Boris Diaw voted for his friend Thierry Henry, but budged when I told him Henry had voted for Messi. I e-mailed skateboarder Bob Burnquist, who voted for fellow Brazilian Robinho. "You can make a hundred goals and win games," he wrote. "But if you are poetry in motion, and you improvise amazing plays and in the end you pass the ball for someone else to make the goal, you will earn the respect of many. Artistry is what inspires!" I called Cubs pitcher Carlos Zambrano, who voted for Kaká. "We talk about it every day at my house, or wherever we happen to be," he said. "We talk more about soccer than we talk about baseball. My friend here says it's Messi."
"We talk about it every day at my house, or wherever we happen to be. We talk more about soccer than we talk about baseball. My friend here says [the best player] is Messi." -- Cubs pitcher Carlos Zambrano
My favorite vote came a month after I had returned from Spain, as I sat in the back of a yellow cab outside the Utah Jazz's practice facility in Salt Lake City. I asked my cab driver, a 39-year-old Baghdad native, what he thought. Without speaking, he held up his iPhone, where Arabic letters scrolled across a green pitch. I later learned that Mohammed al-Uqaili grew up watching Liverpool before listening to European soccer on the radio to get through eight years in a refugee camp as a young man, hundreds of miles from anywhere in the Saudi Arabian desert.
I knew the clip so well, I could see it with my eyes closed -- and sometimes did. Still, I watched Messi take a pass beyond the midline, tap-dance around one defender, short-step the second and burst downfield, arms churning, ball glued to his feet. Al-Uqaili remained somber as Messi cut left of the third man, right of the fourth's outstretched boot, then charged past the stumbling goalkeeper. After Messi twisted all 147 pounds behind his right foot, firing his famous goal past the sixth defender's diving slide, al-Uqaili nodded with authority, and said, "that is the best player in the world."
I couldn't disagree.
Chad Nielsen is a contributing writer to ESPN The Magazine.