The tragic fate of the player that Barça discarded
Barça reunites with Oviedo, 25 years later, the club where the late Peter Dubovsky played.
Barcelona"It was an earthquake, a shock, a tremendous reality check," explains journalist Sergio Cortina, reliving Oviedo's fall: from the First and even European divisions to the Third, to being one inch away from disappearing. This Thursday, the Asturian team hosts Barça again, 25 seasons after the last two matches: a 2-3 win for Barça at the Tartiere and a 0-1 loss for Asturias at the Camp Nou, with Carles Rexach in the dugout and Richard Dutruel in goal. Other times. That ordeal led Oviedo to play against teams from neighborhoods in the city or surrounding towns, even on dirt fields turned into mudflats. In 2013, they lost 4-1 to Sporting Gijón's reserve team. In 2014, by 1 to 4.
Cortina recalls that the situation was so delicate that a coach set up his office in a stadium restroom because Oviedo owed so much money that they even cut off his electricity. "If it snowed one day, I had to bring people down with shovels to remove the snow," adds the author of Leaving Dark StreetThe team has "finally" finished its journey, and the city is once again savoring a reality that once seemed confined to the past, to photo albums. Many still remember that 3-0 victory over Barça on April 15, 2000. Luis Aragonés and Louis van Gaal were on the benches. He didn't play, but one of the great stars of that Oviedo side was Peter Dubovsky. He would die two months later.
Josep Maria Minguella, the players' agent, had discovered him in 1993. He proposed him to Barça and was told no. He proposed him to Madrid and was told yes. They had already finalized the signing and the terms, years and salary, with the technical director, and they went to see the president, Ramón Mendoza, to present the agreement. "He said no: 'That can't be right. A Real Madrid player can't earn so little.' He took a piece of paper and wrote down some figures. They weren't what they pay now, but it went up quite a bit, eh. It's the only time something like that has happened to me. I was used to negotiating with Núñez, who you were talking about." "We returned to the hotel and told the player we had gotten his salary increased," he says, laughing. Real Madrid, forced to break the Dream Team's hegemony, paid 500 million pesetas. Cruyff said that signing Romário was "much better and cheaper." Mendoza replied: "I'm not interested in what that guy says."
Dubovsky, from Slovan Bratislava, arrived in Madrid at 21, as a striker with both present and future. But he didn't work out at the Bernabéu. Two years later, already ruled out, he left for Oviedo. In Tartiere he recovered his smile and his football and became an idol for the fans. He was a very cold person, so much so that he was known as the ice prince, so much so that some afternoons he was even booed because he transmitted apathy, indolence and despaired the crowd, but he was a magical footballer, a number 10 with a silky left foot. Once a coach, Ivica Brzic, told a teammate: "He's a weird guy, but give him the ball.".
Peter Dubovsky's fateful vacation in Thailand
In the summer of 2000, he went on vacation to Thailand with his girlfriend, Aurelia, and his brother and sister-in-law. He loved exotic destinations and photography: on June 23, while photographing the Na Muang Falls on the island of Ko Samui, more than 10,000 kilometers from Oviedo, he slipped and fell about twenty meters into the void. "He was conscious and talking to us. His pelvic area hurt, but at no point did we suspect that the blow to his head was an internal hemorrhage that would end his life a few hours later," his partner recalled to The World. They say that while he was hovering between life and death, he kept saying that he wanted to go home. He fell in a very difficult place to reach: the emergency teams took four or five hours to arrive and there was nothing that could be done. He was 28 years old.
He had taken a ring to propose to his girlfriend. His death shocked the football world and especially Oviedo. Looking back, it's the end of the bright years and the beginning of the dark years: the following year the team would be relegated to the Second Division. His teammates talk about the bitterness of entering the locker room and seeing their coat rack so empty, orphaned. "Yesterday, on the beach, in the heat, I was frozen and a little alone," wrote former Barça player Xabier Eskurza, a teammate at Oviedo, the day after his death in The Country. He explained that every time he returned to the Basque Country, he would ask for anchovies, "as often as only a friend can afford."
Today, he still speaks of Dubovsky with melancholy: "The feeling I had was one of disbelief. The funeral was terrible, and my feelings were more of pain, but at first, after we hung up, it was mostly: 'Wow, this is a dream, this can't happen, this didn't happen, this isn't possible, this isn't possible.' It's been 25 years since his death, so dramatic and so drastic. "If I think about him, I feel the sadness of the life he lost. When you start to remember, they sell you images, and it's like seeing him again. It seems like I'm seeing him again. But above all, there remains the sadness of loss." There also remains the indelible legacy of a player who has become a legend, a symbol of a fan base that has returned from the mud.
