The tired old coach sits alone in the darkness of his academic office. After three hard-won victories over college football powerhouses San Francisco State, UCLA and Southern Methodist, the University of Akron has eliminated the Fresno State Bulldogs from the 1988 NCAA playoffs. The eclectic collection of books sitting on his bookshelf and an old Basque shepherd’s cane bear witness to his silent contemplation over the loss. He adjusts his glasses and rises from his chair. He walks over to Fresno State’s Arena Theater cheered on by a gathering crowd. The old man recognizes some of his students in the crowd. A feint grin comes over his face. The applause fades in his mind. He once again goes into battle: this time not for a football championship but for the hearts and minds of young people. Federico García Lorca and Albert Camus come to life through the old professor’s voice. They learn of a gypsy dying from a broken heart, of a romantic Andalusian world that has been destroyed by civil strife, and of a fictional Algerian teacher named Daru who feels alone in his own homeland.¹ The old man finishes with the satisfaction that he has gifted young people with a new appreciation for poetry and literature. The night was not one of defeat but one of success for the core of his football philosophy. This is Dr. José Elgorriaga and this is his story.

Sports Illustrated: Elgorriaga in his academic office

Methodology 

Beginning in the late nineteenth century and continuing into the present day, many sports, including football soccer, have been appropriated and utilized by the top and by the bottom for their own purposes; while nation-states have utilized football to assert domestic control and project soft power onto the global community, individuals and social groups have also used sport to demand or assert their rights and to disrupt sociocultural systems premised on either racial or gender discrimination. Non-state actors across the globe have proven time and time again that football can successfully be utilized as a motor for both political and social change. James Dorsey has demonstrated that young working class and violence-prone fans, or Ultras, have been highly effective at fomenting and diffusing political discontent against various neo-patriarchal regimes across the Middle East.² Brenda Elsey and Joshua Nadel have similarly shed light on how women across Latin America have successfully challenged and broke down gender norms throughout the twentieth century by demanding the leisure time necessary to play football along with those public spaces and community resources needed to ensure the games’ continuity.³ To provide one more example, Mariann Vaczi compellingly argues that the Athletic Club of Bilbao became a site of “secret transgression” for many Basque fans that used the pitch to elaborate “fantasy narratives,” particularly whenever Athletic confronted Real Madrid FC, to suture the traumatic existential threat that both the Spanish Civil War and the Franco dictatorship (1936-1975) posed to Basque identity, culture, and language.⁴ 

The young but burgeoning historiographical corpus on sports history is replete with examples of those provided above; instances where people outside of power have used football to tear down oppressive and unjust sociopolitical structures. The present contribution, however, aims at demonstrating the opposite; namely, how football can also serve as an effective tool to build up and nurture community and democratic values. José Elgorriaga (1927-2009) utilized the pitch to educate, build community, and encourage democratic values among both players and spectators. Because Elgorriaga did not leave behind any memoirs or an autobiography, I will extrapolate his football philosophy by triangulating between three different types of sources: 1) Elgorriaga’s intellectual production (which includes book reviews for academic journals, translations for works on Spanish poetry and music, as well as academic papers prepared for university circulation), 2) local history as documented in FSU’s daily newspapers such as The Collegian Bee and Voz de Aztlán, as well as an interview with his son “Chato” Elgorriaga and 3) the history of the United States, Spain, and France during the Spanish Civil War and the Franco period. This exercise straddles the fence between exile studies and sports history as it seeks to integrate both themes to flesh out how Elgorriaga’s personal and intellectual trajectory affected his football philosophy. The focus will not be on Elgorriaga’s career as a football player or coach for FSU inasmuch as evaluating the impact and consequences of exile and displacement. Elgorriaga’s football philosophy is consequently of concern here not for its legacy on college sports but rather for its wider significance for both the local Fresno community and for the history of Republican exiles in the wake of the Spanish Civil War in general.⁵ 

 

The Basque Labyrinth

The Basque Country has historically enjoyed certain autonomous privileges and rights within the periphery of the emerging Spanish state. Local customary laws, known as fueros, were codified in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries between the Spanish crown and the Basque regional powers.⁶ The fueros exempted Basques from military service and taxation and permitted provincial assemblies to veto royal edicts. To ensure this self-governance, the Basque Country supported the conservative faction that stood for decentralized monarchy during the Carlist Wars of the nineteenth century (1833-1840, 1872-1876).⁷ The Bourbon Restoration meant defeat for the Carlists and with it the loss of the Basque fueros. Because the fueros were meant to safeguard the Basque language and culture, late nineteenth-century Basque nationalism emerged out of the premise that political autonomy meant cultural survival. Historically, then, many Basques such as José have and continue to identify as both Basque (cultural nationalism) and as Spaniard (political nationalism).⁸ 

Mutual antagonisms gradually eroded the practice of the turno pacífico, the rotating system between conservative and liberal factions, that had sustained the Bourbon Monarchy (1874-1931) for over the next half century.⁹ General Miguel Primo de Rivera’s military coup of 1923 lent the moribund Monarchy a lease of eight more years of life but it came at the steep price of corruption, inefficiency, and military influence.¹⁰ Thus, the Second Spanish Republic that was born in 1931 inherited long-standing structural problems which included a long-term political crisis marked by an increasingly violent polarization along with the exacerbation of domestic economic problems as a result of the worldwide depression.¹¹ This was the world in which Juan and Isabel Elgorriaga came of age in and the one in which their children, José and María Dolores, were born into.

Football/soccer first penetrated the Basque Country through commercial links between British and Bilbao industrialists at the turn of the twentieth century.¹² By 1927, the year José was born, many young Basque people throughout Bilbao in particular, and throughout the rural provinces in general, enjoyed playing and spectating football and Basque pala matches as well as attending Spanish bullfights on Sunday afternoons.¹³ In the Basque border town of Irún, young José became familiar and played both football and pala near his home and local school.¹⁴ In an interview conducted by student Leticia Espinoza for the Voz de Aztlán in 1987, José labeled both of his parents as “Republican.”¹⁵ Several competing political ideologies coalesced around two pedagogical schools of thought. On the one hand, Krausism championed the idea of aligning Spain with broader Western European liberal traditions, including the separation of church and state and education for women.¹⁶ On the other hand, a revived and increasingly reactionary Catholicism drew its legitimacy from the Spanish imperialist legacy and presented itself as defender of a divinely-ordained hierarchical society and as a bulwark against an ever-secularizing Europe.¹⁷ Because Spanish republican ideology was heavily influenced by the Krausist school, it is highly likely that José’s formative education, and consequently his sports ethic, was imbued with secular, liberal, and democratic values up until the age of nine when his family’s life was violently interrupted by the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War.  

Sports Illustrated: Elgorriaga playing pelota

Displacement and Trauma

The various coalitions that governed the Second Spanish Republic between 1931 and 1936 generally attempted to resolve Spain’s various economic and political crises by embracing modern social change and by formally recognizing the cultural differences of both Catalonia and the Basque Country.¹⁸ Reading a potential Bolshevik-inspired revolution into the Republic’s intentions, military rebels headed by Francisco Franco in alliance with the Catholic Church and large landowners rose up in defense of traditional Catholicism and a monolithic “Nationalist” vision. When the military coup did not precipitate the immediate collapse of the Republic, both sides began to request outside military and economic aid. Fearing internal upheaval and international isolation, the French Third Republic and Great Britain decided to follow a policy of Non-Intervention while Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany immediately sided and aided the Nationalist rebels as a means to advance their own geopolitical interests in Eastern Africa and Central Europe.¹⁹ 

In an interview with Bruce Anderson for Sports Illustrated (SI) in 1988, José recounted the story of his family’s displacement from Irún at the outbreak of hostilities.²⁰  “The link between the province of Guipúzcoa and France was a bridge over the Bidassoa river,” Elgorriaga recalls. “The first thing, when the war started on July 18, my father learned that the loyalists [Republican army] would blow up the bridge. Our house was maybe 30 meters from the bridge. We had to evacuate the town--fast. We went into France, just across the river, and as we went up the hill, we heard the explosion, we looked back, and we saw the bridge going up.”²¹ The discrepancy that results from the juxtaposition between José’s testimony and the documentary evidence available is worth exploring in detail.

In his seminal and polemical work, The Spanish Holocaust, Paul Preston reconstructs in detail the events leading up to Republican defeat in the battle of Irún (August-September 1936). In early August 1936, Nationalist General Emilio Mola initiated a military operation to deny the Basque Country access to the French border. Irún consequently began to be shelled from the sea and attacked daily by German and Italian bombers. Dropped rebel pamphlets threatened a repetition of the Nationalist massacre of Republican civilians and soldiers in Badajoz. Although large numbers of Requetés (Carlist paramilitary troops) were dispatched towards Irún and San Sebastián, the brunt of Irún’s defense rested on poorly armed and untrained militia defenders. It was at this point that thousands of civilians began to flee across the international border to Hendaye, France. Louis Stein reports that two thousand crossed on August 30.²²  Preston adds that thousands more “panic-stricken refugees” fled following the Nationalist takeover of Irún on the third of September while the last defenders set portions of the city ablaze.²³

Once in France, José recounted that his family “settled in a farmhouse in the forest outside the coastal town of Hendaye, two miles northeast of Irún. A year later, a forest fire caused them to move into the town [proper].”²⁴ In Hendaye, the 9-year-old boy and his sister María Dolores were kindly taken in by the local principal of a grammar school and allowed to attend even though they did not have proper documentation. José describes his principal, Jean Carricaburu, as an “incredible man, practically self-taught [and as] one of the gentlest men I have ever met and very much concerned with the kids. He had an uncanny way of presenting a complex problem very simply. What also made him a good teacher was the fact that you wanted to do things for him, not only because he was the principal, but also because he was such a caring person.” By late June 1940, France fell before the Nazi war machine. On October 23, Hendaye became the site of a pivotal meeting between Francisco Franco and Adolf Hitler. In the SI interview, Elgorriaga recalled that  that “everything was closed. All the windows were shut. They did not allow anybody to go to town. After the meeting, Hitler said he would rather have his molars taken out without anesthetic than talk to Franco again. Hitler did not get a thing.”²⁵  At some point during the Nazi occupation, José became witness to the Gestapo terror and deportations in Hendaye. In the same interview, he recalled how “one day when I was a kid, we went home at [noon] for the lunch break. We came back an hour later and the Germans had taken the twelve most prominent men in town to a concentration camp. Carricaburu was one of them. I think eight of the twelve never came back. Carricaburu was one of those who came back after the liberation. They were like skeletons, like ghosts, emaciated. He resumed his teaching, but he was a very sick man, very tubercular.”²⁶

The Elgorriaga family experience during the Spanish Civil War and Nazi occupation of France stands in marked contrast with the fate of the Basque Country after the Nationalist victory and that of the larger Spanish republican exile community in France. In the six weeks between the start of the civil war and the fall of Irún, families and friends passionately discussed, debated, and weighed the community and financial consequences of fight or flight on a daily basis. Although the Spanish Republic granted the Basque Country formal autonomy in October 1936, the region experienced ever higher casualties as Nationalist forces advanced deeper into Basque lands. For the next year, Bilbao would suffer major bombing raids and experience massive civilian and soldier flight. In late April 1937, German bombers obliterated the Basque city of Guernica. Basque surrender resulted in property confiscation, imprisonment, torture, and mass executions. For their part, the French government allocated Spanish refugees to different tasks and locations depending on the changing political and military circumstances between 1936 and 1945: they attempted to either evenly disperse families across various French departments, place them in makeshift concentration camps, assign them to labor battalions, put them to work in French industry and agriculture, or integrate them into the French military and French Foreign Legion. All of this while placing constant pressure on the Spaniards to voluntarily repatriate and then finally expelling many of them back to Francoist Spain.²⁷

Mary Marshall Clark argues in her study of the memory recollections of those who lived through the 2001 September 11 attacks that the “memory of emergency” represents at best only a partial memory that is shared, fractured, time-bound and often overshadowed by the definitions of catastrophe produced and reiterated by the mass media, state and public policy makers.²⁸ The three instances where this phenomenon becomes evident in José’s interview with SI include: 1) the retroactive dating of his family’s displacement to the first day of the war; 2) knowledge of the Hendaye meeting between Franco and Hitler and its outcome; 3) knowledge of Carricaburu’s deportation to a concentration camp. While the latter two examples are clear indicators of how José’s memory of events were later influenced by historical accounts, the first example evinces a desire to elide potentially traumatic pain.

In psychoanalyzing the structure of Holocaust survivor Marianne Ellenbogen’s life narrative, Mark Roseman explains that the trauma of memory was related to a guilt that stemmed from having left her family and from surviving when many others did not.²⁹ Similarly, Alessandro Portelli describes the “unchronic imagination” as the means by which memory heals trauma. This is achieved via a utopian “wish-fulfillment” in which historical reality is made to correspond more closely to an individual’s desires or aspirations. This memory mechanism therefore permits the individual to retain a sense of moral worth and dignity under threat by painful and traumatic events.³⁰ It is therefore possible that the elisions and superimposed historical evaluations within José’s life narrative may serve the purpose of precluding discussion on the real possibility of having left behind family and friends, of having witnessed horrific and violent scenes, and/or of ignoring the plight of others for the sake of personal safety. While we cannot know for certain how these debates unfolded in the Elgorriaga household or the exact circumstances the family had to face, one may plausibly conjecture that the five decades’ worth of telling and retelling his life story to family, friends, students, and journalists propelled José’s “memory of emergency” to undergo the healing processes of the unchronic imagination.

While the ultimate implication here is that young José’s family became “republican” more out of circumstance than conviction, the larger argument is that José’s experiences during the Spanish Civil War and subsequent displacement in Nazi-occupied France will not only inform his eventual intellectual pursuits but also reinforce those democratic and community values he had learned in both Republican Spain and France. In one of his last recollections of  Carricaburu, José explained that “sometimes we were sent to the principal's office. You misbehaved or didn't do your homework, and at the end of the day, the teachers used to send five, six, maybe 10 people to the principal. And everybody said, “What the hell's he going to do now?” And he would say, “O.K., guys, let's go. We're going to cultivate our garden.” Which we did, in a garden right next to the school. I'll never forget that. That stuck with me.” The concept of “cultivating your garden” is one of the life lessons José would encourage time and again in his capacity as an educator in the classroom and in his capacity as an educator on the football pitch. 

Sports Illustrated: Elgorriaga in conversation with students

California Dreaming

“Chato” Elgorriaga, José’s son, explains that his grandfather had traveled to California at some point in the early twentieth century to establish a sheepherding business along with his brother Ben. The sheep would be herded from Madera to Fresno to be sold. Once the business gained a firm footing, grandfather Elgorriaga returned to Irún.³¹  In 1987, José related to student Leticia Espinoza that his uncle Ben Elgorriaga paid his family a visit in 1946 immediately following the Second World War. His father asked Ben if it would be possible to bring José to Madera, California to work for him as a sheep rancher. Two years elapsed due to the heavily restricted U.S. Government’s Spanish immigration quotas.³²  Legal entry into the United States proved especially difficult between 1933 and 1945. North American neutrality up until December 1941 precluded any official efforts of aiding Spanish refugees. Of the close to 440,000 Spanish Republicans that went into exile,³³ historical and linguistic ties induced around 160,000 to migrate to Mexico,³⁴  while 100,000 passed through makeshift French concentration camps and at least another 100,000 were repatriated to Francoist Spain.³⁵ Of the Spaniards that stayed in France, 25,000 lost their lives either fighting for the French armed forces, as part of the French Resistance, or in Nazi Concentration Camps, most notably Mauthausen.³⁶  Even at the conclusion of this period in 1945, Spaniards only accounted for 1.2% of the close to 250,000 European refugees legally allowed entry into the United States since 1933.³⁷  By December 1949, the twenty-two-year-old José was able to obtain a student visa and enter the country as one of the few hundreds of Spaniards that were allowed to legally do so that year.³⁸

Elgorriaga very well understood at the time how fortunate he must have been in getting admitted and even more fortunate to do so as a student. Because he was the exception and not the rule of the larger migration flows of Spanish Republicans of the period, he viewed the move as one of permanence. While this motivated José to throw himself into his studies, it also induced intense bouts of nostalgia and longing. As he later explained to Espinoza, “the hardest part [of being in California] was that he was so far away from his family. He was lonely and missed all his relatives and friends…[even] studying didn’t keep his mind off it.”³⁹ The possibility of returning to Europe became even more remote as the decade unfolded. In 1953, the politics of the Cold War prompted the United States to sign the “Pact of Madrid” which furnished diplomatic economic and military aid to Francoist Spain thereby precluding a much exile-desired NATO invasion of the Iberian Peninsula. In the same year, José completed his B.A. Degree in Business from Fresno State College. The following year, José married Carmen Venegas, a Mexican-American fellow foreign language educator at Fresno State.⁴⁰  In 1955, José received his Master’s Degree in Foreign Languages from UCLA followed two years later with a Doctorate Degree in Languages at age 28.⁴¹

 

Intellectual Development

Between the 1940s and 1960s, various intellectuals within the Spanish Republican exile community in Mexico advocated a form of imperial nostalgia in their writings known as Hispanismo which advanced the view of an idealized, mythified, and exceptionalist representation of Spanish history. As such, Hispanismo inferred that Hispanic America should culturally defer to the Spaniards in their attempt to spiritually unify and lead the Hispanophone world. Sebastiaan Faber argues that this ideology compensated to a large measure for the shame, disillusion, and despair of defeat and displacement.⁴²  Aside from ideology, exiles also attempted to pass their sociopolitical values unto their children. Faber explains that parents frequently sent them to schools ran by Spaniards, to regional centers, and encouraged the development of social contacts among fellow refugee families. The latter tendency was especially prevalent among Catalans and Basques who wished to preserve their sense of cultural and linguistic difference from the broader Castilian community.

Because of his likely early liberal formation, no doubt nurtured by his beloved French principal Jean Carricaburu and subsequently reinforced by his professors at Fresno State College and UCLA, José’s ideological convictions as evinced in his intellectual production significantly differed from his homologues in Mexico. Dr. Elgorriaga did not conform to the larger exile trend of promoting Hispanismo or of marrying within the Basque community. While his intellectual production focused on historical and literary figures that experienced the pains of global displacement much like himself, it also served him as a platform to promote community and democratic egalitarian values.

Between 1958 and 1969, the Basque scholar wrote a series of scholarly reviews for the Revista Hispánica Moderna and the Hispanic American Historical Review. Four of these reviews in particular prove useful in extrapolating the broader trends within José’s intellectual development and thought. In his review of Marguerite C. Rand’s  Castilla en Azorín (1956), José agrees with Rand that Spanish novelists from the Generation of ’98, such as José Martínez Ruiz “Azorín,” long for and have symbolically searched within Castile for the “true and spiritual” Spain in their writings. José characterizes Azorín’s search as one of melancholy but one also full of optimism because Spain’s history was “far from over.” ⁴³  That same year, José also reviewed Juan López Morillas’ El krausismo español (1956) in which he interprets Sanz del Rio’s success in introducing Krausism to Spain on the basis of Krausism’s cultural, rather than philosophical, value. José further attributes Rio’s success to his charismatic teaching style which ultimately enabled him to fundamentally alter Spanish intellectual thought.⁴⁴ Four years later, Elgorriaga reviewed Álvaro Mendoza Diez’s La revolución de los profesionales e intelectuales en Latinoamérica (1962). He coincides with Diez’s assessment that revolutionary movements in Latin America have only been partially successful because its leaders were not able to transcend their social class or to develop an alternate political and economic scheme that could encompass all classes in this region.⁴⁵  At some point in the next couple of years, Elgorriaga’s professor Jose Rubia Barcia, a fellow republican exile, introduced him to the eminent Spanish poet León Felipe (1884-1968) who resided in exile in Mexico until his death in 1968. To render homage, José wrote a brief seven-page biography on the life and times of León Felipe the following year. He describes Felipe’s life as one of “constant wandering through the world” and employs words such as pain, loneliness, bitterness, and fear to describe Felipe’s life trajectory. He ends by characterizing Felipe as an individual who gave everything to promote his vision of unity and love.⁴⁶

It is evident that Dr. Elgorriaga was intellectually attracted to literary figures who not only experienced displacement much like himself (Azorín, León Felipe, and Sanz del Rio to a lesser extent) but who also personified the type of intellectual figure he aspired to become. For example, Elgorriaga viewed the nation as a social construct much in line with the views of Azorín and Felipe. As such, he did not view Spain as a monolithic entity nor did he yearn for the Spain of yesteryear or ever subscribed to a Spanish cultural superiority as did other exile intellectuals. José described the Basque people to student Joe Ateca in 1963 as one that clung to their “ancient language and culture” despite relentless, in reference to the Franco regime, pressure to do so.⁴⁷ Moreover, Basque exceptionalism has traditionally been premised on difference as opposed to an assumed superiority. ⁴⁸  Thus, José did not have any reservations about finding beauty and art in other Spanish regions outside the Basque Country. In 1990, he co-wrote a monograph on the history of flamenco tradition, a culture rooted in historical wandering and one usually associated with the region of Andalusia.⁴⁹

Another development in Dr. Elgorriaga’s intellectual thought is his conceptualization of community. Although José always took cultural and linguistic pride in his Basque heritage, he sought to stand in contrast to the Latin American revolutionaries he read about and studied. Unlike them, he wished to transcend his own sociocultural and class identity in order to help all people regardless of class, ethnicity, or politics. The current Chicano and Latin American Studies Department at FSU traces its origins, in part, to José’s labor of love for education and community. The Chicano movement had become more radicalized by the tail end of the 1960s as different student activist groups intensively struggled to secure those institutional changes across various U.S. universities that would cater to the educational needs of Mexican-American students. In the midst of struggle and controversy, Elgorriaga accepted the appointment to be one of the founding coordinators for the La Raza Studies program along with Ralph Vigil in late 1970. That José would see the value in such educational change and accept the task of leading FSU’s first attempt at addressing these historical wrongs speaks to his sense of social justice and to his concept of community. Both José and Vigil were viewed and received with initial contempt and suspicion from radicalized Chicano students.⁵⁰

Whether Elgorriaga was appointed so that the vociferous demands for change be placated or whether he applied for the position out of his own political convictions remains speculative. However, what the evidence does reveal is that the Basque professor labored hard to make the program thrive and to make it accessible to the wider student body. Within two years, the California Foreign Language Teachers Association presented José with the “Outstanding Teachers Award” for having “revolutionized” the undergraduate degree for Spanish. The major expanded to 30 units and incorporated student agency into the design and purpose of every individual degree. Adviser and student collaborated to ensure that every student’s academic needs were met.⁵¹ The following year, along with Carmen Clough, he was able to secure a 300-book donation from Mexico’s National University (UNAM) to expand the La Raza Studies program. Both professors stressed that the collection of books would “be available to all students” and would be of particular value to students in linguistics, foreign languages, history of both La Raza studies as well as pre-Spanish and contemporary American Studies.⁵² 

Elgorriaga’s approach to building community through collaboration and his dedication to his academic pursuits were eventually recognized, and ultimately admired, by the successive waves of students that crossed his path. Leticia Espinoza concluded her 1987 interview with José for the Voz de Aztlán with this assessment, “covering this story really opened my mind as to how sometimes we students see our professors as something other than human. Coach Elgorriaga is not only real but he is one of the most interesting and fascinating men I have ever met. He is a valuable reminder to all students who are 'minorities' such as myself, to remember one thing and one thing only: 'if you want something go after it and no matter what never give up. If you really want it…you will succeed!'”⁵³ Former student and eventual fellow professor of foreign languages at FSU Ignacio Santesteban remarked that it was his Basque mentor who convinced him to continue with his studies and to get his doctorate. "He is always with his students. In the cafeteria, in his home, everywhere. For him, there is no classroom. Wherever he is, that is the classroom.” ⁵⁴ That “wherever” will eventually become FSU’s varsity football pitch.

Football Philosophy

José’s relationship with FSU football started when he was a student there. He played goalkeeper and center midfielder position for student club “Cosmopolitan”, in the early 1950s made up almost entirely of foreign students.⁵⁵ During the 1960s, as José became a professor first at Colgate University before accepting a Spanish language position back in FSU, colleges and universities across the country dramatically expended their football offering. Whereas only eight teams competed against each other during the first NCAA men’s soccer tournament in 1959, 24 did so in 1969.⁵⁶ During this decade, José worked as a volunteer referee at community soccer games on Sunday afternoons. By 1970, FSU established its first varsity football team. Two years later, José accepted becoming assistant coach under Bob Bereskin. In 1980, Bereskin took a temporary leave that eventually became permanent. With his son Chato taking the position of goalkeeper, the 53-year-old language professor accepted becoming FSU’s full-time football coach at no additional pay in the wake of Bereskin’s retirement.

Throughout his academic career, José wrote a series of academic papers. Two in particular, Education Today (1979) and Mostly About Words (1992), evince the maturation of José’s thinking on the symbiotic relationship between democratic values, community-building, and education. Throughout these two pieces, José laments the dehumanization effects that neoliberal policies have wrought on North American society in general but particularly on national education systems.⁵⁷ The erosion of the nuclear family had led to a youth generation that is egotistical, self-centered, and shies away from hard work.⁵⁸ Consequently, the education system has started to produce trained, but not educated, students who have lost the intellectual vitality to deal with the problems confronting education of the moment. To address these grievances, he suggests that schools should collaborate with students to fundamentally change their institutional structures so that high school curricula can better align with college programs goals which would enable new graduates to be better equipped with the leadership skills necessary to navigate the rapidly changing service-oriented demands of the free market. The ideologies outlined in these papers and the recommendations José advances on how to create a dynamic and responsive education system will ultimately serve as an ethical guide for his football philosophy which he would put into practice in the following decade in his capacity of FSU’s football coach (1980-1991).

Education Today: Academic Paper by Jose Elgorriaga

In an interview with Tony Stevens for the Daily Collegian in April 1980, José laid out his “two-stage” approach to building a successful football team and program. He envisioned an inclusive sports culture premised on educating both players and spectators to a specific code of ethics and sportsmanship. Much like his efforts in the preceding decade at bringing faculty and students together for closer collaboration, José’s football philosophy aimed at dispelling any egotistical tendencies within players in order to build a cohesive team while it simultaneously sought to incentivize spectators to attend matches as well as teach them that fandom loyalty need not be limited to just one sport: one could be a fan and enjoy both gridiron and association football.⁵⁹  This approach soon proved fruitful for Coach Elgorriaga.

In 1982, the FSU Bulldogs acquired Canadian forward Dennis Odorico. Coach José described Odorico as an “unselfish” and valuable player because of his ability to “see the game developing and get in the right place” and because of his ability to provide “confidence to the other players on the field.”⁶⁰ When asked why he chose Fresno out of all of his options, Odorico answered “[because] the people in Fresno and the coaches treated me great.” While we do not have access to the locker room discussions, it is reasonable to assume that Coach Elgorriaga drew inspiration from Sanz del Rio’s charismatic repertoire with his students as well from of León Felipe’s messages of unity and love to create a sports culture premised on team unity, responsibility, initiative, leadership, and self-worth. For José there was no disconnect between the classroom and the pitch: both became forums to guide, teach, and learn. 

When Leticia Espinoza asked him about this explicit connection, Coach Elgorriaga replied, “in a test you find out whether you made your point or not by the way [you] perform on the test. The same can be said for soccer. You practice all week and on Sunday you play…you win or lose depending on if your point was made and the guys learned it or not.”⁶¹ Thus, for Coach Elgorriaga, football was never an end on to itself but an alternate means outside of the classroom to continue building and promoting community and democratic values. San Francisco coach Stephen Negoesco described José in the following manner: "He's honest, above board. I can't say anything bad about the guy. Win, lose or draw, he insists on feeding our team afterwards. It's always, 'Let's get together and talk.'"⁶² This interpretation becomes more salient if we consider what Coach Elgorriaga believed football should not be. When student David Comfort solicited his thoughts on the 1988 NCAA quarter finals match between FSU and UCLA, Coach Elgorriaga explained, “it was not very pretty. It was not the usual UCLA-Fresno State game, which has been a showcase of what soccer should be. The game was very rugged, without rhythm and structure-it was played more on physical strength.”⁶³ In matches such as these, Coach Elgorriaga perceived the real defeat lay in the breakdown of team cohesion and the resort to brute strength. Experience had taught José that democracies were destroyed in such similar ways. The beautiful game should therefore serve as a platform to instruct democratic communities how to build and maintain cohesion and avoid the resort to anger and destructive violence.    

Conclusions

Coach Elgorriaga’s childhood experiences of having survived the Spanish Civil War and the Nazi occupation of France taught him that democracies are fragile things and that they must be sustained by free-thinking individuals.⁶⁴ To develop such leaders, communities must erect education systems that can benefit all stakeholders. The best way José assumed he could build effective leaders in both academia and on the football pitch is to treat everyone with a love that promoted self-realization and leadership. It was this particular football philosophy which enabled Coach Elgorriaga to propel the 1987 FSU football team to the country’s first ranking. By that time, the Bulldogs had participated in eight NCAA tournaments and appeared in the Final Four in the years 1986 and in 1988.⁶⁵ Because of his fluency in French, Elgorriaga served as interpreter for the Cameroonian national side during the 1994 World Cup.

His apotheosis came seven years later when at the age of 68, José was inducted into the Fresno Athletic Hall of Fame. In his 11-year span as FSU’s football coach, José had been solicited for countless interviews, had received various academic and sports award, and was a beloved professor on the FSU campus.

By the time of José´s passing in 2009, the football world had changed beyond recognition. The deregulation and privatization of television coupled with the rise of new global communication technologies led to a hyper commercialization of the game.⁶⁶  This was a trend that José saw coming and one he tried to counteract through his football philosophy. In this sense, Coach Elgorriaga belongs to the old guard; to the era before sports coaches were hired as full-time employees by the universities and disconnected from academia. Coach Elgorriaga belongs in the tradition of college coaches that successfully fused their education and ethical values to their respective sports programs and philosophies such as Knute Rockne (University of Notre Dame), Clair Bee (Long Island University), Phog Allen (University of Kansas), James Naismith (University of Kansas), and John Wooden (UCLA).

But perhaps José’s wider importance is that his life and intellectual trajectory embodied the “anti-Spain” the Franco regime so desperately tried to eradicate for over three decades. Whereas Franco sought to destroy those communities that did not align with his monolithic vision of what Spanish society should be, José sought to build communities with peoples from all backgrounds and walks of life. Biography, therefore, can help historians better understand how the life trajectories of individual exiles have historically contributed toward eroding, and ultimately subverting, the social and cultural capital authoritarian regimes have tried to accumulate by means of violence, oppression, and displacement. Herein lies the broader value of José Elgorriaga’s football philosophy; a legacy with such a strong melioristic bent that it continues to inspire former students to contact his son “Chato” to thank him for the guidance and mentorship his father provided. This is a legacy that will live on wherever academics or sports figures labor towards bridging different people together in and outside of the classroom and in and outside of the football pitch. When José passed in 2009, one of Chato’s friends turned to him and observed, “I have never seen so many grown men cry in my life.” ⁶⁷  Many were there to say farewell to their former friend, teacher, coach, or relative; all except for Clio. More than to mourn a great football coach and educator, she grieved for one of the last sons of the Second Spanish Republic.  

Chronology

July 16, 1927  -Jose Elgorriaga is born in Irun, Spain

April 14, 1931 - the Second Spanish Republic is proclaimed

July 18, 1936 - Spanish Civil War begins

August 19 - September 5, 1936 - Battle of Irun

August-September 1936 - the Elgorriaga family flee to Hendaye, France

April 1, 1939 - Spanish Civil War ends with Nationalist victory

June 25, 1940 - France falls to Nazi Germany

October 23, 1940 - Francisco Franco and Adolf Hitler meet in Hendaye

May 8, 1945 - Nazi Germany surrenders to Allied forces

1946 - Uncle Ben Elgorriaga from Madera, California visits the family in Hendaye

September 1949 - Jose emigrates to California under a student visa from Fresno State College

1949-1953 - Jose plays football for a student football club

1953 - Jose receives a B.A. Degree in Business from Fresno State College

September 23, 1953 - Francoist Spain and the United States sign the “Pact of Madrid”

1954 - Jose marries Carmen Venegas

1955 - Jose receives a Master’s Degree in Foreign Languages from UCLA

1957 - Jose receives a Doctorate Degree in Languages from UCLA

January 1958 - Jose reviews a book on Azorín for the Revista Hispánica Moderna

January 1958 - Jose reviews a book on Krausism for the Revista Hispánica Moderna

1959 - first NCAA men’s football tournament

1962 - Jose becomes a foreign language professor at Fresno State College

1962 - Jose coaches voluntarily for local football matches on Sunday afternoons

1962 - Jose reviews a book on Lat. Am. revolutions for the Hispanic American Historical Review

September 17, 1968 - republican Spanish poet Leon Felipe dies in Mexico

April 1969 - Jose publishes a brief biography on Leon Felipe for Revista Hispánica Moderna

1970 - Fresno State establishes a men’s varsity football team

1970 - Jose becomes the chairman for Fresno State’s Foreign Language Department

1972  -Fresno College becomes a member of the California State University system

1972 - Jose becomes assistant coach under Bob Bereskin

April 1972 - Jose receives the Outstanding Teachers’ Award

December 1979 - Jose publishes the academic paper “Education Today”

March 1980 - Jose becomes head coach for the FSU Bulldogs

1982 - the FSU Bulldogs acquire Canadian forward Dennis Odorico

1985 - Jose is named the National Soccer Coaches Association of America NCAA Division I Far West Coach of the Year

1986 - the FSU Bulldogs finish in the NCAA Final Four

1986 - Jose is named National Coach of the Year by Soccer America

1987 - the FSU football team is ranked first in the country

December 10, 1987 - Leticia Espinoza interview

1988 - the FSU Bulldogs finish in the NCAA Final Four

November 7, 1988 - Bruce Anderson article for Sports Illustrated

1990 - Jose co-authors a book on the art of flamenco

1991 - John Bluem becomes the new football coach for the FSU Bulldogs

November 1992 - Jose publishes the academic paper “Mostly About Words”

1994 - Jose serves as translator and liaison for the first World Cup played in the United States

1995 - Jose is inducted in the Fresno Athletic Hall of Fame

March 1996 - Jose publishes the academic paper “A Visit with “the Guest”

December 16, 2009 - Jose passes away