Vocento: “A Gentleman In The Ring”

(Versión original en español aquí.)

A couple of weeks ago the eleven newspapers of the Vocento Group in Spain – El Correo, El Diario Vasco, El Diario Montañés, La Verdad, Ideal, Hoy, Sur, La Rioja, El Norte de Castilla, El Comercio, La Voz de Cádiz, Las Provincias - ran the following interview with me. The only exception was ABC which ran this one a few weeks before.

Alexander Fiske-Harrison

A Gentleman In The Ring

by Francisco Apaolaza

Having crossed through a dimensional portal, suddenly he appears in the bull-run of Cuéllar (Segovia), in an out-and-out race with Spanish fighting bulls, a copy of the Financial Times rolled up in his hand. With each stride, Alexander Fiske-Harrison, English gentleman, writer, actor and reporter for the British press spans the huge distance between his world of the cultural and economic elite of London and the bull-run of Cuéllar with its dust, hooves, horns and shoe leather. This is the story of how one man crossed through the door of these parallel universes and then relayed it in the first person to the most anciest newspaper in the City.

Now, perhaps, the Financial Times will give a respite to the workhorse of Spanish debt and point instead to Spain’s oldest bull-run. Perhaps the best part of the story is the signature on the article. Fiske-Harrison is not the type of tourist who cannot distinguish a cart-ox from a fighting bull, but is an amateur bullfighter whose curious journey began many years ago while search of new cultures and strong sensations. What he found was very far from his life in a grand English family – a line of bankers – with its studies at Oxford, its games of rugby, horses, shooting and the exclusive red and white athletics blazer of Eton College, where Prince William and David Cameron also studied.

The Spectator: A Good Run by Alexander Fiske-Harrison

My article from The Spectator, written largely on the breakfast tables of Pamplona, half cut on vanilla and cognac, having just run with the bulls. (With thanks to Joe Distler.)

AFH

A good run

Alexander Fiske-Harrison

14 July 2012

Why I risk my life among the bulls of Pamplona

I have just finished running — with a thousand like-minded souls from around the world — down a half-mile of medieval city streets while being pursued by a half-dozen half-ton wild Spanish fighting bulls. They were accompanied by an equal number of three-quarter-ton galloping oxen, but we didn’t worry about them: they know the course as well as anyone and keep the bulls in a herd. This is good, because when fighting bulls are on their own they become the beast of solitary splendour and ferocity you may see in bullrings across Spain, France, Portugal, Mexico and much of Latin America. However, every second week in July, during the festival of Saint Fermín, they are run together as a herd from the corrals to the bullring.

Rest In Peace Bomber: Friend, Adventurer, Traveller, Warrior

On February 24th, 2013, my friend Bomber died. I thought it fitting to write a little tribute of my own to him here and translate the one from the website of the regional newspaper of one of his favourite cities on Earth, Pamplona.

Breakfast on Sunday of the Miuras, Pamplona, July 8th, 2012, among good friends. We had both just run with the bulls, I in my striped jacket, Bomber in his black one. The great bull-runner Joe Distler on Bomber’s left had removed his white tuxedo in case of spillages. (Photo: Jack Denault)

I first met Bomber properly in Pamplona in 2011, when I returned at the insistence of Angus MacSwan who told me I had got the city wrong in my book when he interviewed me for Reuters. That year, when I was flushed with the novelty of the feria de San Fermín, the wonders of running bulls properly, and the sheer excess of Fiesta properly lived, I can not remember how much we spoke, or what about. However, in the months that followed, he was a frequent commenter on this blog, and would often drop me notes congratulating me on the success of my book or my defence of los toros in various pieces of journalism.

His favourite of these was when I went to visit a matador he had met, Juan José Padilla, and who had taught me back in ’09, after he lost his eye in the ring, but was making a come back despite the injury and lack of depth perception.

Bomber had a great fondness for Padilla as a man, a matador, and in one of Bomber’s favourite complimentary phrases, “as a warrior”. He sent me this photo of the two of them together with great pride.

(When I visited Padilla at his house before his comeback, he looked like this. [Photo: Zed Nelson])

On my first day in Pamplona last year, July 6th, I joined the High Table of American bull-runners for dinner – Joe Distler, Larry Belcher and Bomber – and there Bomber told me how much it meant to him that another generation were coming to Pamplona, were becoming involved with the fiesta de los toros, and – most importantly to a man who at heart was a traveller – were helping to defend the diversity of things and cultures in the world, most especially Spain.

As Bomber and I walked back from that down into the Plaza de Castillo – well, he walked, I staggered from wine, funny how he made the encierro, the ‘bull-run’ the next day and I didn’t – I was reminded of the tragic story I was told about how the love of his life, Goldie, had died prematurely on the operating table, and how the news was conveyed to him in the that very square as he stood among friends outside Bar Txoco, where we always stand after the 8am encierro to ‘talk’ off the adrenaline, and how Bomber had collapsed from grief.

From left to right, Bomber, Joe Distler, Larry Belcher and Me one morning outside Bar Txoco, 2012 (Photo: Jim Hollander)

I cannot claim that I got to know Bomber half as well as I would like, but anyone who knows Pamplona knows that the fortnight that makes up two Fiestas is like three months of normal time. The only consolation for his passing aged 65 is that when he spoke of Goldie, you knew that life was simply so much less bright for him without her. And I noticed in our communications that he spoke of her more and more often after the 2012 Fiesta ended, and then he moved out of their shared home in Garmisch in Germany, posting strangely prophetic photos on Facebook as he did so, saying goodbye and thank you not just to the place, but seemingly to all his friends as well.

Myself and the young American bull-runner Bill Hillmann had spoken about going to meet him in Germany in the Autumn, but we never did, and that will always be a sadness in my life. Even my father, who only met Bomber a few times, asks after him, just as Bomber made a point of sending me this photo of the three of us.

No one could be better prepared for the final encierro which we all one day will run. In the words of Joe Distler upon reading this post, “Bless and keep you brother.”

Alexander Fiske-Harrison

And here is what the newspapers said…

The Chicago Tribune: Running with the Bulls

The great young American bull-runner Bill Hillman’s article in the Chicago Tribune on James A. Michener and Ernest Hemingway ‘running the bulls’ in Pamplona, featuring quotes from Ernest’s grandson John Hemingway, myself and Joe Distler. By no coincidence, we were all three of us out in Pamplona less than a week ago drinking and running the bulls together.

Now, if we could only find something else to work together on…

Alexander Fiske-Harrison

As I geared up to run with the bulls this week at the Fiesta de San Fermin in Pamplona, Spain, my mind turned to literature: Both Ernest Hemingway and James Michener famously wrote about the violence and drama of bullfighting— and both took risks to do it. But which of them really lived the Fiesta to the fullest?

The contenders

Hemingway, a Nobel Prize winner and Oak Park native, did more than any other author to build and preserve the mystique of the Fiesta de San Fermin with his 1926 novel “The Sun Also Rises.” Yet many experts, including his grandson John Hemingway, believe Ernest never ran with the bulls—we’ll get back to that.

Michener, a Pulitzer Prize winner, also did his share to present Spanish culture to the world in his 1971 novel “The Drifters” and his 1968 nonfiction work “Iberia.” Michener ran with the bulls many times, although he never claimed to be good at it.

The case for Hemingway, the aficionado

Did Hemingway actually run with the bulls? John Hemingway, Ernest’s grandson and author of “Strange Tribe: A Family Memoir,” is torn on the issue.

“I don’t think he ran,” John Hemingway said. “At least from what I’ve heard, he didn’t. But then who knows? After a night of drinking, he might have on the spur of the moment decided ‘what the hell,’ and he and a group of his friends took off with the locals running with the bulls. We’ll never know.”

Hemingway studied bullfighting and was known to use a cape to lure and turn vaca (2-year-old wild, fighting cows) in Pamplona’s bull ring after the run. But Alexander Fiske-Harrison, a British bullfighter and author of “Into the Arena,” sees Hemingway’s work with vaca as daring, but not quite a life-and-death feat.

“A vaca has far greater maneuverability and speed than a fighting bull,” Fiske-Harrison said in an interview. “It can turn on a dime, and its horns are often sharper than a bull’s. However, they do not have the weight behind them. Hemingway’s danger was really related to how well he could take a tumble; although a vaca did kill the great late 20th century matador Antonio Bienvenida.”

The case for Michener, the mozo

Did Michener really run? Or did he stand? Michener got into running with the bulls late in life. He already had heart trouble and wasn’t especially mobile. In the existing photos of Michener on the street, he was usually standing in a doorway as the herd ambled past. Does that count as running with the bulls?

“Technically, Michener never ran, but to be in the street with bulls takes as much nerve as running,” said Joe Distler, a New York-raised Parisian considered in Spain as the second great American mozo (or bull-runner). “Nowhere on the street is safe. Sadly, that’s been proven time and time again.”

Feria del Torero by Antalya Nall-Cain

Café Iruña, a favourite haunt of Hemingway’s in Pamplona. (Photo: Antalya Nall Cain)

 

 

 

El Fundi performs a ‘natural’ with a bull of Victoriano del Río. (Photo: Antalya Nall-Cain)

 

 

 

El Juli performs a derechazo with a bull of Victoriano del Río. (Photo: Antalya Nall-Cain)

Padilla in The Pamplona Post

It may seem churlish as The Last Arena receives its 50.000th visitor to send them to The Pamplona Post, but since the extract from my book Into The Arena - with a host of photographs I couldn’t fit in the book by Nicolás Haro – is all about Pamplona’s favourite matador, Juan José Padilla, I am afraid there was no way around. Please click on the masthead below:

Moving blog for Pamplona

Running in Pamplona '09 - me circled right

For the festivities of Pamplona 2011, I will be moving blog to The Pamplona Post, an informal, constantly updated multimedia avalanche on the madness of bullrunning, bullfighting, drinking and everything else one gets up to in the streets of the capital of Navarre…
Join me there by clicking on the masthead below:

The run up to Pamplona…

Me, right, running with the bulls in Pamplona. (Look for the horn behind the head of the man falling to my right.)

As I dig out my running clothes for the 320th annual running of the bulls in Pamplona, Spain, I am pleased to see the chapter where I described running there in 2009 in my book, Into The Arena: The World Of The Spanish Bullfight, serialised in The Independent On Sunday today. This year, on the 50th anniverary of Ernest Hemingway’s death, I go to meet with John Hemingway, grandson of the man who made the town the by-word for “grace under pressure” and drunken revelry with bulls attached.

Alexander Fiske-Harrison: ‘How I risked my life in the Pamplona bull run’

Ernest Hemingway made the Pamplona bull run famous. To mark the 50th anniversary of his death, the acclaimed British writer Alexander Fiske-Harrison relives the day he ran with Pamplona’s bulls…

Read on here..

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/alexander-fiskeharrison-how-i-risked-my-life-in-the-pamplona-bull-run-2301797.html

Or just buy the book here…

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Into-Arena-World-Spanish-Bullfight/dp/1846683351/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1302790004&sr=8-1