The flag making days

So, back in the day, I was 100% RSL, through and through. They could do no wrong, neither could MLS.

Before the team had even played its first game I was in with the Loyalists, (actually the Loyalists was my name suggestion for the team's first supporter's group, well, "Checketts' Loyalists," and then we shortened it to just the Loyalists) and all was right with the world. 

RSL was going to rule the soccer world we thought, we were going to have an exclusive partnership with Real Madrid, they were going to come to Utah to play a friendly match every other year, etc. etc. You know the story.  

What could I do to help the team? The team needs my support, without me the team won't survive. I must do something. Flags, yes flags! I will make flags.

And so I did, I went to work in my tiny Loyalists workshop and started making flags. Well, I would go get the material and such, and my mom and grandma would sew them together for me. Seriously, a grown ass man had his mom and grandma sewing flags together to take to RSL games!

Believe it or not I recently asked my mom about it and she had nothing but fond memories of sewing the flags together with her mom, (my grandma) seeing as several years later grandma passed away at the ripe old age of 92. It is a memory she will always have. 

Anyway, a couple of weeks ago for Easter I was up in the Ogden area visiting mom and dad. We kept one of the flags in a dusty corner of the garage, it has sat there since the end of my RSL fandom. I guess it has been sitting there collecting dust for about 15 years. I always thought I should throw the flag away but just never got around to it, however mom mentioned she doesn't want me to, she said she wants it there in the corner of the garage where it has always been. Funny.

So after we had had our Easter egg hunt for the grand kids, and the hot dogs and hamburgers had been consumed, I got the last surviving flag out (I had made four flags originally) and waived it around awhile and beheld it in all its glory. 

This was the last of the four flags, this one was the "Utah State RSL flag"

 

A quick history of the flags;

The first one was the "RSL Romanian flag". 

For this one I got four Romanian flags, overlaid the red stripes, and sewed it together. This was the flag that was featured on the front page of the Salt Lake Tribune the day RSL played their inaugural game at Rice Eccles.

 

The second flag was "Ol' Beauty", this was the one I liked the best actually. I took a blue twin size bed sheet, cut it in half if I remember correctly, and then sewed some red on the end, and then some yellow on the end of the red. I don't have a photo of this one but it looked something like this.

And finally, flag number 3 was "Big Bertha". This one was made with a red queen size bed sheet, again I think I cut it in half, sewed yellow on the end, and then sewed white on the end of that and took a giant blue marker, maybe two or three markers if memory serves me, and did a blue and white checkerboard. Everyone loved this one in the Loyalists section, I think they really liked the checkerboard. It looked cool when it was waiving, I have to admit. The team mascot even borrowed it a couple of times.

Anyway, good times. Good times indeed. 

Eventually I sold flags number 2 and 3 to some teenagers in the parking lot of Rice Eccles after a season ending game I think. I was kind of done with them and they came up to me and offered to buy them so I gave in. I don't know whatever happened to flag number 1. 

Flag number 4, the "Utah State RSL flag" still exists, my niece even recorded me waiving it. It is heavier and harder to waive than I remember.

Maybe I will post the video here soon. I don't know, so much effort required to blog about a sport I don't even really care about anymore.

I did try to watch a game the other day, Barcelona vs. Atletico Madrid. Champions League I guess. I couldn't make it more than 10 minutes and then I turned the channel, I was almost falling asleep.

So I went over to Netflix and watched a couple of episodes of Black Sails. 

I have already watched the four season series two or three times now, and even own the series on dvd. It is convenient though to watch it on Netflix while it is available, sadly it says it is leaving soon. 

If you haven't seen it though you should watch it. Insanely good it is.

However you can't watch it with kids around, it is not the same as Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean, not even close!

Landon Donovan: Why the USMNT is Not a Legit Contender on the World Stage - The Rich Eisen Show

So this popped up on my YouTube feed for some bizarre reason, a clip of Landon Donovan on the Rich Eisen show.

Back when I was a soccer fan I never liked Donovan, we always called him "hair club." I thought he took a dive way too often and I hated that. I hated players diving all the time, it was one of the main reasons I left the game.

I have to say though that Donovan comes across very mature and dare I say wise in the following clip. I might even change my opinion of him, that is if I were to care anymore about soccer and MLS.

Anyway, enjoy the clip, he says some good things.

Morante de la Puebla returns to the plaza and all is right with the world again

Today was traditionally one of the biggest days of the year in the bullfight world, Resurrection Sunday. And no place is more at the center of that biggest day than Sevilla, where someone once described Sevilla as "so intensely Catholic it makes Rome look like a secular outpost."

Not to be left out though Madrid also held a bullfight, as well as Arles, France. Oh yeah, in case you didn't know bullfights are held in the south of France as well. Nimes, Arles, Dax, and Mont-de-Marsan being the places that come to mind the most.

Anyway, in addition to it being one of the biggest days of the year it was made even more so with the return of Sevilla's favorite son, Morante de la Puebla. I guess he just could not stay away from the bulls. And I would have to agree with him, once the bullfight bug bites you and you are infected it is hard to get away. I tell myself every year that I need to concentrate on other things but as the weather warms, the flowers start to bloom, and the grass turns green, I can't help but hit the bullfight news sites and see what is going on. 

And apparently it was a good day, with the news sites reporting that Morante cut two ears from his second bull, Peru's boy king Andres Roca Rey cut one ear from his second bull, and David de Miranda also cutting an ear from his second bull.

So, another Spring has sprung, fighting bulls dot the rolling green hills of Spain's many ranches, and all is right with the world again.

I watched a soccer game!

Well, I kind of watched a soccer game, last Sunday I watched the last 30 minutes of Roma @ Napoli.

There was nothing on, I was being a couch potato, and I stumbled across the game. I asked myself, should I watch it? Should I see what I have been missing these past several years since my exit from soccer fandom? So I left it there and watched the last 30 minutes.

Ugh.... I haven't missed anything. Roma was ahead 2 - 1, and then Napoli scored, and the game ended 2 - 2. 

I was utterly uninspired. 

Anyway, y'all that enjoy it I wish you continued success with it.

On a brighter note, I was on the website TeePublic looking for bullfight graphics, and I had typed in "Madrid" to see what would come up.

As I was scrolling through a lot of bad designs, and only one or two on bullfighting, I saw this one; (excuse the watermarks)

 

I laughed out loud and said, "now that is funny as hell."

Even though I'm no longer a soccer fan I would not fault myself if I got that printed on a coffee mug or something. If you haven't ever ordered anything off TeePublic you can get designs on hoodies, coffee mugs, hats, etc. 

Anyway, here is the link for this design if you are interested. 

https://www.teepublic.com/t-shirt/85891398-football-ronaldo-and-messi

Beginning of year post

2026 has started off great! 

At least things are better than at the end of last year. My plan of staying away from things that were dragging me down last year has worked, my life so far anyway is much less chaotic. 

I've stayed away from Netflix and all the other garbage. I don't think I have even watched one movie so far this year. I have watched some of Graham Hancock's Ancient Apocalypse show or whatever the hell it is. There is an episode on Easter Island which caught my eye, I need to go back and watch it again. I was falling asleep through some of it I think. 

The bullfights, I occasionally looked at the news sites just to see what is going on by I am not obsessed like I have been in years past. One bit of interesting news however, Morante de la Puebla seems like he can't stay away and will be coming back to at least perform at a few fights in Sevilla, Easter Sunday and a couple of the Spring Fair ones as well. Most likely a couple in the fall also. Bullfight aficionados rejoice!

Super Bowl, I did not watch even one minute. I caught a highlight or two and it turned out to be a snoozer anyway. 

Soccer, yawn. Not interested. I did do a quick news check on the USL's plans for promotion/relegation and they are still a go but not until around 2027 or 2028. So I have plenty of time until I need to make a decision on whether I care anymore or not. 

Anyway, hopefully we get snow soon. Damn, what an awful winter. There are some storms on the way, hopefully they are enough to get us back on the right track, at least somewhat. I have no faith at all in Utahns to reduce their water usage, over the past few years no one in my neighborhood has taken out any of their lawn like they should. I've been trying to set an example though, I have taken out probably almost 50%, and plan on taking some more out this year. 

That is going to be another stress point for me, neighbors who let their sprinklers run almost everyday when they need to be ripping out lawn instead. Don't these damn people pay attention to the world around them? Maybe it will take the Great Salt Lake drying up completely before they understand. 

I'm not going to let it stress me out though, at least not to the point it causes chaos in my mind.

On a lighter note, I've found a new interest. Well, something maybe to plan a trip around in the future. I've been to Buenos Aires a few times, but I've never taken in a polo match while there. I think I need to do that sometime, looks like something I could get used to.

End of year post

Well, 2025 is done, thank the Lord.

2025 was rough on a personal level, I am hoping for a better 2026. (Nothing life threatening, everyone in my circle is healthy, it was just a bummer of a year it seems. Maybe you felt that way too.)

As I have been driving around for work the past couple of days I have been taking a personal inventory, we probably all do that a little bit. And I was shocked at how out of control my life seems to be, I have just too much sh*t going on. So I thought about it and decided I need to get back to basics, I need to live a more minimal life. 

To hell with sports, to hell with Netflix, to hell with bullfighting (yeah, kind of a shocker for me to say that.) to hell with a lot of stuff. I need to see what is gobbling up my time and see if I can't get rid of it. 

You might be saying, "good luck with that, it"s impossible." But I really need to figure it out, I need to try and enjoy life again.

Anyway, below I have posted a New York Times article about the abrupt retirement of Morante de la Puebla. It was a surprise, nobody expected it, and he did it after a triumphant October afternoon in the bullring of Madrid. After this article I am going to try and put the bullfighting aside, and see if clears my mind some. 

What about soccer you ask?, the World Cup is coming up!

Nope, not interested, not even in the slightest. I can just see the posers now, everyone hopping on the soccer bandwagon. It will be enough to make me vomit. I was thinking the other day though that when the time comes, maybe, and I really mean maybe, I will choose one team and just follow them and see how they do through the tournament. Japan perhaps, or maybe Brazil. I don't know, we will see. 

What about the USL and their first season with promotion and relegation? Yeah, probably when Spring rolls around I will start to look at that just a little. Again, I don't want anything to occupy too much of my mind and time, I need to minimize, remember?, minimalism is the goal for 2026!

So, time for bed, time to sleep. No New Year's partying for me, I am way too old for that. 

Peace y'all.

Blood and Tears as Spain’s Troubled Bullfighting Star Hangs Up His Cape

(by Jason Horowitz nytimes.com November 12, 2025)

José Antonio Morante Camacho, arguably the greatest bullfighter of his generation, lay flat on his back in the middle of the arena.

A 1,220-pound bull had just flipped him in the air, prompting a gasp from the sold-out crowd in Madrid’s Las Ventas, Spain’s most hallowed bullfighting ring.

As the 46-year-old, known across the Spanish-speaking world as Morante de la Puebla, did a mental scan of his scarred body, other matadors rushed to carry him off. Brought safely to the ring’s red perimeter wall, he got up, grimaced and walked off the pain. He eventually returned to the fight, drawing the bull close with elegant sweeps of his cape that elicited cries of olé.

When it was over, the bull was dead, the rare prize of its ears were hoisted in Mr. Morante’s hands and a blizzard of white handkerchiefs waved in appreciation.

The bullfighter embraced Spain’s leading far-right politician, bathed in a shower of flowers, Spanish flags and cigars. He turned back to the center of the ring where, with tears on his weathered face, he removed a symbolic pigtail, clipped to the back of his hair. Everyone weeping along with him knew what that meant. Morante de la Puebla was calling it quits.

“I felt an artistic exhaustion,” Mr. Morante said a few days after the Oct. 12 fight, in an interview at his riverside farm in La Puebla del Río, his hometown outside Seville in southern Spain. In whispered, languid sentences, Mr. Morante, wearing a wool Gucci suit and fedora, said he felt no lessening of his skills and that his career had been “upwards, upwards, upwards.” But, he said, “I’ve decided to stop before I fall.”

The withdrawal of Mr. Morante deprives bullfighting aficionados of a legend admired for his artistry, courage and imagination. Impresarios say they will miss his ability to fill the seats and the end of a rivalry with a rising Peruvian matinee idol. The leader of the nationalist Vox party, Santiago Abascal, had in Mr. Morante a direct line to die-hard fans of an increasingly polarizing and conservative-coded pastime.

But even many of the Spaniards who want to follow the example of some regions and ban bullfighting across the country appreciated Mr. Morante as a rare original, not just for his Elvis impersonator mutton chops and psychedelic rock band outfits but for his bravery in publicly wrestling with mental health problems.

“It exists, and I don’t like to deceive anyone,” he said as he sipped coffee to wash down medication that he said sapped his strength and caused fluctuations in his weight. He talked about his experience with electroshock therapy, his diagnosis of depersonalization, bouts of weeping and his decision to spend much of the year in Portugal, because, he said, “my doctor is there.” And while he acknowledged that fans thank him for destigmatizing mental illness, he added with a quivering smile that “it’s harder to stand in front of a bull.”

He and his family still live in his hometown, where locals drink beers under bullheads and photos of him in a bar that bears his name.

His farm by the river has a bull ring and a ballroom annex featuring taxidermized bullheads, antique bullfighting posters and lighted vitrines displaying his sequined matador costumes. His living room is decorated with the heads and tails of his greatest triumphs, shrines to some of Spain’s most storied matadors and sculptures of cherubs and saints.

A plate featuring Spain’s dictator Francisco Franco hangs by the kitchen counter, near scores of bronze trophies and a stack of his trademark pink and green capes, stained with blood and branded Morante de la Puebla. The place had filled up over the years, he said. “I’ve been doing this for a long time.”

Mr. Morante grew up close by in a small house marked with a plaque above a narrow door and exposed electric wiring. As a child, he said, he faked sleep as his father, who lugged sacks of rice in a nearby factory, carried him into the arena, a ruse designed to avoid paying for a second ticket. Once inside, Mr. Morante said he would open his eyes and soak up “a divine place.”

At home, he stuck a sausage on the end of a stick draped with a red muleta cape and pretended that the family’s dog, Paloma, was a bull. His mother yelled at him, but by 6 years old, he confronted his first young cow in a local corral, and suffered his first collision. But then he got up. “I felt that something unstoppable surged in my blood,” he said.

He dropped out of school and forged papers at age 14 to participate in the ring. At 17 he debuted, against his mother’s wishes, as a matador. He recalled his youthful “beauty” and success. But by the time he was 20, he said, his mother was weeping at his plan to marry a girl from the town, and leave home. That was the day, he said, that he suffered a mental crisis.

“I looked in the mirror. I didn’t seem like myself,” he explained. He began to weep uncontrollably, he said, and felt as though he was living outside his own body. A doctor diagnosed him with depression and a dissociative disorder, and soon after, he said, he received electroshock therapy in Miami, where a friend suggested medicine was more advanced. It helped a little, he said, but his condition remained.

In 2008, after three years of marriage and the birth of a son, he split from his first wife. He said he grew accustomed to the solitude caused by his condition, which was only compounded by the solitude of facing down bulls in the ring. Nevertheless, his career blossomed. While Mr. Morante spoke with envy about the sponsorships and stratospheric salaries of soccer stars, he earned — and spent — millions.

In 2010, he remarried. But as his family expanded with two daughters, the election of a left-wing government clearly antagonistic to bullfighting imperiled his profession.

Mr. Morante said he went “asking for a little help,” from Mr. Abascal, the hard-right leader who, he said, “doesn’t know much” about bullfighting, but who eagerly went to bat for a hero to his political base. “Show the deep Spain,” Mr. Abascal texted Mr. Morante during the interview at the farm.

Mr. Morante’s triumphs helped bring in bigger crowds, and bullfighting became more popular with younger conservatives. But his personal demons haunted him.

Confidantes in town said his mood swung wildly depending on how he did in the ring. He sat out some bullfights, and in others, he dispatched bulls he didn’t like the look of with efficient, lackluster performances.

He eventually got back on track with the help of Pedro Jorge Marqués, a childhood friend from Portugal who had become a dentist and his manager and who lived with Mr. Morante’s mother when in Puebla.

But during Mr. Morante’s absences, other stars rose, including the young Peruvian bullfighter Andrés Roca Rey. This summer, the two had words in the ring, and Mr. Rey infuriated Mr. Morante by telling him to take it easy: “Maestro, smoke a cigar slowly.”

Mr. Morante, who admitted, with a puff on a Cuban, that cigars relaxed him, said he decided a rivalry was good “only if it’s noble and in front of the bull.” The two had made up, he said, but added he had no interest in seeing “Afternoons of Solitude,” an award-winning documentary focused on Mr. Rey, who, he said, “looked for” attention.

On Oct. 12, Mr. Morante assured that all attention focused on him. He said he had made a deal with God that if he triumphed in Madrid he would call it a day. “The combination of my mental health issues, the suffering, it wasn’t a joyful situation,” he said. “But it was one of satisfaction. For having fulfilled a dream.”

And as if in a dream, thousands of young, preppy bullfighting fans stormed the ring and carried him out on their shoulders through the arena’s famous gate of triumph, though their ripping at his shimmering matador costume for souvenirs, he said, was “very distressing.” The evening ended with him on the balcony of a famous Madrid hotel blowing kisses to the crowd in a special silk striped nightgown that he had packed, he said, “just in case” he triumphed and went out in style.

The problem now, he said, was that he had no other interests. “Nothing” he said. “Nothing.” Contrary to bullfighting gossip, he said, he and his wife were still together, though, he added with a shrug, “I don’t know until when.” A local farmer who dropped off a couple of golden pheasants to raise on the farm began to weep when Mr. Morante signed for him one of the capes stacked in the kitchen.

“What else am I going to do with them?” Mr. Morante said.

His weary eyes instead lit up when Mr. Marqués told him promoters were already plotting to bring him back.

“I had a dream about that,” Mr. Morante said, adding, “let’s not call it a complete retirement. It’s a rest.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/12/world/europe/spain-bullfighting-morante-camacho.html