What can we say about Roberto Alomar and that game on Saturday in Cleveland? "Duende" is the word that came to my mind over the weekend, and please allow me to explain. This is not a word to be used casually and, from what I can see in the American press, it is not -- and probably because it takes some careful explaining each time.
What is duende? You might say it is charisma, passion, panache, flair, chemistry. It is soul, style, grace under pressure, star quality. But, as the late jazz critic George Frazier put it, duende is all of that "to the nth power." Duende, he wrote, "is heightened panache, or overpowering presence . . . that certain something."
In great performances -- music, dance, acting, poetry, sports -- it is that which separates mere talent from genius. Frazier heard duende in the horn of Miles Davis. And he once put it this way: "It was what Ted Williams had even when striking out, but Stan Musial lacked when hitting a home run." And -- you must understand this in order to understand duende -- he did not mean that as a put-down of Stan the Man.
Duende is a psychic-spiritual thing. The literal Spanish definition of duende is "hobgoblin" or "ghost." The Spanish expression "tener duende" means "to have what it takes." But the word has much larger meaning, you see, and the fun comes in the search for that larger meaning. Federico Garcia Lorca, the Spanish poet and author of "Lament for the Death of a Bullfighter," called duende the "energetic instinct" that no flamenco dancer or matador could be without.
"To help us seek the duende there are neither maps nor discipline," Garcia Lorca wrote. "All one knows is that it burns the blood like powdered glass, that it exhausts, that it rejects all the sweet geometry one has learned, that it breaks with all styles."
During a discussion of this subject in this space several years ago, former basketball coach and sports pundit Paul Baker wrote: "Duende is turning the tide, making a difference and winning the day, all with style and grace. It can be an isolated act or a person's entire being. . . . Duende runs a fine line between a heroic figure and a jerk. Body language, physical appearance, dress, voice, mettle, timing and dispatch are amalgams of duende."
I think it is what a lot of us mean when we describe something -- an event, a moment in time -- as "almost surreal."
And that is why I reached for the word after Roberto Alomar hit the home run to win that game in Cleveland.
