If you offered the work of your dreams, but you had to travel 16,000 kilometers to get it, would you take it? Benjamín Mora (Mexico City, 1979) said yes without thinking. He asked where the offer was, how much they were going to pay him and called his wife. “We didn't even know where Malaysia was, what the hell would I do there?” Says the Mexican coach of the Johor Darul Taksim (JDT)“We imagined that we were going to walk in the palaces and in our head it was like the movies we had seen and we had a little fear, but we knew we had nothing to lose.” To the last bull, five years after putting all his life in a suitcase and a backpack, everything looks easier. The League has become “a single horse race”, in the words of the press of the Asian country, and its club has been champion for the seventh consecutive year, the third time since they assumed it to the first team in 2017.
Before success in Malaysia, Mora was already a globetrotter. The nomadic life was a legacy of his father, one of the most important promoters of Mexican wrestling in the eighties and nineties. Between dressing rooms, men in the air, flying kicks and photos with the mythical André the giant went through 14 schools and 23 removals when he was a child. Then, football took him from Tijuana, where Latin America begins, to Tapachula, where hundreds of thousands of Central American migrants cross Mexico every year to look for a piece of the American dream.
The young technical director knows a couple of things about the lack of opportunities. He could never show himself as a professional player and just when most players think about retirement, already after thirty, his incipient career as auxiliary in promotion clubs and coach of basic forces was about the shipwreck. “In Mexico, nobody had to pay attention to me, or why turning to see,” he says. He had not been a mass idol. He had no tour in the local league. He had no contacts to intercede for him. He had not caught anyone's attention. “I didn't think I deserved a chance, I just wanted to prove what I was done,” he says by videoconference. “I believe more in the feelings than in reason and so, with its high and its casualties,” he adds.
“My biggest motivation is that I'm going to die and the question I ask myself every day is how I want to live while I am here, there are many people who seem zombieI do not want to be one of them, ”he says. When he reached the second team of the JDT he lost four games in a row. And that photograph in which he imagined walking through the gardens of the Sultan of Johor's A Mexican had come or a young technician, “he recalls.” Never allow a no o o it can't be donethat demand has helped me grow as a person, ”says Mora about the prince Tunkku Ismail Idriss —Multimillonario, almighty and general of the army – and repeats, as if I could not believe it: “A prince of Malaysia gave me the opportunity at 35 and without experience of directing the best team in the Southeast Asia and the best team of the decade in the country.” Today they sing to him Cute Cielito And the Foreign Ministry has distinguished him as “distinguished Mexican”, the first and unique that receives the distinction after establishing himself in Malaysia.
Life is quiet in Johor Bahru, the capital of the province, which is bordering Singapore. The territory is wide, the buildings are very high, the roads are clean and there is little insecurity. Mora, a vegetarian who does not tell him not to a Aguachile Oa a good dish of Sinaloa style seafood, takes several minutes to talk about fruits. His travel log gives from giant bananas and mangoes, mushrooms, rambutanes, pyadas and white pitayas, pears and apples that he had never seen. “I cook a lot of vegetables and weird things, I am not very fan of food, the truth,” confesses the coach, who would change several glasses of watermelon water and curry dishes with rice, for the variety of Mexican cuisine: “It is not the same, they are other flavors.”
The coach realized that Malay classes were not going to serve as much for the dialects and cuts the cultural gaps in English. His work team includes Mexicans, Spaniards and Argentines, who have to be tolerant of the observance of the Islamic laws of players who in some cases do not swallow or their own saliva during Ramadan or who, as in the world, live realities disrupted by the pandemic. The fact of directing in a country where national sport is the Badminton does not take pressure. He asks his players to be aggressive and come out with the dominated ball. The sports commentators are going to be tightened. And the boys of the Strait, the main group of fans, would not forgive him to lose the classic against the Pahang, regardless of that his club has been crowned undefeated in the last season or that he celebrates as a goal that his team has burst a ball in the middle of the court.
Mora's graduation arrived in Asia, where he had to learn to let his parents go and see his two daughters grow, the youngest born in Johor. His work has raised interest in Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Chipre, Indonesia, the United States and Mexico, but his head continues in Malaysia. “My dream is that they allow me to always direct and wherever, they are called what they are called and are in the league,” says the Mr.: “Not many people understand me, but that does not matter to me.”
