He fed himself on stolen oranges
...but later he became the richest bullfighter
Achiever
By Steve Douglas

EL CORDOBES, the famous Spanish bullfighter, was 27 years old before he knew the world was round and not flat. He was illiterate until that age.

But with more money coming in than he knew how to handle, he just had to learn to read and write to make certain the promoters weren’t cheating him.

Born Manolo Benites, he came from a desperately poor peasant family in Palma del Raio, a small town in Cordoba. The children there spent more time working in the fields than they did at school.

Manolo’s father worked a seven-day week for a wage which was hardly enough to buy food for himself, let alone his large family. Often they dined on soup made fromgrass.

Young Manolo became a vagrant. He was often in trouble with the local police for stealing oranges. Several times he was beaten up by the local police chief, a hated man known as ‘Tomato Face’ because of his ruddy complexion. Once he was brought before the court and sent to prison.

The boy’s brushes with authority made him even more of a rebel.

Around Palma del Rio bitterness festered between the haves—the wealthy landowners — and the have-nots — the peasants.

When the Spanish Civil War started in 1936, some of the local rebels seized the bulls of the biggest local landowner, Don Felix Moreno, and killed them. The people of the area fed off the meat for weeks. The bulls, bred for fighting, were the best and most valuable in Spain.

Don Felix made the rebels pay. When the Nationalist Army marched into Palma, he was leading it. He ordered the rebels to line up beside a long trench he had forced them to dig. Volleys from machine guns slaughtered hundreds of them.

Manolo’s father went off to fight with the loyalist armies, and the boy never saw him again.

Moonlit practice

In the late forties, a cinema opened in Palma. Manolo and his friend Juan Horillo went there as often as they could. Many of the films they saw were of bullfights in farway Madrid.

The films, together with pictures of famous bullfights on the walls of a local cafe, fired the two boys with the ambition to become bullfighters.

One day Manolo borrowed a blanket from his sister, soaked it in dye and made his first mulueta. He found an old rusty sword in a field, a relic of the Civil War. At night, he and Juan ran off to the fields of Don Felix’s restocked bull farm and in the moonlight, they practised fighting the fearsome bulls.

It was a dangerous and foolish game. Once a bull has fought a man, he understands what the game is all about. Then, when he gets into a ring, he is a killer. No longer can he be tricked by waves of the cape.

‘Tomato Face’ and his men caught the boys at their moonlight sport. Again Manolo was flung into jail. He decided the time had come to leave home. He and Juan trekked across Spain trying to persuade promoters to give them a chance to fight in the many small fiestas where bullfighters have to learn their trade. Always the answer was the same "Go away. I canot be bothered with you."

They reached Madrid and, to avoid starving, took jobs on a construction site. In 1956, the fortunes of Manolo Benitez reached their lowest level. His endless round of visits to the fiestas had yielded nothing.

He was called up for National Service in the Army. When that ended, he was 23. His career as a bullfighter had not even started. Many of Spain’s greatest bullfighters are at their best by 23. Not to have even begun at that age was a crippling handicap.

Then Manolo’s practice impressed a small-time promoter, Luis Lopez. Lopez decided that here was a young man who had something different. But at first nothing came from his investment in this prodigy. The money he lent Manolo for his equipment seemed to have been wasted.

Turning- point

The turning-point came at the little town of Talavera de la Reina, 72 miles south-west of Madrid. The bullring was packed and Manolo was the star of the show.

Lopez still lost money because the ticket sellers cheated him out of 50,000 pesetas. But Manolo was launched on his career.

The year Manolo spent learning his craft in these small-time bullfights proved good training. The crowds loved his daring and his clumsy skill. Soon he was taken up by an adventurer, Rafael Sanchez, known as ‘ElPipo’, who had made a fortune during the Civil War.

Within a year ‘EI Pipo’ had taken his protege to nearly every bullring in Spain. Everywhere they went, he bribed the local newspapermen to give them publicity. Soon Manola was a popular idol as ‘El Cordobes’ — the man from Cordoba.

He gave bullfighting a new dimension. He was different. He grew his hair long and was called El Beatle. He drank a lot and liked girls. He was news.

It was then - with the offers pouring in - that Manolo asked a Madrid priest to teach him to read and write. He had arrived. The fees promoters paid him for topping their bills were astronomical.

Soon he was the richest fighter in the bullring’s history.

The money was invested in houses, flats, business, an hotel called ‘El Cordobes.’ Even if he never killed another bull, Manolo Benitez would never want again.

At his peak, he decided to quit. He had had enough of rusing from one corrida to another, day after day. For a time he was persuaded to stay on ... at even higher fees. Then he left the glamour and danger to live in near solitude at Cordoba.