"Comedy saved my life," he explains a couple of days after his latest show. Zuhaitz talks about comedy as therapy, on stage and off it, his show very raw and very funny. It gets a laugh, though, and that's the way it has to be.
No, really: Zuhaitz puts the resulting football sticker up on the screen. except get snapped by the photographer from Panini.
THE LAST STAND LYRICS PLUS
He had played one game plus a single minute from another in which he was sent on to waste time, which he says was about all he was good for by then. Not that it stopped him going out and celebrating the team's success, of course, returning home three long days later, a mess in every way. Zuhaitz's show lasts 91 minutes - one for every minute he played the 2002-03 season when Real Sociedad finished runners up. Stream on ESPN+: LaLiga, Bundesliga, MLS, more (U.S.) I prefer to be on the bench because I am so scared of making mistakes and I start to think that primera [Spain's top division is too good for me," he says. "I reached the point where I no longer want to play. He talks about trying to remember which leg he was supposed to be limping on as he headed off, happy to have conned everyone until Clemente made it crystal clear that he had rumbled him. He left other games early, too - inventing injuries to escape, the pressure becoming too much.
Yet that wasn't something he would think often. Secretly, he says, he was thinking: Zuhaitz, you've played a blinder here. Faked it, which would be a recurring theme - something he would end up doing for too many years. Sent off in the 78th minute, he protested, complained, shook his head and looked as upset as he could. The debutant did what he was told - there's a moment when he pauses the screen and hones in on Hasslebaink's face, a bewildered stare that suggests what the hell is this guy doing?! - until the inevitable happened. Hasselbaink was arguably Spain's best striker at the time, scorer of 33 goals that year. Is Africa heading towards World Cup humiliation?."And trust me," Zuhaitz recalls Clemente telling the team, "we're the winners in that deal." Twice over, in fact: they lose Hasselbaink, we lose Gurrutxaga. Zuhaitz opens his show by explaining how Javier Clemente, the famously feisty, straight-talking former Spain manager, gave him his debut with a simple instruction: Don't do anything at all, still less play football, except follow Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink everywhere and not let him get a touch. "And it's even harder to imagine me as a footballer when you see me there." Behind him, a screen shows some "highlights" from his career.Īnd so it begins. He's currently doing a two-month run at the Teatro Reina Victoria in Madrid. "It's hard to imagine me as a footballer when you see me standing here on this stage," he says at the start of his latest stand-up routine.
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There is a little bit of artist license for comic effect, but this is as close to reality from inside the game as you're ever going to get. Well, Zuhaitz Gurrutxaga says, 95% of it is. He gave up and became a comedian instead. Courtesy of Zuhaitz Gurrutxagaĭid you hear the one about the footballer who got sent off on his debut and scored two goals the day he got his first, and last, game for his country? Gurrutxaga's reinvention as a comedian has not only helped him process the struggles of his soccer career, but has helped him find peace and purpose that LaLiga didn't necessarily present.
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