It would be hard not to know how to pronounce his name after all the hype over his 3 retirement games at the beginning of this year.

I can, however, shed light on why he didn’t correct the GM and coach. No one here cares about names. Names are constantly misspelled and totally mangled, either written or out loud. After a career spent largely abroad, he’s probably used to it, and it seems to be genetically programmed into all Ticos to treat name-mangling with equanimity.

Just an addendum to your post about racial politics here–I guess you probably know that for a long time blacks weren’t allowed to travel to the Central Valley, which is why having so many black players in the national team is a relatively recent phenomenon (and why no one ever remembers that Ricardo Saprissa, the Spanish funder [yes I mean funder, not founder] of Deportivo Saprissa, refused to let blacks play for his team at first–it was only several years after the team was founded that they would even have been an option).

The irony of course is that, while racism is extremely prevalent in Costa Rican society, no one ever notices or is really bothered by it. I remember going to a game a couple of years ago between Saprissa and the Kansas City Wizards. The Wizards goalkeeper (don’t remember his name, sorry) was black, and during the warm-up the crowd enjoyed itself making monkey noises at him. And celebrated wildly at the end of the game when a last-second equaliser and a goal in extra time put Saprissa through to the next round of the CONCACAF–both goals scored by one Gerald Drummond, brother of the Jervis you mention in the post.

Costa Rica has to be one of the most blissfully racist societies I have ever known. I’ve seen them make ‘Indian’ noises at the Mexican national team and other Central American ones. And cheer on players of any race. It’s not really even hypocrisy, they just don’t notice there’s anything strange in what they do. Which makes it much less offensive I suppose–certainly none of the black players here ever complain.

Anyway, this turned into rather a long post, considering the original article was about a year ago. I don’t even know if you’ll ever read this. But I thought there might be something in here you’d find interesting.

By the way, Wanchope has just taken up a managing job, at Club Sport Herediano.