Colombian goalkeeper René Higuita is one of South American football's true characters and even at the age of 38 he refuses to hang up his gloves. But he is though actively preparing for the end of his playing days by serving as goalkeeping coach for the Ecuadorian national team.

New manager Luis Fernando Suarez confirmed Higuita would continue in the role he filled during the reign of the previous manager, his compatriot Hernan Darío 'Bolillo' Gómez. "We cannot officially list him as a member of the technical staff, but we can take him on as a guest assistant on loan from his club, Aucas de Quito," explained Fernando Suraez, "the national team's goalkeepers, Jacinto Espinosa and Damian Lanza, will learn a lot from him."

Higuita has rarely been out of the headlines during his long career. He appeared regularly in sports pages, notably as the inventor of the "scorpion kick," but, as a childhood friend of the former leader of the Medellin cartel, Pablo Escobar, he featured almost as often in the news sections too.

The penalty area on a football pitch was never going to be big enough to contain someone like René Higuita, who simply could not resist the temptation to run out and dribble past opponents, put in a few headers or take a free-kick 35 yards from his goal.

Ever since replacing the goalkeeper of "Dorado", a neighbourhood team from Medellin, during a five-a-side tournament, René Higuita has attracted loads of attention. He was spotted by scouts of Nacional Medellin when playing for a regional team and in 1982 he received 16,000 pesos (about 10 dollars) for his first transfer. "I had never seen so much money," says the man who former Colombian manager Francisco Maturana baptised "El Loco" (The Madman), "while others may have thought it was a pitiful amount, it was an absolute fortune to me."
Born in August 1966 in Castilla, a run-down slum in Medellin, Higuita should really have been called René Zapata, but his father, Jorge Zapata, refused to acknowledge him and he was raised by his mother, Maria Dioselina Higuita, who earned a meagre living working in a textile factory.

He first came to national attention at the age of 20 when, to widespread surprise, Francisco Maturana made him the country's goalkeeper for the 1987 Copa America.

Ill-judged risks
Maturana was so impressed by the youngster's eccentric personality that he told him before the competition, "you are so crazy and irresponsible that you can also take the penalties." He may have become known as a long-haired extrovert who enjoyed playing the clown, but he also became a key part of the team's defensive system and was, in fact, "the side's real sweeper."

 

Forward Roger Milla from Cameroon runs past Colombian goalkeeper Jose Higuita (R) after stealing the ball from him on his way to score a goal 23 June 1990 in Naples during the World Cup second round soccer match between Cameroon and Colombia. Milla scored two goals in extra time to help Cameroon defeat Colombia 2-1 (0-0 at the end of regulation time)
(AFP)
His penchant for taking risks, which were sometimes ill judged, occasionally resulted in spectacular blunders, such as in the 1990 FIFA World Cup™, when Cameroon's Roger Milla stripped him of the ball before slotting into the empty net and eliminating Colombia. 

His flair did not always end in disaster however, and his display of audacity in a friendly against England at Wembley on 6 September 1995 won him admirers all around the world. His spontaneous and wonderfully artistic "scorpion save" simply amazed spectators. "It's a clearance whereby the goalkeeper jumps forward and places his hands on the turf and then raises his legs behind him and kicks the ball out with his heels," explains Higuita, as it were a perfectly natural thing to do, "but, I'm not crazy. I'm a normal person, with positive and negative quirks."

Similar to Paraguay's José Luis Chilavert, Higuita was not content just to guard his own goal and loved to get on the score-sheet at the other end. He claimed 30 goals in a career that rarely failed to provide entertainment. On 12 May 1995, for example, he featured in match between Nacional de Medellin and Deportivo Pereira, in which both goals in the 1-1 draw were scored by the goalkeepers, Higuita blasting home a 30 free-kick, and his counterpart Pedro Rodriguez converting a penalty.

The scorpion's biography?
There are, however, some rather less admirable aspects to his career, such as when he tested positive for cocaine, though he has always protested his innocence, and his imprisonment for several months in June 1993 for having acted as a go-between in a kidnap scandal involving the daughter of one of Pablo Escobar's associates.

"I acted for humanitarian reasons," said Higuita, "if I was ever needed again to help free someone, I'd do it without hesitating. I'm a footballer, I didn't know anything about kidnapping laws."
 
Perhaps he could be faulted for being excessively loyal to even his most dubious friends, but there is no doubt "el loco" wears his heart on his sleeve, as proven by the career-threatening injury he sustained on 11 November 1995 when playing in a benefit-match for UNICEF.

That is the tale so far of René Higuita, who says his life "has been a novel." Never one to do things by halves, he is trying to persuade none other than his compatriot and former Nobel Prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez to write his biography. The title seems ready-made: "The story of a slightly crazy scorpion."