Andrés Balsa was born on 11 March 1883 in Mugardos, A Coruña, as the son of a humble farmer and grandson of a single mother, and his childhood was spent like that of all the children in his town, working very hard and going through hardships.[2][3] Unlike the others, however, he eventually outgrew all of them, being six feet tall with its corresponding tonnage, a giant between sizes of 1,65.[2][3]
Fighting career
Balsa wanted to see the world and get to know America, so he enlisted in the merchant marine, and from the decks of those ships, he learned to fight and carry out night skirmishes as entertainment in the usual impasses of such long voyages.[3] In a stop in Acapulco, he accompanied the ship's skipper to a regular inn in which he attended an evening of freestyle wrestling, one of those shows where at the end of it, the champion would challenge someone in the audience to last fifteen minutes in a match against him in exchange for a thousand pesos, and at the insistence of his boss, Balsa agreed to fight with the condition of not being abandoned if he were injured or badly off.[3] Balsa easily defeated the Mexican long before the time ran out, at which point he left the navy by letting the ship sail, and began fighting by investing his prize in training in the free and pugilistic arts.[3] He trained under an English champion, a Jack Nelson, who introduced him to the official circuit around 1909, taking him on tour through Panama and Cuba, where he defeated tough opponents in boxing matches, such as the German champion in Havana.[3]
With about two meters of height, one hundred and twenty kilos of weight,[3] and a strength that the media of the time considered "herculean", Balsa entered the world of wrestling, fighting throughout the continent, competing from the United States to Peru, Cuba, and Argentina with a large percentage of victories and earning money.[2] However, it was a bittersweet glory, since his way of dancing on stage was considered unorthodox for purists, fuel for their ridicule, with "he lacks any technique" being the usual tagline that accompanied his triumphs, and even in the Spanish press, which echoed his victories in the United States and Cuba, his successes came with the same words.[3]
Balsa, who styled himself as El Moderno Ursus, as well as Italian strongman Romulus (Cosimo Molino), featured bull wrestling in their acts.[4] Due to his fame, he participated in the Italian film Quo Vadis? directed by Enrico Guazzoni, receiving $5,000 to play the role of Ursus, which was attributed to Bruto Castellani who repeated the role in the 1924 version.[4][5] He can also be seen in the skin of a gladiator in other famous films like Ben-Hur.[3]
Balsa participated in several wrestling competitions and in 1915, while Europe was bleeding to death in the Great War, he defeated the Japanese Taro Miyake in a fight for the world wrestling title.[3][6] After fighting in cities such as Rio de Janeiro, Madrid, and Liverpool, he returned to Galicia at the end of the War, arriving in the port of Vigo on 1 July 1920 aboard the steamer Desna, received with praise of crowds.
Confident in his abilities, Balsa decided to make the leap into the competitive world of boxing, going to New York City to compete for the world heavyweight title in 1921, but was defeated by Jack Dempsey, who would remain champion uninterruptedly until 1926.[2] In the build-up for this challenge, he won a match with such a taste of triumph that the bruised American begged him to be his trainer.[3] He is still remembered today in America by literature thanks to his fight against Dempsey, while no one remembers him in his native Galicia.[3] This was the highest moment in his boxing career, but also the beginning of a physical decline that would lead him to a series of strong defeats with boxers of not very high category in 1925.[3] Ahead of his last boxing match, Balsa was still weighing the KO from the Belgian Jack Humbeeck a few days earlier, and his 40 years of flesh and muscle weighed much more, and thus he barely lasted two rounds against José Santa, a weak Portuguese who came from sparring, just so that "Hércules" could have some joy.[3]
Managerial career
From the age of 40, his ability as a fighter began to diminish, so Balsa hung his gloves and announced himself as a physical culture teacher in his gym in Vigo, but he also began the fight of getting into the world of a sport that had been attracting his attention for a long time, football.[2][3] At the time, it was inappropriate for footballers to dedicate time to training the body, and in this, Balsa found refuge from a life of retirement that used to bring times of famine to former boxers like him.[3] In 1926 he joined the technical staff of Celta de Vigo as a physical trainer, replacing Francis Cuggy, and from then on, Balsa's career remained linked to the world of football.[2][3] His methods were so effective that Vigo reached the semi-finals of the 1926 Copa del Rey, and the pleasant level of his players helped him make the transition from trainer to coach.[3] In the 1927 cup, Vigo won all the games of its group, with 34 goals in favor and only 8 against, but then fell in the round of 16 in a third tiebreaker match against Arenas Club de Getxo.[7] At the end of the season there was a renewal of the board of directors of Celta, who decided to replace Balsa with the Scottish W. H. Cowan, so despite winning the Galician championship and reaching the cup semi-finals in 1926, he was fired from Celta after only one season and a half.[2][3]
Balsa then joined Deportivo de Coruña, which ended up exploiting him due to the greed of its president, who combined his duty as the team's coach with shows during patron saint festivities in the towns, carried away by the president of the club, appearing under the name El incógnito in Madrid, dressed in a Mexican mask from his good times, recovering the title of world wrestling champion in 1929.[3] At the end of the 1928–29 season, Balsa decided to leave his homeland once again, landing in Cartagena, returning to Madrid, and then briefly training the city's municipal police just as he had done in his Mexican stage with the federal fire department.[3]
In 1931, Balsa joined the ranks of CD Castellón as a coach, where his work received criticism very similar to that he had as a wrestler, since he was accused of a total lack of knowledge of football technique.[2] Under his responsibility, in the 1931–32 and 1932–33 campaigns, Castellón finished as last classified in the Segunda División.[2] He then moved to Valencia in 1934, around the time that the city was experiencing a football fever due to having reached its first-ever Copa del Rey final, which they lost 1–2 to Madrid FC.[3] In the summer of 1935, however, after the interim manager Antonín Fivébr took a flight to Moscow to experience the revolution, Valencia hired him as coach, thus becoming the first Spaniard coach in the history of the club, where he remained for over a decade.[3][6]
Balsa made his debut as Valencia's coach on 8 November against Sport de La Plana [ca] and stayed as such until 1937, for a total of 1,431 days, and although he won the regional champion [es] in 1937, his overall results at the helm of the team were once again not very outstanding.[2] When the Spanish Civil War broke out, Balsa remained loyal to the Spanish Second Republic, forming part of the new Valencia team made up of workers after the confiscation of the equipment by the employees and footballers.[2] The abrupt stoppage of official competitions due to the outbreak of war led the Catalan and Valencian federations to create a new tournament, the Mediterranean League, in which Valencia finished in fourth with 17 points, just three short of first-placed FC Barcelona.[8] He then led the team to the final of the 1937 Copa de la España Libre, which they lost 0–1 to Levante.[9] His fidelity to the Republic helped him keep his position in a club founded by Blasquistas, in a time that has been poorly documented, blurred, and skipped by history with the recurring catchphrase "and then the war broke out"; officially he coached at Valencia for two seasons, although he actually coached for four, from 1936 until 1940.[3] Balsa remained in the technical and coaching staff of the Valencian team until 1946, the year in which the trail of Balsa disappeared again.[2][6]
Balsa went on to manage CD Castellón (1946–47) and CD Eldense (1947–48).[1] In 1950, Valencia played a friendly match against Burjassot CF for the benefit of their former coach. In his last years, Balsa exhibited himself in some charity events.[3]
Death
At the end of the 1950s, Balsa emigrated to Brazil with his wife, along with his son Andrés, owner of several businesses. At the end of the 1960s, his son died and the family was ruined, so Valencia CF gave him money to return and settle in Valencia. He grew old in Latin America and died discreetly in Madrid on 16 December 1973, at the age of 90.[1][3]
