Sport: Death of a Matador

All his art was an affair with death, and in the bullring Juan Belmonte always was desperately close to dying. Throughout his thousand corridas, death seemed to be his mistress, and away from the plaza, she always seemed to him to be the better twin of boredom. When he retired in 1935, he was king of the world's matadors, more than a millionaire, a hero in his native Spain, spoken of in the same breath with Cervantes and Goya. But life grew dull as it grew safer. When a friend told him he had...

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