Add head-butting a referee aged 16 in Uruguay to the three bitings and the racial abuse incidents!!!!
This is very interesting - an American journalist went to Uruguay a few years ago to investigate Suarez's upbringing and youth football career.
He uncovered a story of an assassination attempt on a journalist who exposed an incident of a 16 year-old Suarez head-butting a referee after receiving a red card!!!
http://espn.go.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/1098437...
Cool graphics of Surez's head which change as you scroll down - very arty and cool, huh?
Keep on scrolling through the photos as you read to find more text.
I've made an edited version of the article and changed the paragraph order to make it more easily understandable:
[What happened in the head-butting and Suarez's street fighting mentality]:
November 2003...
During a match to decide a youth league championship, referee Larranaga gave Suarez a red card and then claimed Suarez assaulted him:
...Suarez never quit. With 15 minutes left and the game turning against his team, he flew into a Danubio player, sliding for the ball. The official showed him a yellow card, which witnesses say was a bad call. Suarez popped up and jawed his displeasure, complaining, and Larranaga went back to his pocket for a red card, another bad call, which doesn't excuse what happened next.
The fears inside Suarez boiled over.
A red card meant he'd miss the next game. The team that had been his family through a difficult youth would play its final match without him. It was the last game of his childhood, and he'd watch it from the stands. He had scored 63 goals that year, one shy of the club record, which he desperately wanted. Larranaga had thrown him out of a game, but he also had ripped him away from his family. Rage flowed through Suarez.
The first eyewitness we found was Suarez's former youth director, Daniel Enriquez...
"He pushed the referee," Enriquez said, "and headbutted him."
In 2003, the head of youth soccer, Nelson Spillman, threatened a referee named Luis Larranaga.
According to them, Spillman called Larranaga after the match, asking him to change his official match report to eliminate any mention of aggression by Suarez, wanting to protect the star player on his favorite team. Larranaga refused, and Spillman in a voice message called him a pimp and a motherf-----, threatening to end his career. Larranaga stuck up for himself and turned in his report unedited. Suarez received a long suspension. Sources at the football federation leaked information to Gabito, who ran his story on Dec. 11, 2003. More leads followed. He dug deeper on Spillman. On Dec. 21, just 10 days after the initial report, Gabito walked home from his television show. It was 11:15 at night. A strange car idled in front of his house.
Now, sitting at the table, Gabito looked around and grabbed the sugar container. That would be the car. Other bits of coffee paraphernalia represented him and his house, and here, at Café Tribunales, on a busy, urban square, he re-enacted his own assassination attempt.
Gabito got to his door and felt the hard barrel against his head. The hit man, forced into the job to settle a debt, changed his mind at the last minute. He wrapped his arm around Gabito's neck and shot him in the leg. The getaway car screeched off into the night, and, with blood pooling on the concrete, Gabito hailed a cab to the hospital..."
All three people involved in the shooting spent time behind bars, but all have been released. They've fared better than Gabito, who angered powerful interests one time too many. Fired at least twice over the years for refusing to print lies, he is now blackballed from the industry he loves. He hasn't had an investigation on television since 2011, and he hasn't had a byline since February 2013. He feels wronged, backed into a corner....
...His friends and former mentors struggle to explain a complicated idea. They protect him, and explain away his extreme actions, because they sense the desperation buried inside of him and don't know how to articulate it. Basically, the theory goes, anything that threatens his ability to score, and win, isn't processed in his subconscious as the act of a sportsman but, rather, as an act of aggression against his wife and his children. Watching him play certainly supports the idea because, when a defender presses close, Suarez doesn't respond as if the man is trying to take the ball. He reacts as if the defender is trying to send him back to the streets of Montevideo, alone....
Everyone in Uruguay knows what Suarez fought against, and rose above. That's how he exists in the national consciousness, as someone who fights to win, no matter what, running to escape poverty and obscurity. A man doesn't bite simply because he is crazy. He bites because he is clinging to a new life, terrified of being sucked back into the one he left behind..."
