It's easy to miss Calle Carlos Arruza. It's a tiny street between the Hotel Arizona and the Tucson Music Hall at the Convention Center.
Arruza wasn't a Territorial-era mayor. He wasn't even from Tucson.
Arruza was one of most acclaimed bullfighters 60 years ago. He fought in Nogales, Sonora, on multiple occasions.
The street name reminded me of the days as a kid in the 1960s when my parents took us to watch the corrida de toros. It was a grand spectacle then.
These days, the Nogales bullring, where Norte Americanos flocked to be part of a pageantry, is bereft of bulls, matadores, bandilleros and picadores.
It is politically incorrect today to admit admiration for bullfighting. I can and so does Dick Frontain.
I visited Frontain Monday morning at his Midtown home, which is filled with reminders of bullfighting's heyday in Nogales and elsewhere.
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Frontain, 76, was arguably one of the best American writers on the subject. He also took damn good bullfighting photos, and his books on Arruza and bullfighting are prized.
As an amateur matador, Frontain held his own in the ring, but at a cost.
"I don't know how many times I broke my ribs," said Frontain, who also has several plastic joint replacements.
But forget the close scrapes with the toros' horns. It is the passion and history of bullfighting I came to hear from Frontain.
He saw his first bullfight in Ciudad Juárez, across from El Paso, in 1955.
The New York City native was in the Army, and one day he and his wife, Mona, went across the bridge to see a bullfight.
Frontain was immediately drawn to the ritual, the celebration and the elegance of man vs. beast, a drama as old as dirt.
"It was a contrast of human courage and animal bravado," Frontain said.
After his Army hitch in 1956, Frontain and his wife came to Tucson. They had fallen in love with the Southwest border region.
No sooner had they arrived when the great Arruza appeared in the then-4-year-old Nogales plaza de toros, making his comeback as a rejoneador, a bullfighter on horseback.
Frontain was there, and he began as chronicling the corridas for the Arizona Daily Star, which then regularly covered Nogales bullfights, and for magazines.
He traveled to bullrings and bull breeding ranches in Mexico and Spain.
Frontain knew the impresarios as well as the owners of the breeding ranches, like the great Mexican comic, Cantinflas, an accomplished amateur who fought the bulls in Nogales.
Frontain also collaborated with Tucson artist Ted De Grazia on their 1967 homage to bullfighting, "Mexico's Border Bullrings."
Diego O'Bolger, a Tucson matador, said Frontain was part of bullfighting's local folklore.
"He is one of those people who gave Tucson its character," said O'Bolger, who still challenges the bulls.
When he wasn't writing about toros and toreros, he taught creative writing at Pima Community College.
He and his wife, who died in 2002, virtually raised their three daughters in the world of bullfighting.
Frontain waxes about the confrontation between matador and bull. There is grace amid the gore.
Writer Ernest Hemingway brought the sport to America's attention, and Hollywood gave it its treatment.
It boomed in Nogales but fell out of favor. Attempts to resurrect bullfighting have failed.
Bullfighting remains popular, however, in other parts of Mexico, in Spain, southern France, Portugal, Colombia and Venezuela, Frontain said.
Frontain misses it all, especially the matadors' awesome opponents.
"It's one man, one bull," he said.
That's even.
Opinion by
Ernesto
Portillo jr.
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