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“It gives you energy,” Dario Dubois once said of his unusual pre-match ritual. “You paint your face, you go to war and you kill your rivals.”

For a while Dubois, a centre-back who did the rounds of Argentina’s lower leagues for a decade or so, went the full Kiss pre-match, covering his face and neck with black and white make-up before taking to the field. On one occasion he had to knock on the referee’s door before kick-off and ask if it would be OK to use his mirror to apply the paint, as the away team’s dressing room didn’t have one. He found the war paint had the triple benefit of making him more fearless, making opponents more fearful, and earning himself more recognition. “I’m just a clown with a painted face – but one who is ready to die for his shirt,” he said.

Dubois was the long-haired rocker type, filling some of his spare time by playing in not one but three bands, one a tribute act that covered songs by veteran Argentinian rockers Vox Dei – “At first we called it Dubois Dei, but now it’s called Tributo Rock,” he said – one called Corre Guachin, which played a modified, grungy, electronic version of the traditional Colombian folk music cumbia (a style that came from the streets of Argentina’s slums and is known as cumbia villera) and, most improbable of all, a tribute band dedicated to the glories of Reef, the Somerset-based group that scored a couple of top 10 hits, most notably with Place Your Hands, in the mid-90s.

And Dubois was also an all-round character. In the pre-face paint days he told a story of being stopped before a game by a director of his side’s opponents and informed that he would get a small cash bonus if he let them win. Dubois spat in the man’s face and told him to eat grass, later calling him “a bastard rat” in the local media.

On another occasion he was playing for Lugano when a club sponsor failed to pay a promised victory bonus, so he covered their logo, and indeed most of his shirt, in mud before their next game kicked off. Then there was the game between Midland and Excursionistas in which he was sent off for a second bookable offence only for the referee, on taking the yellow card from his pocket, to send a 500 peso note tumbling to the ground. Dubois picked it up, announced to the official that “this is for the prize money you’ve stolen from me with this red card, you son of a bitch”, and sprinted with it towards the dressing rooms, pursued by the referee, opposing players and assorted coaching staff (he eventually gave it back, fearful that the fine for pocketing it would significantly outweigh the potential benefit).

His commitment to his footballing career was admirable, given that he didn’t even like football. “I don’t like playing,” he said. “I do it because it’s competitive and I get to spend my time training. I don’t eat red meat, I don’t drink alcohol or do drugs. I’ve never done any of those things. I play football. And the few pennies I get for playing come in handy – my economic situation is disastrous.” This certainly appeared to be true, and when he wasn’t training or rocking, Dubois would earn a little extra money selling incense and hippie clothes from street stalls.

It was the face paint that made him truly notorious, at least among followers of regional lower-division football in Buenos Aires. In all he made 146 appearances for Yupanquie, Lugano, Deportivo Laferrere, Deportivo Riestra, Canuelas, Deportivo Paraguyo, Victoriano Arenas and Ferrocarril Midland, which is where he was based when he hit peak infamy, in May 1999.

“The other players think it’s funny,” he insisted, when asked about his makeup. “There’s nothing about it in the rule book, but if it hurt the club I’d stop, because even though I don’t like football, I am a fan of Midland.”

Midland weren’t such a fan of him. A couple of weeks after he gave that interview, they told him to find another club. “It just can’t carry on,” announced their chairman, Rodolfo Marchioni. “He’s been clowning around for the last month and a half.” Dubois countered that Marchioni was “just jealous that I’m getting all the press attention”, and turned up at their next game offering to play barefaced. He was told to sit in the stands. The then coach, Jorge Canova, told him it would be “very difficult to stay at the club”.

In the summer of 1999 he spoke about a possible attempt to jump-start his footballing career in Portugal, though his main motivation appeared to have come from reading that Mario Jardel and Ljubinko Drulovic, then of Porto, had painted their faces blue and white before their club’s final game of the season against Estrela Amadora without getting punished. Nothing came of it. Instead, somehow, he resurrected his career at Midland, remaining there until 2002.

It probably helped that there soon was something about it in the rule book, the AFA deciding that Dubois and his face paints were bad for the image of the fourth division, and furthermore that they could make it hard for referees to identify players. “Well, what can you say,” said Dubois, reacting to the judgment. “Thanks to the AFA for demonstrating on a daily basis all aspects of good management and for being a shining exemplar of total credibility.”

In March 2002, during a game against Liniers, Dubois collided with an opponent and was knocked unconscious. He was rushed to hospital with head injuries, a haemorrhage in the right ear and seizures, the game abandoned. After leaving hospital a week later he complained that “the AFA and Agremiados [Argentina’s PFA, Futbolistas Argentinos Agremiados] are all a bunch of rats. Luckily I’m OK, but I almost died on the pitch and they did nothing to help. I thank these great institutions for not being there when I needed them.”

It was perhaps unwise for him to speak out. Two years later, while playing for Victoriano, he injured a cruciate ligament and though the problem could have been remedied with routine surgery, he could not afford it. He applied to the AFA for assistance, but it turned him down. His career was over.

In 1999 he had been asked if he had plans for his retirement. “I like golf, but I’m no good,” he said. “At the moment I’m a musician and a footballer. If in the future I have to work as a rent boy in a gay whorehouse, that’s what I’ll do.” There was, in the end, no need for that: in retirement he continued to play music and worked on the mixing desk of a bar and concert hall in Isidro Casanova, a suburb of Buenos Aires.

Dubois was cycling home from work with his girlfriend in March 2008 when he was ambushed by robbers, who took his bike, his backpack and his mobile phone and shot him in the leg and stomach. He died two weeks later, aged 37. He is remembered for the outlandish tales that illuminated his playing career, and for the tragedy of his premature death; for the tears and the clown.

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