La Revancha del Campeonísimo

Concept

There are a handful of moments an entire country remembers the same way, and in Paraguay one of them is the 1979 Roland Garros final. Víctor Manuel Pecci reached the final of the hardest tournament in the world on clay and played it against Björn Borg at his peak. He lost, but he took a set off him and made him sweat. Thirty years later the two stood on a court again, at the Club Centenario in Asunción — and the communication problem was clear: those who lived through '79 remember it by heart, but a twenty-year-old does not know who Björn Borg is or why that final matters.

The whole site is built to solve that, and it does not do it by explaining: it does it by letting you into the memory. You can watch the '79 final on a cathode-ray television with grainy picture, exactly as it was seen. You can open Pecci's personal albums —real newspaper clippings, photographs, features from the time— which were uploaded one a day until the match. And you can play: "live what Pecci lived and take on Borg". That game is the best decision in the whole piece: an ad tells you the final was epic; a game where you have to return Borg's serve makes you understand it with your body.

The whole site is old paper: an ochre card background, pages taped at the corners, yellowed clippings and photographs of both players toned in sanguine. The home page is the best-realised part: five paper cards overlapping and barely rotated, as if someone had left them on a table, with the menu handwritten and a tennis ball as the bullet. Nothing is clean, and that is the point: the site does not want to look like 2009, it wants to look like 1979. It is the most playful work in the archive and the only one with a complete video game.