BEFORE GETTING TO the alleged mob hit or the mystery of the missing referee, there should be an explanation about how this quest began. An assigned profile of Luis Suarez led to a stack of things to read about his past. Whether it was a tabloid calling him Cannibal! or The New York Times calling him Luis Alberto Suarez Diaz, the portrait is of a cheat and a lunatic. If someone breathes on him near the goal, he falls down like he's been knifed. He has bitten an opponent. Twice. And, back in his childhood in Uruguay, there's an oft-reported incident that serves as explanation, or maybe proof, that he is, in fact, batshit crazy. When Suarez was 15, overcome with anger, he headbutted a referee and received a red card in a youth match, making the man's nose bleed "like a cow," as a witness said.

No soccer player in the world provokes such a strong emotional response as Liverpool's striker, with less of an understanding of what lurks beneath the surface. His recent injury, which puts his World Cup fitness into doubt, makes him more intriguing. Yet knowing Suarez is difficult, since he seems to not know himself, and, regardless, he wouldn't talk to me. The best path to that knowledge would have to be a journey through his past, looking for clues. That was the plan: talk to people who knew him and let their memories paint a picture. Those who met him during his early years, especially the first person he ever assaulted, might offer slivers of insight. So in addition to visiting Suarez's mother, friends and neighbors, I wanted to sit down with the referee.

Only I couldn't find him.

Nobody I called knew his name. I went to the bottom of the Internet in English, then paid someone to do the same in Spanish. Neither search revealed the man. He was never identified, not in a news story, not in the comments on a news story, not even in message boards. For a reporter, or even an experienced reader, something not being on the Internet sets off alarms. Further reading raised more: The referee story first appeared in one of the often sleazy London tabloids and spread from there, like fact-checking syphilis. One person told one reporter, and all the other stories repeated the anecdote. It bore all the telltale symptoms of origin myth.

Part of me wondered whether the referee ever existed at all, and that led to more questions, and ultimately, this odd little quest. Either I'd knock down a myth, which is journalist crack cocaine, or I'd come face to face with someone who'd been on the receiving end of the initial Suarez meltdown, which spawned, and perhaps would even explain, all that had happened since.

I went to find the ref.

THE SEARCH BEGAN in Uruguay's capital, Montevideo, which curves around a long bend in the coastline. The water sparkles. I passed the impressive hotels and apartment buildings rising above the sea. The challenge of the phantom referee had drawn me to this beautiful city, where the rich live magical lives and, in the shadow of the main bus station, the poor live a century in the past. That's where Suarez grew up in a broken family and came of age as a football player.

"Fútbol, no," said a former mentor, understanding enough English to correct my translator. "Pelota."

Ball.

That means street soccer. Suarez didn't love football. He loved to play ball.

Everyone defended Suarez. On the first day, my translator, Felipe, met me in the lobby of my hotel, and as we started making calls, a referee warned him that I had bad intentions. Why else would I want to find someone attacked by Suarez, if not to use the referee to bludgeon their favorite son?

We went door to door, asking the same question over and over again.

What really happened when Suarez was 15?

People who should know didn't, and the first tremors of obsession began. A high-profile local attorney escorted us into his book-lined office. His socks and tie matched. His name was Enrique Moller, and when Suarez was 15, he was the judge who reviewed all youth league disciplinary problems. He remembered an incident involving Suarez but couldn't recall details. For sure, he said, he didn't remember an assault.

"It was a verbal aggression," said a man Moller had brought to be his translator.

Moller hadn't kept any of his notes or a dusty file about the case. Felipe and I checked out stacks of old newspapers at the national library. The librarian retrieved our materials with a tiny Otis elevator. We took the bound volumes of El Pais and El Observador into the soft, yellow light of the reading room. Neither of us found a story about youth football or a mention of a 15-year-old phenom named Luis.

Someone told us the football federation would have records, but it didn't. The press officer gently admonished us, saying that there were thousands of incidents involving youth players, some minor and some serious, and we only cared about this one because it involved a kid who grew up to be Suarez. So, to recap, he didn't know whether there was an incident, and, if an incident did happen, it was surely minor, and, if it wasn't minor, it still didn't matter and our interest was proof of our own moral failings. At Nacional, the club where Luis played youth football, an employee disappeared down the dark halls of the facility to look for game-by-game stats, or even an old schedule. He emerged empty-handed.

"Those years are lost," he said.

The phone proved more useful than trekking around Montevideo. We started with a famous Uruguayan international referee, a man named Martin Vasquez, whom we caught up with in Chile, where he was working a match. He remembered rumors and whispers about an incident involving Suarez but didn't know a name. The Uruguayan referee community is small and tight, and he suggested other soccer people to call. We worked down the list, quickly explaining what we wanted and why. By the third or fourth call, we found a referee who remembered hearing about a confrontation involving Suarez, but, instead of a headbutt, it was a thrown cup of water. Two people told Felipe they remembered the alleged victim's identity.

The name of the referee, if he was the right one, was Luis Larranaga.

EVERYTHING ABOUT LUIS SUAREZ is viewed and judged through his reputation, which, although familiar to fans around the world, might not be as clear in the relative soccer wastelands of America. Putting him in an American context is difficult because he transcends the sports page. Imagine the tabloid fodder of Lindsay Lohan's life with Jennifer Lawrence's acting chops. That's the unique place Suarez occupies in the European pop culture firmament. In April, the English Premier League named him player of the year. He has carried the reborn Liverpool side on his shoulders. And yet, despite his widely acknowledged greatness, people hate him.

A blogger wrote this: "Even his facial features give the impression of a deceitful person who is meant not to be trusted."

A more responsible newspaper, the Toronto Star, toning down the rhetoric, said this: "He's the diviest, whiniest, annoyingest player on Earth. Though there are plenty of aspirants, he is easily the most hated man in football. ... North of his feet, there is nothing good about Suarez. He couldn't be more awful if he came out of the tunnel twirling mustachios."

The two most well-known examples of said awfulness are, of course, the two times he bit opponents on the field. In November 2010, playing for Ajax in Amsterdam, he bit midfielder Otman Bakkal on the shoulder during an argument. Suarez never played for Ajax again. Less than three years later, now with Liverpool and jockeying in front of the goal in a match against Chelsea, he sank his teeth into the right forearm of Branislav Ivanovic. Both times, Suarez responded to the normal action of the game with a completely inappropriate, nutty overreaction.

Beyond the biting, he dives, famously and often, flailing on the ground if a defender even thinks of touching him, and there's the entire debate in England about whether he's a racist. Playing Manchester United, he reportedly called Patrice Evra negrito -- "little black" -- and, after finishing serving his suspension for racially abusing an opponent, he refused to shake Evra's hand before a match. The same newspaper, the Toronto Star, in the same piece, also wrote: "He will do something insane at this summer's World Cup -- mark it down. ... Eventually, he'll punch a baby."

Those were the things I'd internalized about Suarez by the time I arrived in Uruguay. His reputation prepared me to believe any sort of wild story, and, while Felipe worked the phone looking for more information on Larranaga, a wild story is exactly what I found. We sat in the lobby, and I searched the web for Luis Larranaga and Luis Suarez. Nothing.

I searched again, using only Larranaga's name and arbitro, referee.

Now, in print, I will try to use words to eloquently convey the essence of my internal triple-take reaction once the results popped up in my browser: Holy Goddamn Shitballs!

One link led to a local blog about the hidden mafia running Uruguayan football, about drug cartels using the sport to launder money. The author across many posts built a case for systemic corruption. In the middle of the allegations, there was a story about how, in 2003, the head of youth soccer, Nelson Spillman, threatened a referee named Luis Larranaga.

Spillman, according to the story, tried to pressure Larranaga into changing a postmatch report to the disciplinary committee -- the one chaired by the lawyer with the matching tie and socks. Larranaga had given a red card to an unnamed player who then physically assaulted him. Quick math said that Suarez would have been 16 then, not 15, so either the timeline didn't work or the news reports were off by a year.

The story got weirder. An investigative reporter broke the news about Spillman threatening Larranaga. Less than a month later, a hit man shot the reporter at the door of his house. The hit man had been paid $500. The assassination failed, and Nelson Spillman and his brother, Daniel, who reportedly drove the getaway car, went to jail for the botched hit.

Many media outlets covered the investigation and the trial. In these accounts of the shooting, the youth player whose assault sparked the bizarre chain of events was never named.

Was it Suarez?

TO SUAREZ'S DETRACTORS, the headbutt story provides a structure for the biting and the other horrible behavior, taking distinct incidents and organizing them into a narrative. The headbutt sounds true. Well, it sounds true to soccer fans in Europe. In Uruguay, where Suarez is a treasure, the story doesn't fit into the nation's image of the star. To Wilson Pirez, the scout who discovered Suarez as a poor, skinny 9-year-old kid, the rest of the world is wrong.

Pirez met us at a steakhouse near the Montevideo docks, where dark bars offer cheap international calls and cheaper drinks to sailors rushing off the container ships. Daylight dies a few feet inside the lawless saloons, and everything is for sale. At the restaurant, thick cuts of grass-fed beef cooked on open wood fires, and the whole place smelled like melting fat and salt. Pirez told us about how a reporter from England misquoted him. Suarez had read the comments and called his friend to basically find out, you know, What the hell, man? Pirez assured him he hadn't said those things, then called the newspaper to rant. But the scout knew the drill. "They ask me, 'Was he that bad when he was a kid?'" Pirez said. "Searching for the answer that suits their story, which is 'Suarez is violent.' I get angry. Why are you searching for that?"

Reporters only come to Uruguay to find out why Suarez bites people because, to be fair, that is a damn interesting question. Pirez knows and loves Suarez, so he is both the best and worst person to ask. He'll never believe that perhaps it isn't a completely bad idea to define someone by a few major events. Extreme moments can reveal us as we truly are. So although there is a case to be made that Suarez cannot be reduced to the bites and headbutts, there is an equally compelling case that those few seconds are the most authentic he's ever been. Suarez wears many masks, each of them true in the moment he puts them on, but perhaps nothing reveals his truest self like the mask he wears when he's threatened, for that is the one that shows all the hurt he wants to hide.

The latest bite cost Suarez a 10-game suspension, and millions of people watched the grainy footage of the attack and the photographs of Ivanovic afterward, with terrified eyes, looking as if he'd been playing a game and run into someone for whom the action meant much, much more. Everyone saw Suarez's suspension, as they'd seen an earlier one for racial taunting. But nobody saw what he did when faced with the end of his football career. After one of those two suspensions -- the friend telling the story couldn't recall which -- Suarez flew home. With rumors circling about Liverpool cutting him loose, he ran straight into the embrace of a group of men he hadn't seen in years. He threw a party for many of the guys who played with him on the Nacional youth team in 2003, the same boys he grew up with, who were there when he either did or did not headbutt a referee.

"People he hadn't seen for years and years and years," says Mathias Cardacio, who played youth ball with Suarez.

Sitting in the steakhouse, Pirez told a story of his own, which is as true as the two famous bites. Not long ago, Suarez was at the beach in Uruguay, making an official appearance at some event that wanted the reflected wattage of his fame. Everyone saw him there, flashbulbs popping. But nobody saw him leave, driving in a rush back to Montevideo for Pirez's daughter's second birthday. So is Suarez a family guy who twice bit someone, or is he a lunatic who every now and then manages to act like a normal guy?

In Uruguay, reporters write about him being a great father and friend because that rings true, just as the stories of violence ring true in England and around the world.

The sports editor of one of Montevideo's papers met us one evening in a bar near the old colonial square. A brick oven in the back there reaches extraordinary temperatures, and the flames turn out the best pizza in town, with draft beer so cold it turns to ice when it hits the big, heavy mugs. Romulo Martinez Chenlo tucked his long hair behind his ears and took off his glasses. Martinez Chenlo said he'd never heard the story of the headbutt, which isn't part of the local boilerplate biography. He barely stopped himself from rolling his eyes when I brought up the two sides of Suarez.

"There are not two Suarezes," he said, raising his voice.

Martinez Chenlo decided to prove once and for all that his Suarez never attacked a referee. He scrolled through his phone until he found the number of a friend, a man named Ricardo Perdomo. Perdomo coached Suarez in the youth leagues. If an assault occurred, he would have been on the sideline. Martinez Chenlo dialed and then talked in Spanish for a few minutes, grinning at us every so often, as if he were getting all the details he needed to prove that the story was made up. His eyes moved back and forth, the look of someone processing information, and after a long pause, he hung up.

"It was not a headbutt," he said, sounding triumphant. Then he explained what he learned. It was 2003. Suarez was 16, not 15. Nacional was playing Danubio, another local team, and Suarez never assaulted anyone. He simply protested a referee's decision when a bit of bad luck struck. Sure, his head hit the referee's face, but not on purpose.

"He fell," Martinez Chenlo said, "accidentally into the referee."