Why Soccer Matters Page 2

  On the field, my dad showed glimpses—when healthy—of the brilliance that had once put him so tantalizingly close to the big time. He scored lots of goals, and in 1946 he helped lead BAC to the semiprofessional league championship in São Paulo state’s interior. He also had a certain charisma, a way of carrying himself with elegance and good cheer despite the bad luck that had befallen his soccer career. Just about everybody in Baurú knew who he was and liked him. I was known wherever I went as Dondinho’s son, a title of which I was, and am, very proud. But times were still tight, and I remember thinking even then that it wasn’t worth anything to be famous if you couldn’t put food on the table.

  I guess Dondinho could have sought another skill, another occupation. But soccer can be both generous and cruel. Those who fall under its spell never really escape. And when Dondinho realized that his own dream was falling short, he dedicated himself, heart and soul, to nurturing someone else’s.

  4

  “Ah, so you think you’re good, eh?”

  I would stare down at my feet, and smile.

  “Kick the ball here,” he would say, pointing at a spot on the wall of our house.

  If I succeeded—and I usually did—he would grin for just a moment, and then abruptly turn serious again.

  “Very well! Now do it with your other foot!”

  Blam!

  “Now with your head!”

  Blam!

  And so it would go, for hours and hours, sometimes late into the night, just the two of us, me and him. These were soccer fundamentals at their most basic: dribbling, shooting, passing the ball back and forth. We didn’t have access to the city’s soccer field most of the time, so we used the space available, which consisted of our tiny yard and the street outside, which was called Rubens Arruda Street. Sometimes he’d tell me stories from games he’d played, and show me moves that he’d learned or invented himself. He also talked, on occasion, about his older brother, a midfielder who Dad said was an even better goal scorer than he was, but who died at just twenty-five—another promising career in the Nascimento family that tragically didn’t live up to its potential.

  Mostly, though, it was just drills, learning the basic skills of the game. Some of the exercises were, in retrospect, pretty funny. One involved tying a ball to a tree limb up high and bouncing it off the top of my head for hours at a time. But that was child’s play compared to Dondinho’s technique for teaching me how to “head” the ball properly into the goal. He would grab a ball with both his hands and then hit me in the middle of my forehead with it, over and over again. “Don’t blink! Don’t blink!” he would say. His point was that to really be good, I had to learn to keep my eyes open when the ball hit my head. He even told me that, when I was just sitting around the house, I should pick up a ball and slam it against my head on my own. Which I did—I can’t imagine how ridiculous I must have looked! But, obviously, Dondinho thought it was very important—and he was right. It was a lesson that would serve me extremely well later on.

  Besides the headers, there were two skills in particular that Dondinho wanted me to focus on: 1) Keeping the ball as close to my body as possible while dribbling, and 2) being able to do everything equally well with both feet.

  Why did he emphasize these things? Maybe because of the small spaces we played in—on the streets of Baurú, and in yards and alleys. But also, perhaps, because my dad saw that I was pretty small and scrawny. As an adult, I would grow to be just five feet, seven inches tall; it was clear even then that I was going to be short. So unlike Dondinho, I wouldn’t have any natural physical advantages on the soccer field. If I couldn’t knock other players out of the way, or jump higher than them, I’d just have to be more skilled. I’d have to learn to make the ball an extension of myself.

  Dondinho taught me all these things, it must be said, at considerable risk. My mother, Dona Celeste, dreaded the possibility of her oldest son becoming a soccer player. And who could blame her? For Dona Celeste, soccer was this dead-end pursuit, a sure path to poverty. She was a strong woman, always looking out for us. It was often left to her to be the responsible one in a houseful of dreamers. She wanted me to spend my free time studying, so I could make something of myself one day. Then as now, she was like the angel sitting on our shoulders, always encouraging us to do the right, moral, constructive thing. She wanted better lives for all of us. So in those early years, when she caught me playing soccer, she would give me a good verbal lashing. And sometimes much worse!

  Despite her well-intentioned efforts, my dad and I couldn’t be stopped. What could she do? We both had the sickness. And as time passed, and we kept playing in the little yard, it got to the point where Dona Celeste would just walk outside, put her hands on her hips and heave a resigned sigh:

  “Oh, great. Your eldest son! Just don’t come complaining to me later when he’s starving, instead of studying medicine or law!”

  Dondinho would put his arm around her waist, and laugh.

  “Don’t worry, Celeste. Unless he learns to use his left foot properly, you have nothing to worry about!”

  The parent with frustrated dreams of sporting greatness, training a son or daughter to follow in his or her footsteps—it’s an old tale, one that is full of peril. Some children resent the burden that comes with these expectations. Other kids, placed under heavy pressure, simply snap. Some of them never kick a ball again.

  I never felt any of these things. The simple truth was that I loved soccer. I loved the feel of the ball on my foot, the sun on my face, the camaraderie that came with great teamwork, the electricity that ran through my veins when I scored a goal. But most of all, I loved the time that I spent with my dad. During all those long hours we spent practicing, I don’t think Dondinho ever thought that I’d be rich or famous, not during those early years, anyway. I think he just loved the damn game—and wanted to pass that love along to his son.

  He succeeded. And I have to say, that love has never faded. It’s deep inside of me, like religion, or a language you learn from birth. My dad’s gone now. But the amazing thing is that, all these years later, I still can’t separate my love for soccer from my love for him.

  5

  Throughout my life, I would have the honor of playing soccer in nearly all of the world’s great venues—the Maracanã in Rio, Camp Nou in Barcelona, even Yankee Stadium in New York City. But my very first competitive games were played on the hallowed grounds of “Rubens Arruda Stadium”—which wasn’t really a field at all, but the dusty street in front of our house in Baurú. Kids from the neighborhood were my first rivals. We used old shoes for goalposts; the houses were out of bounds (most of the time); and if an errant kick broke a streetlight or window, we’d run like crazy, although everybody usually assumed I was to blame, being known around town as the most soccer-crazy of the whole bunch. I guess that was the one downside of being Dondinho’s son!

  Our pickup games reflected why I think soccer brings people together like no other single activity. Other sports, like baseball or cricket or American football, require all kinds of expensive equipment or rigidly organized teams. They might have been off-limits to a bunch of poor, unorganized kids in a place like Baurú. But all we needed for soccer was a ball. It could be one-on-one, or eleven-on-eleven, and we were entertained just the same. In our neighborhood, I could run out there pretty much anytime of day and find at least six or ten other kids to play with. Our mothers were nearby, so they could keep an eye on us. But there really wasn’t much to worry about in small-town Brazil in the 1940s—there were no cars, hardly any violent crime, and everybody in the community knew one another. So, no matter the time of day, Rubens Arruda Stadium was almost always playing host to a game of some kind, unless the referee—that is, my mom—broke it up.

  Another great thing about soccer is that literally anybody can play—you can be small, tall, strong or slight, but as long as you can run and kick, you’re perfectly suit
ed to take a soccer field. As a result, our pickup games gathered an incredibly diverse, varied group of kids. Each game was like a little gathering of the United Nations: We had Syrians, Portuguese, Italians, Japanese, and of course many Afro-Brazilians like myself.

  In that sense, Baurú was a microcosm of Brazil, which absorbed millions of immigrants from all over the world. It was a true melting pot, just as diverse as—if not more so than—the United States. Many outsiders don’t know that São Paulo, even today, has the largest Japanese-descended population of any city outside of Japan. Baurú was two hundred miles from São Paulo, and seemingly one-millionth of the size, but we also absorbed our fair share of immigrants who originally came to work in the coffee plantations just outside our city. My neighbors had last names like Kamazuki, Haddad and Marconi. Soccer made us put aside whatever differences we might have, and I’d go over to their houses afterward to eat yakisoba, kibbe or just plain Brazilian rice and beans. It was a great introduction to the world, and it awakened an early appetite for other cultures—one I would be lucky enough to greatly indulge in coming years.

  I was always in a rush to play, so I was usually the one who took charge of dividing up the teams. This was complicated. Why? Well, at the risk of sounding immodest, all those drills with Dondinho were starting to pay off. And that was becoming a problem. My team would win games 12–3, or 20–6. Kids started refusing to play, even those much older than I. So at first, I would try to keep everybody interested by creating lopsided teams, pitting three against seven, for example, and putting myself on the smaller side. When even that wasn’t enough, I started playing the first half of the game as the goalie, just to keep the score close, before finally taking up offense toward the end. Playing goalie so often in those years was another decision that would echo throughout my life in the strangest ways, and eventually give me my most famous nickname, the one the world knows me by.

  Nicknames are a funny thing in Brazil—almost everybody’s got one, and some people have three or four. At that time, I was still known as “Dico”—which my family calls me even today. My brother, Jair, was called “Zoca.” And when Zoca and I weren’t on the field, we had all kinds of adventures with our friends around town—the railway station was just a few blocks away from our house, and we’d go there to see people arriving from São Paulo and elsewhere—it was our window to the world. On other days, we’d go fish in the Baurú River, right under the railway bridge; we couldn’t afford rods or reels, of course, so we’d borrow circular, wood-edged screens, and scoop the fish out that way. On many days, we’d go running with our friends into the forest that surrounded the city, where we’d pick fresh mangoes and plums from the trees and hunt birds, including one species called the tiziu, which briefly became another nickname of mine—because tizius are small, black and fast!

  It wasn’t all fun and games, of course. Nudged by our family’s economic situation, I had started working part-time when I was seven. My uncle Jorge lent me some money and I bought a shoe shine kit—a little box with some brushes inside, and a leather strap for carrying it around. I practiced at first by shining for friends and members of our family, and then when I had the technique down, I went to the train station and shined shoes there. In coming years, I would also work at a shoe factory. For a brief time, I took pastels—a delicious, deep-fried Brazilian empanada of sorts, usually stuffed with ground beef or cheese or hearts of palm—that were made by a Syrian woman in our neighborhood and I delivered them to a vendor. He then sold them to passengers on one of the three rail lines that ran through town.

  There wasn’t much money in any of this—Baurú was poor, like the rest of Brazil. It often seemed like a city of too many shoe shiners, and not enough shoes. But, whatever I earned, I’d dutifully deliver all of it to my mom, who used the money to help buy us food. When times were good, she’d give me a few coins to go see a matinee on Sunday.

  There was also school. Here, I’m afraid my performance wasn’t quite equal to what I was doing on the field. My enthusiasm for soccer, above all, made me a difficult and often rebellious student. Sometimes I’d just walk out of the classroom and start dribbling a wadded-up piece of paper through the courtyard. Now, my teachers did the best they could—they tried to discipline me by making me kneel on piles of dried beans, or by putting balls of crumpled paper in my mouth to stop me from talking. One teacher would make me stand facing the corner, my arms outstretched, kind of like the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio. I remember one time I got in huge trouble for crawling under a teacher’s desk and looking up her dress.

  Over time, I got discouraged by school. There were lots of other things to do, and I’m sorry to say that my attendance became sporadic. This was sadly typical at the time—in the late 1940s, only one in three Brazilian kids went to school at all. Just one in six made it to high school. Still, this was little excuse. I would later regret not having paid more attention as a student, and would go to considerable lengths to make up for it.

  For better and for worse, I reserved most of my considerable energy for the soccer field. It was a place where we didn’t have to think about poverty, or our parents, or long-ago tragedies. On the field, nobody was rich or poor; it was a place where we could just play. We spent our days talking, breathing, and living the sport. Little did we know, soccer was about to be the backdrop for the biggest thing ever to happen in Brazil.

  6

  Then as now, there’s nothing that gets people everywhere quite as excited as the World Cup. The tournament brings together countries from all over the world every four years for a full month of games, celebrations and pageantry. It’s like a huge party where the entire planet is invited. I’ve been to every one of them for the last fifty-six years, as either a player, fan or designated “ambassador” to the sport of soccer. Based on my experience, I can say with some authority that there’s just nothing better. The Olympics are great too, of course, but for my taste there’s almost too much going on with all the different events. With the World Cup, it’s only soccer—a tournament that builds and builds to an exhilarating climax, the championship game, when the new kings of the world are anointed.

  It’s such an institution now that it seems like the World Cup has been around forever. But in 1950, when it first came to Brazilian soil, the World Cup was still a relatively new idea—and it was on somewhat shaky ground. The first Cup had been organized only twenty years before, in 1930. A Frenchman named Jules Rimet, who was the president of FIFA, the global soccer body, decided to create a showcase for the ever-more popular sport. His plan was to gather teams every four years, at the midpoint between each Summer Olympics—hoping that it would increase the profile of international teams and also make a contribution to global harmony. Unfortunately, there were only men’s teams back then—several more decades would pass until someone had the excellent, long-overdue idea of staging a World Cup for women’s teams, as well.

  The first few World Cups drew teams from countries as varied as Cuba, Romania and the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), as well as already entrenched superpowers like Brazil and Italy. The World Cup grew in prestige and attendance, and by the 1938 edition, held in France, games were playing to big venues packed with tens of thousands of people. But there were several foreboding events at that 1938 Cup, such as when the Austrian team had to withdraw at the last minute—because, three months earlier, their nation had been absorbed into Germany. The German team ended up incorporating several of Austria’s best players, but they were eliminated in the first round anyway before a hostile, bottle-throwing crowd in Paris. It was, unfortunately, not the last time that politics would intrude on the soccer field.

  When World War II erupted a year later, the World Cup—like so many other things—was put on hold for a long while. The war ended in 1945, but most of Europe was so terribly devastated, and focused on rebuilding its cities and factories, that years would pass before anybody thought it was possible to hold a global soccer tournam
ent again. By 1950, it finally seemed like the Cup was ready to resume—but the organizers needed a host country that hadn’t been touched by the war, and could afford to build the stadiums and other infrastructure required. And that’s where Brazil came in.

  Even after Brazil agreed to host the 1950 Cup, several countries were still too broke to send teams all the way to South America. This was before the age when everyone could travel by jet, and getting to Brazil from Europe could still take thirty hours and require several stops in places like Cape Verde and Recife, on Brazil’s northeastern coast. Germany, which was still partitioned and occupied by the Allied powers, was banned from participating. So was Japan. Scotland and Turkey withdrew at the last minute. In the end, only six countries would attend from Europe, which besides South America was the other powerhouse of global soccer. This was too bad for them—but it seemed to be great for Brazil! We were still looking for our first World Cup title, and we thought we were way overdue. With a limited field of competitors, and the games on our home turf, how could we possibly lose?

  In Baurú, as elsewhere in Brazil, all of us became consumed by World Cup fever—well, not so much by the Cup itself, but by the absolute certainty that we were about to be crowned the champions of the world. I was only nine, but definitely old enough to get swept up in things. “The Cup is ours!” I remember my dad saying, confidently, again and again, as we all listened to news of the preparations for the tournament on the radio at night. “The Cup is going to be ours, Dico!”

  Among my friends, there was talk of celebrations and parades, and arguments over who might get to see the trophy themselves. We played our street games while imagining ourselves as the world champions. In fact, it was pretty amazing how, wherever I went, I couldn’t find a single soul who even considered the possibility that Brazil might not win the whole thing.