Why Soccer Matters Page 4

  Finally, the radio announcer called out the name of the captain of the 1950 team. He was a feared defender and inspirational leader who seemed immune to the pressure of big games. Perhaps that was because of his past—prior to his playing career, he had been an agent for the Brazilian federal police. He wasn’t much of a scorer, even by the standards of defenders—in two hundred ninety-seven games playing for the Brazilian club team Vasco da Gama, he scored exactly zero goals. But the man was a rock on defense, and a soothing presence on the field, perfect for a championship game such as this.

  The captain’s name? Augusto.

  It was the very same Augusto who, some eight years before, had collided with my dad on that field in Minas Gerais.

  That’s luck for you—one man recovers and goes on to captain Brazil, while another goes back to Baurú, his knee a wreck, to listen to the game on the radio.

  If Dad felt jealous that day, he never said so. I suspect he just wanted Brazil to win.

  11

  The first half of the game was marked by nonstop action, with Brazil constantly on the attack. Our formidable offense, comprised of five forwards, led by the fearsome Jaw, rained shot after shot upon the Uruguayan goal. People who attended the game said that the score could have been 2–0, or even 3–0, in Brazil’s favor by the end of the first half. Yet the Uruguayan goalie, Roque Máspoli, somehow managed to stop every single ball that came his way. Some of the saves were pretty lucky, people said. In fact, in coming years, Roque would gain a reputation as a very fortunate guy—twice in his life, he ended up with the winning ticket for the Uruguayan national lottery. So I guess that July 16, 1950, wasn’t the only day in Roque’s life that the ball bounced his way.

  As the second half began, Friaça finally got that first goal past him. As my mom and dad hugged, my friends and I sprinted out of the house and into the neighborhood. Fireworks and rockets were going off everywhere, and my ears buzzed with a delightful hum. Inside the Maracanã, people were throwing confetti and shooting off fireworks as well. The euphoria finally erupted; the national party had begun.

  When my friends and I came back inside, the celebration was well under way. My dad and his friends were drinking beer, talking about their games at BAC, not even paying much attention by now to what was being said on the radio.

  And then, almost like an afterthought, we heard the announcer for Rádio Nacional blurt out:

  “Goal for Uruguay!”

  Wait—what?

  “Goal for Uruguay!”

  The announcer later said he repeated himself precisely because he knew the audience wouldn’t believe him the first time.

  The room went silent as we listened to his recap of the play.

  “A good combination by the Uruguayan attack and it ends with the equalizing goal,” the announcer said, sounding suddenly subdued. “Bigode lost out to Ghiggia. He sent in a low cross . . . a lovely cross . . . Schiaffino came in from the left and he scored!”

  Brazil 1, Uruguay 1.

  Now, there was no reason whatsoever for anybody to panic. That 1950 Cup had a strange, round-robin format, primarily because there were so few teams. As a result, all Brazil had to do was tie Uruguay in that final game, and we would still be crowned champions. Meanwhile, there were only twenty minutes left in the game—our team had allowed an average of less than a goal per game throughout the tournament. Surely our defense wouldn’t allow a second goal?

  But something strange happened the moment Uruguay knocked that ball into the net. The crowd at the Maracanã felt it, and so did we, even all the way in Baurú. It was as if all the confidence and all the hype suddenly reversed itself, like air rushing out of a room. We’d built ourselves up so high that if we fell, the tumble would be fatal. And suddenly, all of Brazil felt itself staring into the abyss.

  I glanced over at Dondinho, who was now wide-eyed, slumped in a chair.

  At the Maracanã, a crowd of two hundred thousand people—somehow—went totally quiet.

  The silence, Coach Costa later said, “terrified our players.”

  And little Uruguay, the unwilling underdog, began to smell blood.

  12

  Soccer has absolutely nothing to do with the size of a country, or the size of the players. Heart, skill and hard work are the only things that matter. My goodness, I should have known that better than anybody.

  Somehow, we had forgotten that Uruguay was a country with a soccer tradition at least as rich as ours. Its team was renowned throughout the world for its “garra charrúa”—a local term for guts and fighting spirit. They were also known for including players of African descent as early as the 1910s—far earlier than other South American countries, including Brazil. Uruguay already had won two gold medals for soccer at the Olympics, and even had one World Cup championship under its belt—from 1930, the very first Cup, which had been played on Uruguayan soil! That Cup, like the 1950 edition, was also characterized by the absence of several key teams. The world was in the thick of the Great Depression, and many teams from Europe couldn’t afford to make the trip. As a result, some people said Uruguay’s victory in 1930 had been a fluke. But they should have known better.

  When the Uruguayans arrived in Rio for the final, and realized they were being treated as mere patsies in Brazil’s coronation, they did exactly what you’d expect from a team with a championship pedigree—they rebelled. The players were absolutely furious, and practiced with unusual intensity. And in their rage, the coaches and the officials accompanying the team saw a golden opportunity.

  On the morning of the game, Manuel Caballero, the Uruguayan consul in Rio, picked up twenty copies of that newspaper announcing that Brazil was already the “champions of the world.” He took them back to the Hotel Paissandú, where the Uruguayan delegation was staying. When the players sat down for their pregame meal, Caballero dropped the newspapers on the table and declared:

  “My condolences; you’ve all been beaten.”

  The players exploded in shouting and groans. One of them, Eusebio Tejera, who had a reputation for being a bit emotional, stood up and punched the wall.

  “No, no, no! They are not champions!” he screamed. “We’ll see who will be the champion!”

  According to another account, the Uruguayan team captain, Obdulio Varela, then took the newspapers down to the players’ bathroom at the hotel. He scattered them around the room, and the players proceeded to urinate on the pictures of the Brazilian players.

  Whatever nerves the Uruguayan players might have had left upon taking the field at the Maracanã later that day, they dissipated when the first half ended scoreless. Brazil’s sense of invincibility had been punctured for good. Even when we scored at the start of the second half, that only added to the Uruguayans’ siege mentality. Obdulio grabbed the ball from the net and spent a full minute yelling at everyone: the referee, the crowd. He wouldn’t let go of the ball. When he finally put it back down on the grass, allowing play to resume, he screamed at his teammates:

  “We win here, or they’ll kill us!”

  Well, that was a bit of hyperbole, but he certainly wasn’t the first person in Brazil to exaggerate that day. The rest of the team responded with the urgency Obdulio hoped for, and the equalizing goal soon followed. After that, it was up to Alcides Ghiggia, an outstanding player on the right wing of the field, who, with about ten minutes left to play, found himself almost alone near the Brazilian goal.

  13

  The call on the radio said it all:

  “Ghiggia gives the ball back . . . Julio Perez hits it deep to the right winger . . . Ghiggia bears down on goal . . . and he shoots. It’s a goal. Goal for Uruguay! Ghiggia! Uruguay’s second goal! Uruguay are 2–1 up . . . Thirty-three minutes gone . . .”

  14

  Perhaps sensing our imminent defeat, perhaps freaked-out by the silence in our living room, or perhaps just because I was a kid, I went outside t
o play with my friends before Uruguay scored that second goal. We knocked the ball around halfheartedly, and celebrated a few goals of our own. But we could tell things weren’t going well inside.

  A short time later, my dad’s friends began slowly drifting out of our house, shuffling their feet, anguished looks on their face. At that point, obviously, I knew. I set the ball down on the ground, took a deep breath, and went back inside.

  Dondinho was standing with his back toward the room, staring out the window.

  “Dad?”

  He turned around—with tears rolling down his cheeks.

  I was stunned. I had never seen my dad cry before.

  “Brazil lost,” he croaked, as if barely able to say the words. “Brazil lost.”

  15

  “Never in my life did I see a people as sad as the Brazilians after that defeat,” Alcides Ghiggia, who scored the winning goal, recalled years later. He added, showing slightly less empathy: “Only three people in history have managed to silence the Maracanã with a single gesture—the Pope, Frank Sinatra, and me.”

  When the final whistle blew, thousands of people in the stands began to weep. God knows how many followed suit throughout Brazil. The mood was so grim that, even as the Uruguayans waited for Jules Rimet, the FIFA president and creator of the World Cup, to come out on the field and give them their well-deserved trophy, some of them just wanted to go running into the dressing room. “I cried more than the Brazilians,” said Schiaffino, who had scored the first goal, “because I could see how they were suffering.”

  Outside the Maracanã, angry crowds set fire to stacks of newspapers—including, one assumes, the editions that had prematurely proclaimed Brazil the champion. The stadium didn’t burn down, but a statue the mayor had erected of himself outside its doors was pulled to the ground, and the decapitated head tossed into the nearby Maracanã River. The Brazilian players wandered out of the arena in a daze a few hours later. Many staggered into nearby bars, where some of them spent the next several days. Friaça, who scored Brazil’s only goal, was recognized by a group of fans who began shouting the names of the victorious Uruguayan players: “Obdulio!” “Ghiggia!” As Friaça said: “I saw that those shouts were going to follow me for the rest of my life.”

  Indeed, in ensuing weeks and months, the grief would get only more intense. As loud as the hype had been, the mourning and soul-searching was even louder. It was like the end of a war, with Brazil as the loser, and many dead. The defeat was chalked up not to the shortcomings of eleven players, but to the failings of an entire country, proof that Brazil was condemned to eternal backwardness and underdevelopment. Some people began grumbling that Brazil would never win a World Cup, and would never be able to compete at anything with the great countries of the world.

  Even some very serious people took this view. Roberto DaMatta, a famous anthropologist, said the loss was maybe the biggest tragedy in Brazil’s modern history, because it convinced everyone that we were a nation of losers. Even worse, it came at precisely the time when the country had dared to dream of greatness, in both sport and in terms of global prestige—we had taken a risk, stuck our necks out, and it had gone horribly awry. Years would pass before our national self-esteem recovered. “Every country has its irremediable national catastrophe, something like Hiroshima,” wrote Nelson Rodrigues, a Brazilian sports journalist. “Our catastrophe, our Hiroshima, was the defeat by Uruguay in 1950.” Another journalist, Roberto Muylaert, would compare the grainy, black-and-white film of Ghiggia’s winning goal to footage of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, saying they both had “the same drama . . . the same movement, rhythm . . . the same precision of an inexorable trajectory.”

  Some of the players from that 1950 team would go on to great things in their careers at club teams. But, sadly, none of them would ever win a World Cup. Some went to their deathbeds thinking about the one that got away. Zizinho, my favorite player from that team, said he kept his World Cup runners-up medal hidden in a corner of one of his trophy cases, letting it turn black with tarnish. “I don’t clean it,” he said years later. “In Brazil, being runner-up is garbage. It’s better to lose before the final.” But even if he tried to forget, other people wouldn’t let him. Every July 16, for decades afterward, Zizinho had to take his home phone off the hook. “Otherwise, it rings all day,” he grumbled, “with people from all over Brazil, asking why we lost the World Cup.”

  As bad as that sounds, there was one group of players that got more grief than anyone—the black ones. In his famous book The Negro in Brazilian Soccer, the renowned journalist Mário Filho wrote that many Brazilians blamed the defeat on the country’s “racial inferiority”—the idea that a black nation with black players was always going to fall short. This was an old and disgusting theory, of course, but it was made worse by the fact—a coincidence—that the Brazilian team’s two “blackest” players were both involved in the two Uruguayan goals. Bigode, the defender who was assigned to Schiaffino on the first goal, would be taunted for years afterward as a “coward.” He became a recluse, unwilling to socialize with his friends from the 1950 team out of fear someone would mention the game. And Barbosa, the goalie . . . man, that guy had it worst of all.

  I would meet Barbosa many times in later years. He lived in Rio, and he continued to play for club teams until 1962, retiring at the advanced age of forty-one after accumulating many other triumphs in his career. But for all his efforts, there was no way for him to escape the finger-pointing, the ridicule, and the anger directed toward him—even decades afterward. Barbosa attempted to visit the Brazilian national team at their training grounds in Teresópolis in 1994, hoping to see them off with an inspiring message prior to the World Cup in the United States—but the team denied him, believing he was “bad luck.” Before he passed away in April of 2000, he would often say, to me and many other people: “In this country, the maximum criminal sentence is thirty years. I’m not a criminal, and I already served far more than that.”

  The hard truth is that Brazil’s loss wasn’t the fault of Barbosa, or any other player. Zizinho said that all the triumphalist talk in newspapers and elsewhere was “the biggest weapon you can give your adversary.” Coach Costa summed it up best of all, attributing the loss to the “atmosphere of ‘We already won!’ that prevailed among the fans, the press and the management.” It was the hype machine that did Brazil in. Everyone who tried to use the game to their advantage, especially the politicians, deserved a share of the blame. They created unrealistic expectations, and the moment it became clear they couldn’t be achieved, the Brazilian team was doomed.

  “It wasn’t the second goal that defeated us,” Costa said, “but the first one.”

  Nevertheless, many people would never accept such excuses. And sadly, the ghosts from the Maracanã still haven’t completely left us, even today. Barbosa said the worst day of his life was not July 16, 1950, but a perfectly ordinary afternoon some two decades later, when a woman and her young son spotted him at a store.

  “Look at him,” the woman said, pointing at Barbosa, speaking loudly enough for him to hear. “That is the man that made all of Brazil cry.”

  16

  Wait—didn’t I say that the 1950 World Cup loss was a good thing for Brazil?

  Bear with me here.

  Yes, there were a lot of terrible consequences. For Barbosa, and a great many other people, there was never any silver lining at all. But for the rest of us, that day in Rio was a big learning experience—something that would help forge us as a people, and reverberate in positive ways for decades to come.

  Standing around the radio, and suffering together, gave Brazilians a shared experience. For the first time in our history, rich and poor Brazilians alike had something in common, something they could discuss with anybody on the street corner, at the bakery, or at the office, whether they were in Rio, Baurú, São Paulo or deep in the Amazon. We take this sort of thin
g for granted now; but it was very important back then, in creating a common story of what it meant to be Brazilian. We weren’t strangers anymore. And I don’t think we ever really were again.

  Just as important, Brazilians also lost a bit of that blinking innocence, that youngness—you could call it gullibility, even—that had been so evident on that July afternoon, and in the months prior. It wouldn’t disappear, by any means. But afterward we were all just a little more mature, and a little less likely to accept whatever politicians, or the media, were trying to tell us. This would have big consequences, on our politics and on our culture, in years to come.

  Finally: For a generation of aspiring soccer players like me, July 16, 1950, was motivating in ways that I couldn’t possibly exaggerate. As I watched my dad cry, and my mom trying to comfort him, I slipped into my parents’ room. They had a picture of Jesus on the wall. I burst into tears as I addressed Him.

  “Why did this happen?” I sobbed. “Why did it happen to us? Why, Jesus, why are we being punished?”

  There was no answer, of course. But as my despair subsided, it was replaced by something else—something deeper, and more mellow. I dried my tears, walked into the living room, and put my hand on my dad’s arm.