Why Soccer Matters Read online

Our first port of call in Europe was Lisbon, where we refueled. Then it was on to Italy, where the team had scheduled another two warm-up matches against Italian clubs, Fiorentina of Florence and Internazionale of Milan, both of which I missed because of my knee. Before the games, the team took a bus tour of Rome. We were quite the spectacle—a bunch of country boys from Brazil, yelling and laughing like crazy as we toured the cradle of Western civilization. We saw the Colosseum, the Fountain of Trevi, the Via Veneto, and all the other usual sights. In truth, it was all kind of lost on us—we began chanting “Lunch! Lunch! Lunch!” before the tour was even over. Finally, our coaches gave up and obliged us with a visit to a big Italian restaurant, where we downed giant plates of pasta. This, we understood.

  We didn’t know much about the world. But then again, the world didn’t know much about us, either. When we finally arrived at our hotel in Sweden a few days later, we saw that our hosts had hung flags on poles for each of the countries competing in the World Cup. The Soviet Union, England, Wales . . . they were all there, in good shape. But the flag for Brazil was almost completely wrong. Oh, it was blue, green and yellow, more or less. But instead of a globe in the middle there was a square, and it was horribly out of position.

  I was standing there outside the hotel with some of the team’s older players: Nilton Santos, Zagallo, Gylmar, and a few others. One of them pointed at the flag, and we all just stood there for a moment in stunned silence. Then somebody started to chuckle, and soon we were all laughing. Finally, Gylmar, the goalie, said:

  “Well, damn. I guess we’d better ask them to change the flag.”

  Gylmar took it upon himself to do so. A short while later, our Swedish hosts graciously put up a new flag that was correct in every way. It was an innocent mistake, but the lesson wasn’t lost on any of us: We weren’t the only ones who still had some learning to do.

  10

  It’s pretty amazing, in today’s world of Facebook and Google and YouTube and CNN, to remember how little anyone knew about other countries back then. Even in 1958, a TV was still a luxury item, available to only a select few in Europe, much less Brazil. So, in Sweden, as on all the other countless trips abroad I’d make in coming years, we were more than soccer players—we were ambassadors. For most people, whether they were watching us from the stands or meeting us on the street, we were the first contact with Brazil they’d ever had. Millions upon millions of people around the world first became acquainted with our country because of soccer in those years. This was an awesome responsibility. It was also great fun.

  I was mostly focused on getting my knee healed. But there was only so much time I could spend with an ice pack on my leg, and we had six whole days in Sweden before the real games started. So I joined the other, older players on walks around town. We fell in love with this strange new world pretty quickly.

  Of course, the Brazil team management had radically different ideas about what we were supposed to be doing with our time. They were determined to keep us as focused as possible. They may have also wanted to stamp out a bit of the “Brazilianness” that supposedly cost us so dear in 1950. Among the long list of rules and regulations imposed upon us, we were explicitly forbidden from bringing tambourines, noisemakers or drums along with us on the plane. “It was the Brazilian national team that was traveling to Sweden, not a samba school,” wrote the journalist Ruy Castro in his book Estrela Solitária. We were also prohibited from talking to the press outside of set times, or bringing newspapers or magazines into the training area. The team opened all of our mail from our families, screening it for any news that might upset us before passing it along. Once a week, we were allowed to talk to our families by phone—for three minutes, tops.

  It was all pretty restrictive. But there were other elements of the Swedish scene that the team, for all its efforts, couldn’t do much about. Oh, they tried! For example, Dr. Gosling asked the hotel where we were staying, near the city of Hindas, to temporarily switch out all twenty-eight of its female employees for twenty-eight male ones. Fair enough; the hotel complied. But the players quickly discovered a much more dangerous distraction—a nearby island in one of the Swedish lakes that doubled as a nudist colony, and happened to be (barely) visible from the windows of our hotel. Dr. Gosling asked the Swedish authorities if the people on the island wouldn’t mind covering themselves up while the Brazilian team was in town. That request was politely denied. Some of the players on the team somehow acquired binoculars; and we went from there.

  Once we established first contact, there was no way to keep the Swedish girls away. This was only 1958, but in retrospect it’s clear that the sixties came to Sweden a few years early. The women there were beautiful and tremendously forward, in ways that we’d never seen before in Brazil. To our utter shock, the most popular players on our team were not the tall, handsome ones, but the three black players—Didi, Moacir, and myself. The girls would come running up to us for pictures, or an autograph, or just to chat. We didn’t know any Swedish, they didn’t know any Portuguese, and the three of us players only had about six words of English among us. But the girls didn’t seem to care one bit. I imagine many of them had never seen a black person at all before. Some just wanted to rub their hands on our arms and faces. This, of course, prompted uproarious laughter and teasing from the rest of the team.

  “Tell them it doesn’t come off, Pelé! You can go out in the rain without worrying!”

  I know such comments might seem offensive in today’s world, but it really was all in the innocent spirit of discovery back then. The girls did seem genuinely surprised when our blackness didn’t just rub off! I even ended up having a little fling with a gorgeous Swedish girl named Ilena, who was also seventeen. Again, we couldn’t communicate much, but she had this great laugh, and we’d go walking around town, hand in hand, pointing at things and smiling until my face hurt. We were thrilled to have met each other and to have been swept up in this big, important, exciting global event. I remember Ilena cried when I left town, which made me feel sad but also thrillingly like an adult, to have a person in the world who would miss me in that kind of way.

  In the end, the players figured out a way around the ban on communications—sort of. A group of us went out shopping one day. The stores back in Brazil didn’t have many imports back then—Brazil was a closed economy, so anything from abroad was very expensive. We saw all kinds of things that were a real revelation for us, including one relatively new invention: battery-powered radios. That afternoon, I was with Garrincha, the player with the bent legs, and Nilton Santos, who was Garrincha’s teammate at Botafogo. We were testing the radios, turning them on to see if the speakers worked, when Garrincha got this horrible look on his face, like he’d just smelled a corpse.

  “I’m not buying that radio, no way!”

  Nilton turned around, surprised. “Why not, Garrincha?”

  “I don’t understand a damn thing it says!”

  It took us a minute, but we figured it out. The voice coming through on the little radio was, obviously, speaking in Swedish.

  “Oh, come on, Garrincha!” Nilton roared, gasping for air because he was laughing so hard. “It’ll speak Portuguese when you’re back in Brazil!”

  Garrincha shook his head, still looking confused. “No way, man.”

  I was laughing too, but it was the kind of mistake I could have easily made myself. As I said, it was a different era. Hard to believe it was even the same lifetime.

  11

  When the official 1958 World Cup games got under way, Garrincha and I both found ourselves stuck in the same place—on the bench. Some of the team managers believed Garrincha was too mentally undisciplined to play against our first opponent, Austria, whose strategy was based on impressive tactical precision on the attack. As for me, my problem remained my knee. Dr. Gosling told me that, to have any hope of playing, I’d need to undertake a series of very painful treatments. They mostly involved pl
acing burning hot towels on my knee. Remember, this was presumably one of the best sports medicine doctors in the world—which is to say, the world was still in the dark ages. But I obliged, without complaint. I desperately wanted to get on the field.

  In the first match, Brazil played wonderfully, beating the Austrians 3–0 behind two goals from Mazzola and one from Nilton Santos, whose performance was apparently unaffected by the contraband he’d purchased. But in our second game, against England, the team came out flat and we played them to that most dreaded of soccer results—the 0–0 tie. In the “group play” format used in Sweden, and in all future World Cups, the initial games took place among four teams, with the top two teams moving on to an elimination round. After only managing a tie against England, we’d need to beat our third and final opponent to be sure of advancing.

  When I learned we might be just one game away from going home, I thought I was going to lose my mind. Why wasn’t my knee getting better?

  Thankfully, the veteran players helped to reassure me, especially Waldyr Pereira, known as “Didi,” who always showed a quiet and kind of eerily unshakable faith in my ability, even then. At thirty, he was one of the oldest players among us—so old, by the strange calculus of professional athletics, that the team’s management had almost left him behind in Brazil, thinking him past his prime. But Didi’s experience and demeanor were precisely what our excitable group of novices needed—he was so cool, unruffled and poised that many people compared him to a jazz musician. Another one of his nicknames was “The Ethiopian Prince”—which was far cooler, by, like, a million degrees, than “Pelé.” And I’ll always be grateful to Didi for, among his many, many feats at the 1958 World Cup, helping me to keep my feet on the ground when I was still hurt.

  “Your moment will come, kid,” he’d say, patting me on the back, like I shouldn’t have a care in the world. “Just relax and keep the weight off that knee!”

  It was sound advice. I went to see Dr. Gosling again, and did a series of drills while he watched. He didn’t say much, but I could tell it went well. The day before the game, Zito, my teammate from Santos, came up to me and said: “I think the moment has come for us.” I didn’t quite believe him. But a short time later, one of the heads of the delegation came over to me, put his hand on my shoulder, and said:

  “Are you ready, Pelé?”

  The smile I gave him was a thousand miles wide. Soon, I learned the team officials, believing we needed a spark, had finally dropped whatever reservations they had about Garrincha. He was going to play in the upcoming match, too. Then it was just a question of preparing for our next opponent. Boy, was it a doozy.

  12

  In 1958, there was one country that cultivated an aura of mystery above all others: the Soviet Union. This was especially true on the soccer field. We were at the height of the Cold War, and the Soviets were determined to convince the world that their system—Communism—was superior to all others in every aspect of life. Just one year earlier, in a display of their scientific and military might, the Soviets had put Sputnik, the first satellite ever, into space. Now, with a victory at the World Cup, they would show us that they were the best in sport as well.

  One thing that has always fascinated me about soccer, even today, is the way that national teams often reflect national characteristics. You can tell a lot about a country by the way they play the game. For example, the Germans were always known for having “efficient” teams that didn’t waste a single pass or dribble. One English writer, Brian Glanville, said of his nation’s team: “England, in conformity with the English character, have always combined disciplined solidity with occasional eccentric genius.” Of course, when talking about such things, it’s important not to get too carried away with stereotypes. But a lot has also been said, quite rightly I think, about how the Brazilian style of play also reflects our national character: full of joy, improvisation, and our willingness, for better and for worse, to ignore established conventions and rules. Some observers even saw traces of our ethnic makeup—the famed Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre wrote in 1938 that the qualities of “surprise, cunning, astuteness, fleetness and . . . individual brilliance and spontaneity” that Brazilian teams displayed on the soccer field were a reflection of our “mulatto spirit.”

  In that vein, the Soviets called their style of play “scientific soccer,” reflecting their belief that the same qualities that had put Sputnik into space could get them a World Cup championship as well. They had taken data, training and an emphasis on mental acuity to a level that our Brazilian officials, with their pulled teeth and behavioral tests, could only fantasize about. Unlike us, the Soviet approach had already obtained real results—including a gold medal in soccer at the most recent Olympics, the 1956 games in Melbourne, Australia. Stories about the Soviets’ meticulous preparations echoed throughout the other teams’ camps. We heard their players were capable of running at full speed for three hours without stopping. Someone told us that they even did four hours of gymnastics on the mornings of their games.

  Of course, some of this was just Cold War propaganda—but we didn’t know this at the time. This was an era before teams could scout their opponents by watching film or video; all we could rely on was word of mouth. And so, we were convinced that we were about to face a race of bona fide super-beings, bigger and perhaps smarter than us in every possible way.

  The intimidating face of the Soviet team was its goalie, Lev Yashin—and in his case, much of the hype was very much grounded in fact. At six-foot-two, Yashin towered over other players on the field, and he spent entire games screaming orders at everyone, friend and foe alike. He was tough in a particularly Soviet way, having started his soccer career while still a teenager during World War II, when he was sent to work at a military factory in Moscow and began playing for its in-house team. He was also an excellent goalie in ice hockey. Yashin was known as “The Black Spider”—partly because of his habit of dressing in all black clothes, and also because he made so many impossible saves that it often seemed as if he possessed eight arms. He was not just a product of propaganda; he was truly one of the all-time greats. In 2013, a panel of experts in the magazine World Soccer overwhelmingly voted Yashin the best goalkeeper of all time.

  If this was indeed a matchup of national personalities, then how could the joy and improvisational skills of a poor country like Brazil possibly triumph over the training, planning and wealth of a superpower like the Soviet Union?

  Well, our coaches had an answer: by kicking them in the face. Not literally, of course. But they did believe that, from the moment the game started, the Brazilian team needed to do something dramatic to disorient the Soviets to get them out of their comfort zone. If we could get the game out of the realm of science, and into the realm of human behavior, then we might just have a chance at victory.

  13

  As I ran out onto the field in Gothenburg, and stripped off my warm-up gear, I swear I heard gasps from the fifty-five thousand people in attendance. I was still so small and baby-faced that many fans probably believed I was just the team mascot. I walked over to the bench, and Mário Américo, the trainer, gave me one last massage on my knee.

  “Looks good,” he said. “You’re going on now, kid.”

  I don’t remember being that nervous—I had lots of adrenaline, sure, but I was mostly just excited to finally be back out on the field. Soccer, as always, was the easy part.

  As Garrincha and I took our positions, I saw a few confused looks on the faces of the Soviets. Our team had gone to great lengths to disguise the fact that the two of us would be playing. We’d heard there was a Soviet spy tracking our movements, so the team had abruptly switched the time of our final practice, when Garrincha and I played with the starters for the first time. Brazil could play Cold War games too! Apparently our subterfuge had worked. Before the Soviets could realize what was going on, the whistle blew, and the game was under way.

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bsp; What followed was a flurry of action unlike anything I’ve ever been a part of since. Garrincha quickly got the ball and started making his way up the right wing, juking and pausing with seemingly every single step. His beautiful, twisted legs confused the hell out of opponents and made him absolutely impossible to defend—because of their strange angles, defenders could never tell which way Garrincha was going to turn next. Plus, being a natural jokester, he took special delight in fooling, and sometimes even taunting his opponents with his bizarre, circus-style moves. Virtually from the first moment Garrincha touched the ball that day, I could hear people in the crowd laughing. The stands were filled almost entirely with Swedes, but thanks largely to his antics, they were cheering for Brazil from the get-go. The Soviets, meanwhile, were utterly bewildered—nothing in their scientific manuals had prepared them for this!

  Garrincha beat a final defender and launched a wicked shot on goal. Unfortunately, it ricocheted off the crossbar. Just a few moments later, the ball came rolling over to me. I summoned all my strength, took aim at the net and—

  Clang!

  Another ball off the crossbar! I must have looked heartbroken, because Didi, once again possessing enough poise for all of us, yelled from across the field:

  “Relax, kid, the goal will come!”

  He was right. Almost immediately, Didi himself found an opening and put a beautiful pass through to Vavá, one of our forwards, who duly smashed the ball into the net.

  Brazil 1, Soviet Union 0.

  It’s hard to believe, but after that rush of action and emotion, the game was still only three minutes old. Gabriel Hanot, a French journalist who had covered the sport for decades, later described them as “the finest three minutes in the history of soccer.”

  Inevitably, we slowed down a bit after that. But the rhythm of the game had been established, and the Soviets never really recovered their composure. I gave an assist to another goal by Vavá in the second half that provided us with our final result: Brazil 2, Soviet Union 0. The score could have been even more tilted in our favor had it not been for Yashin, the Black Spider, who made plenty of excellent saves that day.