Kaiser

by Rob Smyth

  After a few weeks, a homesick Kaiser complained to Marinho Chagas that he wanted to return to a proper club in Rio.

  ‘This club is really amateur. I can’t stay here, it’s not going to work for me. I’m too professional.’

  ‘What about the money?’ said Marinho Chagas.

  ‘They can fuck themselves with the money!’

  They couldn’t actually do that, literally or metaphorically: Kaiser pocketed the signing-on fee and went back to Brazil.

  CHAPTER 19

  THE LADYKILLER

  His name is Kaiser and he is an addict. ‘I played football because it gave me easier access to women,’ he says. ‘Everything I did was connected to sex. I have no other hobbies. My whole life has revolved around sex. I have a disease, like they say Michael Douglas has. If you put a hot girl in the stands and tell me, “She’s going to shag you”, I’ll score a hat-trick right now.’

  In his heyday, Kaiser had sex everywhere, from nightclub toilets to church chapels, the latter during a friend’s wedding. At times he is introspective and apologetic; at others he takes unashamed pride as he dispenses sermons from the lad bible. Occasionally he manages both at the same time.

  He bragged that he was incapable of love; that no woman could penetrate his heart. But it was clear he would do anything for lust. ‘I swear on my eyesight and my health, easily over a thousand women,’ he says, like a matador talking about his conquests in El Ruendo. ‘If sex was football, I’d be Pelé. If women were money, I’d be a millionaire.’

  Kaiser would chat people up anywhere, from nightclub dance floors to bus stops. ‘If there were girls at a funeral or in a bakery,’ he says, ‘I’d go there.’ He changed his approach depending on the circumstances and told women what they wanted to hear. It might be that they were talking to a famous footballer; that he could get them a modelling contract or an acting audition; that he was a complex, sensitive soul. Whatever it took. ‘I wasn’t as famous as some of the players,’ he says. ‘So I had to use the brains God gave me. I don’t see myself as good-looking, but most footballers are ugly so someone like me becomes a stud. Especially as I knew how to say the right things at the right time. If you let me open my mouth, I was in.’

  Kaiser’s restlessness and preference for short-term relationships, whether with women or football clubs, meant he didn’t mind if the lie eventually unravelled. All that mattered was the moment. Nor did he care about leagues of attraction. He had the chutzpah to chat up any woman in Rio. A number of players use the same phrase to describe Kaiser: cara de pau, which literally means ‘wood face’ but translates as a mixture of cheekiness and shamelessness. ‘That girl everybody is too scared to go up to, he approaches,’ says Gustavo. ‘He’s got nothing to lose.’

  The group would place bets over whether Kaiser could woo a woman of their choice, or slap down a load of money as an incentive for him to do so. One day, while they were enjoying a post-kickabout beer on Copacabana, Kaiser was encouraged to approach Isadora Ribeiro, a famous actress who was notorious for giving the shortest shrift to male admirers. The stakes were raised accordingly.

  ‘Kaiser, this one is beyond even you. Never mind money, if you get her number I’ll buy you a fucking apartment in Barra.’

  ‘Just like Romário only needs two seconds to score in the box, I only need two seconds to score with a girl.’

  Kaiser accepted the challenge and wandered off, stopping to talk to a small boy. The players were in hysterics. Kaiser had bottled it, or at the very least was buying himself time while he tried to think of a scam. A few minutes later, when Ribeiro went into the water, Kaiser followed her. Then, out of nowhere, he started splashing frantically and diving under the water.

  ‘My watch!’ shouted Kaiser. ‘My Rolex! That cost $50,000!’

  ‘What the hell?’ said Ribeiro. ‘Really? You’ve lost your watch?’

  She started to help Kaiser look for his watch for a few minutes, at which point Kaiser called off the search, announcing that there were more important things in life than status symbols. As the two of them emerged from the water, a nervous child came up to Kaiser and asked for his autograph – the same boy Kaiser had spoken to (and paid) a couple of minutes earlier. Ribeiro questioned why Kaiser was being asked for his autograph, at which point Kaiser put himself in shy, modest mode, eventually allowing the fact that he was a famous footballer to be coaxed out of him.

  Kaiser walked past his friends with Ribeiro, haughtily ignoring their laddish cheers. He sat down and spent the rest of the afternoon chatting with her. ‘He ended up leaving the beach with her,’ says Alexandre Couto. ‘As he was leaving everybody started applauding. He says after that he went out with her. Whether that’s true I don’t know but the first part is – I saw it all. He was such an alpha male. When people doubted him, he always proved them wrong.’

  He pulled a similar trick at the beach when he had announced to anyone who would listen that his BMW had been stolen. And apparently random approaches from fans were commonplace. On one occasion he told his dentist friend Ricardo Ostenhas to ask for an autograph when he was with a woman, and then administered a theatrical bollocking to him for intruding upon his private time. ‘Can’t you see I’m with this beautiful girl?’

  Kaiser believed in what teachers called guided discovery. ‘You don’t need to go around with a sign saying, “I’m a footballer”,’ he says. ‘I would set up scenarios so they would find out, like not having to pay the bill at a restaurant.’

  The most extravagant example of that occurred in January 1989. When Kaiser heard Ajaccio wanted to sign his friend Renato Mendes Mota, he took the opportunity to impress a girl he liked. Kaiser arranged to meet her for lunch by the pool at the Copacabana Palace, where they bumped into Mendes Mota and some agents who were negotiating the transfer. Mota was represented by an Italian called Antonio Rossellini, who had been briefed as to his role in Kaiser’s story. The agents representing Ajaccio were introduced to Carlos Henrique Raposo rather than Carlos Kaiser, and therefore had no idea they were actually talking to the black sheep of the club.

  They were happy to help out Mota and Raposo, especially as it was in return for a sizeable favour. They wanted to buy some classic football shirts while in Brazil, and Mendes Mota recommended his friend, Mr Raposo, as somebody who could help. He sold them a Botafogo shirt, worn by the great Jairzinho in 1968, for a bargain R$500. It literally reeked of authenticity. No wonder: Kaiser had worn it while running on the beach. It was a modern replica of the classic Botafogo kit that he washed repeatedly until it started to fade and shrink.

  After the terms of Mota’s transfer were provisionally agreed, talk turned to Raposo. And so, for the next hour, representatives of Ajaccio made an extravagant song and dance about wanting to sign a player they already owned, purely so he could impress a girl and make her think he was on the brink of a bumper payday.

  ‘Look, if we sign Renato we’ll already be at our limit of four foreign players – Renato, Fabio Barros, Alexandre Couto and Carlos Kaiser. Once we can get rid of Kaiser we can sign you. He’s gone AWOL.’

  ‘This delay is not good for me,’ said Kaiser. ‘What are the fans going to think? They have already read about me in the local newspaper.’

  ‘You think we don’t know that? I got to work last week and there was graffiti on the door of the club office saying “WE WANT CARLOS HENRIQUE RAPOSO”.’

  ‘Look, graffiti doesn’t pay my bills. When are we going to sort this?’

  At this point Rossellini, playing the role of Kaiser’s agent, interjected. ‘You have two more weeks. We can’t wait any longer.’

  ‘I want to come to Corsica,’ said Kaiser. ‘But I need to sort my future out, and I need financial security. I’ve had offers from Palmeiras and also from Roma and Brescia in Italy.’

  The Ajaccio representatives promised they would sign Raposo the moment they got rid of Kaiser.

  Long before football’s data revolution, Kaiser was crunching the numbers. Before a night
out, or an afternoon at the mall, he would write his number on thirty or forty pieces of paper and hand them out as flyers. He didn’t care about the rejections: even five out of thirty was better than nought out of nought.

  ‘He was always with beautiful women,’ said Carlos Alberto Torres. ‘He was quite handsome. He was no stud but he was decent looking and he would always be hanging out with really pretty women in Rio.’ Kaiser dated Dora Bria, the famous windsurfer, for a few months before she found out his story was built of sand. ‘I’ve slept with many famous people,’ he says. ‘The girls on the “Superfantastico” show. Singers. Famous foreign tennis players. French actresses. I don’t want to incriminate anybody. A lot of them are married. Many of them have kids now.’

  Some of them had grandkids then. Kaiser’s list of conquests includes a few who paid for the experience, some believing they were sleeping with Renato Gaúcho. ‘I’ve slept with women for money,’ he says. ‘Older women, when I was twenty and they were forty-five, fifty, sixty. I’ve slept with a seventy-year-old! With no Viagra!’

  It often seemed like Kaiser’s life was one big porn film, so you can probably guess what happened next. His cousin Paulo Tomé was invited to audition for some adult entertainment, and Kaiser volunteered to offer moral support. What happened next doesn’t need to be described in forensic detail. But after extensive negotiations, Kaiser ended up as part of a scene that was not in the original script. He received the approval of the leading lady, who recommended him to the executive producer. ‘You could put him in a scene with two hundred people around him and he won’t flake,’ she said. ‘The guy is proper talented.’

  Sadly for the adult entertainment cognoscenti, the film was never made.

  ***

  Kaiser had a phone book with over a thousand women’s numbers. He wrote each and every one backwards, just in case it was ever stolen. That book was his most important possession, not least because it made him almost indispensable. ‘He became known among the players here in Rio,’ says Gonçalves. ‘We’d say, “Let’s go out to Studio C tonight. Call Kaiser. Get him to bring along some girls.”’

  Kaiser, you suspect, has enough dirt to fill newspapers for months. ‘If he becomes as famous as he thinks he was in the past, loads of people are in trouble,’ laughs Renato Gaúcho. ‘And I’m not the only one implicated in the stories, I’m telling you.’ Kaiser’s loyalty is too great for him to name the protagonist in certain stories: like the clean-cut footballer who hid in the boot of a car when Kaiser drove him to an orgy, or the star whose gold cocaine box was put in Kaiser’s safe-keeping at parties.

  As Kaiser says, life is an exchange. He might arrange female companionship for a doctor, who would then sign him off indefinitely from playing football because of a muscle problem that stemmed from a hitherto undiagnosed peanut allergy. He also arranged women for older former players and especially the older bicheiros. Everyone was in his debt. And he knew that everyone liked women. ‘I found out what you needed and I would exploit that need. Your weak point. What you like.’

  Kaiser also played Cupid for his less famous friends. ‘He would approach on our behalf with that Casanova style,’ says Luiz Maerovitch. ‘There’s a saying here: “If you don’t have money you tell stories.” So he would tell stories very well.’

  One night, Kaiser and Maerovitch went over to two women in a nightclub. Maerovitch smiled nervously, unable to hear what Kaiser was saying to them. A couple of minutes later, he was surprised to find out that he was the owner of Pirelli, one of the world’s biggest tyre-manufacturing companies. ‘The woman was impressed before I’d said a word to her,’ he says. ‘Kaiser pulled almost every single girl he chatted up – whether it was for himself or someone else. He was one of the only guys in Rio de Janeiro with such reputation and with such charm.’

  Vinicius Diek, who runs a kiosk near the beach in Leme, wondered why he was suddenly surrounded by women on a night out. Kaiser explained that he was a world-famous UFC star.

  Gutiérrez, another of Kaiser’s friends, resembled the Flamengo player Ailton, with inevitable consequences. ‘The girls would ask me for a Flamengo shirt or tickets to the Maracanã,’ he says. ‘I would have to buy them myself. I spent loads of money on that, but it was great value because the girls were super-hot. Whenever we went after a couple of girls Kaiser would always tell me to keep my mouth shut. When I came along he’d done all the groundwork. I just had to score the penalty.’

  Kaiser set ‘Ailton’ up with at least twenty people. He got a nasty surprise when he went for an MRI scan and found the secretary was somebody he had recently spent the night with. As he scribbled his real name on the relevant form, he nervously explained that Ailton was just a footballer nickname. There was a happier ending when Gutiérrez met his wife Celeste through his alter ego. ‘I really have to thank Kaiser for that introduction. I’ve been in a relationship with a wonderful person for twenty-five years. He was the one who introduced me. I met her on the beach when he was flirting with her sister …’

  CHAPTER 20

  THE BLACK MAGIC PATIENT

  Most people say Kaiser couldn’t play football if his sex life depended on it. That was certainly the opinion of the Vasco da Gama players when he returned to the club in 1991 and was dragged into a game of piggy in the middle. It was Bebeto, the star striker who had moved from Flamengo, who suggested that Vasco allow Kaiser to do a bit of training while he regained fitness.

  ‘He was dashing from one end to the other,’ laughs Bebeto. ‘He was sweating loads! I thought he was going to have a heart attack. The ball went this way and that way but everybody said, “Get him out, get him out. Otherwise he’s going to die. You’re going to kill Kaiser.” All of the players agreed: “Kaiser is so crap!”.’

  Kaiser pulled up nursing his thigh and his pride.

  ‘You’re fine, aren’t you?’ said Bebeto quietly.

  ‘Yep. I just can’t handle it.’

  The players liked having Kaiser around so much that they tolerated his technical imperfections, and even defended him – ‘He’s coming back from injury, cut him some slack’ – if a member of the coaching staff criticised him. ‘I held the group together,’ says Kaiser. ‘I was probably more useful off the field than on it.’

  Probably.

  ***

  While Kaiser agrees he was at his most useful off the field, he doesn’t accept he was useless on it. ‘I had talent, but I didn’t like football,’ he sniffs. ‘When people say, “Kaiser wasn’t a good player” … they’re missing the point. The reason Kaiser wasn’t a good player is because they’re comparing him to the players he hung around with: Ricardo Rocha, Romário, Bebeto, Renato Gaúcho. In today’s generation I’d be a star player. Nobody plays in the teams I played at without being good. Why do you think my nickname is Kaiser? Why do you think the Fluminense players called me Maradona?’

  Kaiser arrived at the Vasco training crowd in a cheery mood, looking forward to another day of doing absolutely nothing. He wasn’t whistling such a happy tune when Paulo Angioni, Vasco’s director of football, came over to say hello. Angioni told Kaiser that the club were so desperate to see him play that they had instructed a black magic priest called Pai Santana to cure him.

  ‘Oh my God, that was such a funny day,’ says Bebeto. ‘The black magic priest had all his spells. He was saying, “Come here, my son, come here.” Kaiser got really scared.’

  Kaiser didn’t believe in voodoo. He believed in voodon’t. As the priest prepared to go to work, Kaiser gave him some advice. ‘Take your money, man. There’s nothing wrong with me. There are some things black magic can’t cure. Take your money and don’t bother doing your thing because I intend to stay injured for the rest of my life.’

  Kaiser also bribed Carlão and Gato, the Vasco masseuse and kit man respectively, to corroborate his injury stories and give him all kinds of elaborate treatments. Whenever the management team asked if Kaiser was ready to train, Carlão said he needed a few more weeks’ recovery.r />
  During that time Kaiser became friendly with an emerging attacker called Edmundo, who went on to become one of the best players in Brazil. His encyclopaedic knowledge of football helped him pinpoint the most exciting young players in Brazil, primarily so that he could befriend them before they started to climb to the top of the ladder.

  Bebeto has one other memory of Kaiser’s time at Vasco da Gama – that he was constantly negotiating a transfer to Europe on one of the landlines at the club. ‘He’d speak in Portuguese,’ says Bebeto. ‘I was thinking, “How does that work? Are you going to France speaking Portuguese?” I took the phone from him and there was nobody on the other end. He was talking to himself.’

  On another occasion, Kaiser was caught having a heated argument about unpaid wages – with the speaking clock.

  CHAPTER 21

  THE FREELOADER

  Kaiser made up for having no money by being extremely economical with the truth. His ability to freeload was legendary. ‘He was always hanging out at the best spots, and he was always broke,’ says Renato Gaúcho, smiling and shaking his head. ‘How do you manage that?’

  He did it by creating a cornucopia of exchanges, many of which ran simultaneously, to ensure his needs were met. They ranged from the shameless to the subtle, the explicit to the unspoken.

  He might promise to bring Carlos Alberto Torres or another superstar to a restaurant – thus giving it an instant hit of prestige – in return for a month of free meals. Journalists would write articles about him in return for a prime reservation at Porcão, the famous steakhouse, or entry to the VIP section of Hippopotamus.

  Sometimes the exchanges were particularly intricate. Kaiser would promise a journalist an exclusive interview with a star player if they wrote a profile about his career. He would use that profile to help secure a VIP section at a nightclub, and then invite beautiful women to come to the party, promising them footballers at every table. The promise of the women ensured the players came along. If one of them met somebody he liked, he would thank Kaiser by giving that exclusive interview.