Futebol

by Alex Bellos

  Rebelo Junior was nicknamed the Man of the Unconfoundable Goal. His unconfoundable 'gooooooaP echoed through history and is now a mark of all Brazilian – and Latin American – radio and television football coverage. His colleagues found that it had advantages. Raul Longas, nicknamed the Man of the Electrifying Goal, wailed like a siren for longer than his peers. There was a reason. He was short-sighted and could not properly see who scored. The extra seconds allowed his sidekick to write down for him the player's name on a piece of paper.

  The most listened-to football commentator during the 1940s and 1950s was also the most idiosyncratic and colourful. He is, still, one of the most listened-to Brazilians in the world. Ary Barroso wrote many of Carmen Miranda's most famous songs. He also wrote the light samba 'Aquarela do BrasiP, translated as 'Brazil', which is one of the most performed pieces of music of all time. It has been recorded by as diverse artists as Frank Sinatra, Wire, Kate Bush and S'Express.

  Ary was a Renaissance man. As well as writing music he was a football commentator, pianist, writer, local councillor and, later, a television-show host. Ary was also a Flamengo fan. It would not be unfair to say that he was a Flamengo fan above all his other roles. In the early 1940s his compositions had made him internationally famous. He flew to Hollywood and was invited to become musical director of Walt Disney Productions. For a composer, there was possibly no higher position in showbusiness. He refused.

  Ary Barroso

  'Because don't have Flamengo here,' he explained, ungrammatically.

  Ary's love for Flamengo eclipsed any impartiality he might have had as a commentator. Instead of shouting 'goooooal' Ary blew into a plastic mouth organ. It was easy to tell who had scored. If it was Flamengo the mouth organ would squeal repeatedly with joy. He would blow extended flourishes like an excited child. If it was against Flamengo the organ would emit a short, embarrassed 'frrp'.

  Ary was entertaining because he was passionate, unpredictable and irresponsible. He once told his audience when a striker was approaching the Flamengo box: 'I'm not even going to look.' Another time the radio fell silent because he had run to the edge of the pitch to celebrate a goal with the team. Yet, his audience was not just Flamengo fans. He was a parody of the general Brazilian assumption that everything is motivated by personal interest. In the closing minutes of a match in which Flamengo was losing 6-0, a man arrived at the stadium willing to pay any price to be let in. 'I don't want to see the game,' he told the confused gatekeeper. 'I just want to see Ary Barroso's face.'

  Brazilian football authorities allow journalists on the touchline during the match, interviewing players and the referee as they come on and off. This practice was started by Ary Barroso. He was the first broadcaster to put a reporter on the pitch – to get him different angles on the game. This created situations which shocked the English when Southampton travelled to Brazil in 1948. 'The usual radio commentators and photographers refused to be kicked off the field so that the match could start. The radio and press seem to be the deciding factors in this country about the time when a match shall commence!' tut-tutted referee George Reader in a dispatch to the Southern Daily Echo.

  The importance of radio within football has led to another peculiarly Brazilian phenomenon – the 'radialista'. The radi-alista is ostensibly a radio broadcaster, yet because the idea is to be as showy as possible they are celebrities in their own right. Many radialistas take advantage of football's prominence to launch themselves in other spheres. Reporting on football matches teaches you skills such as public speaking, thinking on the spot and how to rouse a crowd. The list of politicians, businessmen and lawyers who started their careers commentating on local football matches is a long one. Rio state governor Anthony Garotinho aims to be the first ex-radialista to become Brazilian president.

  Radialistas can be anything they want to be. Washington Rodrigues, the interviewer who reduced a football to tears, jumped to the other side and became coach of Brazil's largest club. It was the equivalent of making Des Lynam coach of Manchester United.

  Washington does not look like a sportsman. When I meet him at his radio studio his ample physique is comfortably rested in a chair. He is genial and soft-spoken. Washington's broadcasting style is not the firework variety; he is the most verbally creative of his peers. He has coined more than eighty phrases, of which several have passed into common usage. His style is witty and intimate, for example calling fans in the geral standing area Geraldines and those in the arquiban-cada terraces Archibalds.

  Washington – like Ary Barroso – is a dyed-in-the-wool Flamengo supporter. He has never hidden it. It is a trademark of his style. When, in 1995, Flamengo were in trouble the club's president – himself an ex-radialista – wondered who could pull them out of the crisis. He asked Washington, even though he had never been a coach, a player or even a linesman before.

  'What were Flamengo looking for?' Washington says. 'The club wanted internal peace. They wanted someone who could identify with the fans. I am not a coach, nor do I have pretensions of being one. But everyone knows what football is. We are all football coaches really.'

  The radialista was given a four-month contract as coach. 'What did I do?', he asks. 'Tactics is like a buffet. If there are forty plates you eat four or five. You don't eat all forty. I asked all the players to put on the table their ideas about the best way to play. Then I put mine and afterwards we chose the best.'

  Washington introduced other unorthodox methods. He was unable to understand games standing on the touchline because he had only ever seen football from his position in the radio cabin. So he asked the Brazilian Football Confederation if he could install a television in the dugout. They were unsure and asked FIFA. FIFA replied that it was unsure, since it had never been asked before. Eventually, it gave him the all-clear. Washington sat in the dugout, watching television instead of watching the players.

  He lasted his four-month contract. He did not turn Flamengo into champions, yet he had moderate success. The club must have been happy enough since three years later, when the club was again in difficulties, he was given another four-month contract. In his second stint he helped Flamengo avoid relegation from the first division of the national league.

  He adds: 'It was an educative experience. In forty years I didn't learn as much as I learnt in those eight months. I started to see players in a different light, how they are during the week, what their personal lives are like. It made me regret a lot of things I had said or written before. I am really careful now in criticising a coach.'

  Football journalism has been the start of many eminent Brazilians' careers. On 5 March 1961, Joelmir Beting was at the Maracanã, reporting on a game between Santos and Fluminense. He saw Pelé take the ball just past the centre line and dribble one, two, three, four, five . . . six players before beating the goalkeeper. It was a work of art. Those present say it was the most wonderful goal he ever scored. But it was before the era of televised games. The dribble would never be seen again.

  Joelmir thought that a way to make the goal eternal was to cast it in bronze. He commissioned a plaque that was put up in the stadium the following week, dedicated to 'the most beautiful goal in the history of the Maracanã'. The phrase 'gol de placa' – goal worthy of a plaque-entered the lingua franca, and is still the highest compliment in Brazilian football.

  Joelmir now has a different plaque. He is a distinguished financial commentator.

  Football was also a trampoline for Brazil's Monty-Pythonesque comedy troupe Casseta & Planeta. The humorists started a satirical magazine in the 1970s. Later they were given their own show by Globo, the main TV station. In 1994, Globo asked them to provide daily sketches during the World Cup. During the tournament they broadcast clips from the United States for the lunchtime and evening news bulletins. 'None of the international journalists really knew what was going on,' says Bussunda, one of Casseta &c Planeta's comedians. 'Here was a bunch of Brazilians dressed up in ridiculous costumes making complete fools of ourselves where
ver the national team went.'

  When Brazil won the final – in Los Angeles' Rose Bowl – they filmed a spoof video dressed as Californian hippies singing 'The Age of Romarius', to the tune of the 1960s anthem 'Aquarius'. It was one of their best-received gags. By the end of the World Cup Casseta & Planeta had a celebrity status almost as big as the footballers themselves.

  'When we flew back to Brazil it felt like we were champions too,' says Bussunda, whom I meet sitting in his office in Ipanema.

  Casseta & Planeta now have a weekly primetime show on Globo. They carry on writing gags based around football. 'Football is a very rich seam. If we were writing just about what goes on on the pitch, then maybe there wouldn't be enough material. But when you are talking about football you are talking about Brazil,' he says.

  Bussunda is a TV natural. He makes you laugh just by looking at him. His expression is wonderfully glum and he is blessed with a portly comedy stomach. His obesity is part of his act. The catchline for his weekly articles in the sports newspaper Lance! is: 'the columnist who is a ball already'.

  Casseta & Planeta is my favourite Brazilian television programme. The satire is no-holds-barred. They send up politicians, personalities and even Globo itself. Sometimes I can't believe what they get away with.

  I ask Bussunda whether any of their victims have ever complained? He looks at me with a straight face. 'The only time we ever received external censorship was when we were planning a sketch about Fluminense.'

  The incident occurred when Romario was playing for Flamengo, who are Fluminense's arch rivals. Casseta &Planeta invited him on the show and asked him to wear a T-shirt that said, 'Não use drogas. Não torça para o Fluminense'. Literally, this means, 'Don't take drugs. Don't support Fluminense'. But it is a pun on the word 'droga', which also means 'something rubbish'.

  Fluminense went to court and obtained an injunction against the broadcast.

  'So what did we do?' asks Bussunda. 'We played the interview with Romario right up to the moment he was going to show the T-shirt. Then we cut to images of three goals that had been scored against Fluminense the Sunday before.'

  Bussunda did not realise the offence it would cause. His voice is deadly serious. 'I received several threats. I received emails saying that people knew where I lived, that they knew which school my daughter goes to. I was really taken aback. I even had to change telephone numbers.'

  He adds: 'In my career it is the one joke I regret. I realised that the joke had hit the wrong target. We wanted to poke fun at the Fluminense directors. But we hurt the fans.'

  Bussunda learnt that in Brazil there is only one thing you cannot joke about: a fan's passion for his club.

  As well as Ary Barroso and Jorge Amado, football has been part of the public lives of many important cultural figures. Pixinguinha, a black musician who pioneered the use of Afro-Brazilian percussion instruments, wrote the first major composition dedicated to the sport. The song '1x0' was written in 1919 immediately after Brazil won the South American Cup by a goal to nil. The speed and dexterity of the music portrayed the skills of the goalscorer, Friedenreich. More recently, Chico Buarque, who is probably Brazil's most highly respected singer-songwriter, has written songs and articles about football. Chico also owns his own football pitch and amateur football club, where he plays three times a week.

  In 1976 the contemporary artist Nelson Leirner was asked to design a trophy for Corinthians. A veteran of artistic 'happenings' during the 1960s, he decided to make a trophy that was a 'performance' rather than an object to keep. He made a Corinthians flag which was 4m by 8m and tied it to helium-filled balloons. The trophy was presented to the club during a match at the Morumbi in São Paulo – it was set free at the beginning of the game and drifted up and away out of the stadium.

  Corinthians lost the game and Leirner was accused of causing the team bad luck.

  A week later, the flag landed on a farm four hundred miles away. It was taken and put up in a bar in the nearest town. From that moment on the local team lost match after match. Its supporters blamed the flag. Corinthians had gone twenty-two years without winning a title. Perhaps the flag had brought the curse? They began to perform religious rituals to exorcise the bad spirits. Eventually, a television station heard of the story and returned the flag to São Paulo.

  Literature and football have been linked since football's early days. In 1930, Preguinho, the Little Nail, scored Brazil's first goal in a World Cup. His father, Coelho Neto, was a novelist and founder of the Brazilian Academy of Letters. Coelho Neto was a die-hard Fluminense supporter. He attended games wearing a white suit, straw hat and walking stick. His elegant attire was no guarantee of writerly reserve – in 1916, complaining against a penalty, Coelho Neto led one of Brazil's first pitch invasions.

  Despite his love of football, Coelho Neto did not include it in his fiction. Football, though enjoyed by all levels of society, was for many years not deemed serious enough for art. In 1953 it was considered scandalous when it featured in a play. A Falecida, The Deceased Woman, tells the story of Tuninho, a widower who wastes his wife's burial money on football because he discovers that she had been unfaithful.

  The Deceased Woman is by Nelson Rodrigues, Brazil's greatest playwright. Nelson adored causing offence. Usually the taboos he broke were more subversive than mentioning sport. He was obsessed with adultery and incest. Between 1951 and 1961 he published daily short stories in a Rio newspaper, almost always about marital infidelity. Nelson had a wonderful gift for dialogue and a wickedly perverse sense of humour. He described the hypocrisies of lower-middle-class Rio like no one before or since.

  Nelson Rodrigues at the Maracanã

  Nelson was the younger brother of Mário Filho, the pioneer of Brazilian sports journalism and the man who conceived the Maracanã. Of their ten other siblings that survived infancy, all went into journalism. When two of them started a sports magazine in 1955, Nelson was asked to lend a helping hand.

  Nelson's columns took football-writing into a new dimension. For a start, he made up characters and situations. Perhaps he felt the freedom to do this was because he was not a sportswriter – he was a famous playwright. An equally likely reason was because he was so short-sighted that he could hardly make out the events on the pitch. For example, in order to explain flukish occurences, Nelson said it was the work of the Supernatural de Almeida, a man from the Middle Ages now living in a fetid room in a northern suburb of Rio. The Supernatural is an absurd concept, but his public loved it because it played into their own superstitions. It became part of football's vernacular. Several times I have heard commentators say, when trying to explain an unlucky bounce: 'Look! It's the Supernatural of Almeida!'

  Nelson, without intending to, gave Brazilian football its clearest voice. It is a peculiar, if explainable twist of fate that Brazil's two most important football writers were brothers-since Nelson might never have started without Mário Filho's influence. Their styles were very different. Mário Filho's texts were serious opuses. Nelson, on the other hand, articulated the hyperbolic passion of a fan. 'I'm Fluminense, I always was Fluminense. I'd say I was Fluminense in my past lives.' He coined dozens of phrases that seem as relevant now as when he wrote them four decades ago. He described players like Pelé and Garrincha as transcendent icons – which no one had done before. Nelson was the first person to describe Pelé as royalty. 'Racially perfect, invisible mantles appear to hang from-his chest,' he said when the player was just seventeen. Pelé, of course, later became known as The King.

  When games started to be televised, Nelson was not impressed. 'If the videotape shows it's a penalty then all the worse for the videotape. The videotape is stupid,' he said, famously. Nelson's Luddite comments are often quoted today. Partly this is because he reminds people of the golden years. But also it's because Nelson got it right. Brazilians do not like to be objective about their football. They like it to be halfway between fact and fiction. They like it to be as informal as possible; full of stories, mytholo
gies and inexplicable passion. Football is about Ronaldo and Rivaldo but it is also about Margaret and Tospericagerja and Mauro Shampoo.

  Chapter Eleven

  NAKED FUTEBOL

  No one remembers exactly who was playing or when it was. But we can be sure that the match was a battle of life or death and the team losing 1-0 needed the win like a man needs air to breath. Suddenly, a player kicked the ball with such courage that it missed the goal and landed in a nearby creek. But he was not as courageous as the right back of the losing team. Without half a thought he plunged into the water. The match was all or nothing and he had no time to lose. Two minutes later he returned. His legs were trembling like a young liana. And white, white, white. He was so shaken that he couldn't speak, only point. Everyone ran to the riverbank. There she was. A snake. So calm, so large . . . And the worst of it was that she was lovingly spiralled around the ball.*

  In order to prepare his football club for the Big Kickabout, Audemir Cruz pays for Erica dos Santos to have a manicure, leg wax and haircut. Audemir is the president of Vila Nova and Erica is the team's beauty queen. He has, as is required, already bought her a bikini and a pair of trainers. Now he is fussing over the final arrangements. When she is ready he takes her in his maroon 1975 Ford to the stadium. Audemir, who is thirty-eight, drives slowly because he is still learning and does not have a licence. They pass slums that clog the sides of small rivers, high-rise blocks and shopping centres. The humid heat gives the sensation of being incubated in cotton wool; the sun is so strong it feels like someone is stretching your skin. At the stadium Audemir hands Erica Vila Nova's team shirt. It is white with green vertical stripes. He wishes her luck. She smiles nervously, says thank you and walks silently backstage.