Futebol Nation

by David Goldblatt

  The many living musical cultures of the country, combined with the new radio industry and the spread of gramophones in the 1930s and 1940s, created a burgeoning Brazilian recorded music industry. Although a variety of styles and genres existed – European polkas and waltzes, the mulatto sound of choro, which mixed these dances with Afro-Brazilian rhythms, and regional variants from the north-east and Bahia – the dominant popular music of the era was samba. The genre grew out of the musical cultures of Rio’s poorest and blackest neighbourhoods at the turn of the twentieth century. It took choro’s mix of influences, emphasized African rhythms, and added call-and-response singing and some European instrumentation. In the 1920s there was a popular genre of samba, as well as a more refined version for white and middle-class consumption. Under the Estado Novo samba was also divided between those who toed the line – regime samba – and those who didn’t. Regime samba could be crude propaganda, as in Luís Menezes’s paean to the Vargas revolution: ‘Slavery has ended. Long live the 1930 Revolution which was our salvation.’ In the hands of composers like Ary Barroso, samba drew on a stock of imagery that depicted Brazil as a peaceful tropical paradise, a newly found Eden.

  The first recorded football songs stood to one side of these mainstream compostions: ‘Fluminense’, by Américo Jacomino, for example, was an instrumental combination of classical guitar and tango rhythms. In the early 1930s humorous ditties and joke songs were the norm, like ‘Futebol’ by the backwoodsmen double act of Alvarenga and Ranchinho and comic impresario Capiao Furtado. However, as the 1930s progressed football came to occupy a distinct place in popular samba and dance music. Eduardo Souto’s 1936 hit ‘É Sopa, 17 a 3’ recounted the politics of the 1930 presidential election and the subsequent coup led by Vargas as if it had been a football match. É sopa, literally ‘it’s soup’, translates best as ‘it’s easy’. Catete Football Club was the presidential palace, Team A was led by Tonico, who was Antônio Carlos Ribeiro de Andrada, governor of Minas Gerais; Team B’s captain was Julinho Prestes, the governor of São Paulo. The referee, Dr Macaé, was the outgoing president Washington Luís, and the man who found it all so easy was Getúlio Vargas, the gaucho who with his Mineiro and Paraíba allies eventually triumphed.

  Go for the big game, winning the Catete Football Club cup.

  Team A’s Captain: Your Tonico.

  Team B’s Captain: Your Julinho.

  The Judge: Doctor Macaé.

  The very worthy president of the Catete Football Club

  To win Brazil.

  Getulinho says: ‘It’s easy, easy, easy.’

  A Paraíba with a gaucho and Mineiro.

  Football as a playful political metaphor was fine, but football as the natural habitat of the malandro was harder to stomach. Noel Rosa, whose hugely popular samba lyrics of the 1930s stood outside of the cosy and regulated imagery of the regime, never made it on to the radio. He often placed football in his songs as a feature of everyday life, and of special interest to the urban hustlers he liked to portray. In ‘Conversa de Botequim’ he imagines his man taking advantage of a waiter in a restaurant:

  If you don’t stay and clean the table

  I won’t get up or pay the bill.

  Go ask your boss for a pen, an inkwell,

  An envelope and a card . . .

  And a cigarette to scare the mosquitoes.

  Go tell your man to lend me some magazines,

  A lighter and an ashtray.

  And of course, what the malandro really wants to know, once he’s settled at the table, is what was the score? Rosa sang, ‘Waiter feel free to quickly bring me piping-hot bread . . . Go ask your customers, what happened in the football.’7

  The regime responded to this kind of depiction of football fans with the release of ‘O Bonde São Januário’ – ‘the São Januário Tram’ – performed by Ataulfo Alves. This was a samba which paradoxically hailed the new sober urban worker, who preferred getting to work on time than going to the Estádio São Januário and the louche life of drinking and football that bohemians and slackers indulged in: ‘The São Januário tram/It carries a worker/I am going to work.’ More than that, the model worker was turning his back on football: ‘I never used to have a clue/But I decided to look after my future/You see I’m happy, I live well/Laziness doesn’t put clothes on anyone’s back.’

  In the 1940s, as government control eased on musicians and composers, it was the street-level voice of Rosa rather than the official tones of Alves that lived on in football samba. Wilson Batista’s ‘E o Juiz Apitou’ (‘And the Ref Blew his Whistle’) cast the football fan as an obsessive who tries to rest on Sunday but is compelled to attend the game, ‘ninety minutes of suffering’. More than that, he is not interested in fair play, only in getting the right result. Lourival Ramos celebrated the Brazilian national team in his song ‘Copa Roca’. Lamartine Babo, in a stunt sponsored by local radio, wrote the lyrics of a new hymn for every one of Rio’s eleven biggest clubs in a single day.8 They were all realized on record, a testament to the size of the market and the now immense popularity of football in Rio.

  The political turmoil and difficult economic conditions of the early 1930s saw few films of any kind get produced and nothing that featured football since the clowning and comedy of Campeão de Futebol, released in 1931. But at the end of the decade two films were made that depicted football in terms that the Estado Novo could feel comfortable with. Alma e Corpo de uma Raça (‘The Body and Soul of a Race’) received its premiere in Rio which was attended by the directors of Flamengo, the education minister Gustavo Capanema and President Vargas himself. The film was made with the support of Flamengo, who provided sets and players, as well as money from government agencies. The main melodrama was mixed with semi-documentary footage of the new social programmes and enthusiastic youths of Padilha’s patriotic Flamengo. The film’s chief character is Louis, a relatively poor Flamengo player and medical student, who hopes to emulate his dead father, who had been the star striker at Flamengo. Life is perked up but complicated by the return from Europe of his childhood sweetheart, Maria Helena. Maria is still game but the family would prefer her to marry Rubens, also a Flamengo player and a medical student, but from a very rich family. Maria declares that she will marry whoever scores the most goals for Flamengo that season. Everyone’s moral blushes are saved when Rubens realizes he cannot win her heart, and concedes Maria and Flamengo’s goal-scoring opportunities to Louis; and Louis successfully completes his medical thesis, thus ensuring his upward class mobility.

  Futebol em Família featured a conservative doctor, ironically named Professor Leônidas Jau (his namesake was the era’s ultimate bohemian player), whose lectures sharply criticize football. He claims that the game deforms the mind and the body, and declares his loathing for star striker Arthur Friedenreich. His son, inevitably, is a football player and a medical student, loves Friedenreich and is eventually called up to play for Fluminense. The professor forbids this, which gives the film the rest of its storyline. The conflict is happily resolved as the son successfully combines football and study, and the professor, against his inclinations, becomes a devoted football fan.

  With the fall of Vargas and the Estado Novo, Brazilian cinema was in theory released from this combination of officially sanctioned melodrama, clowning, excruciating sentimentality and lamentable plotting, but for the most part that’s where the medium stayed. José Carlos Burle’s first football movie of the era, O Gol da Vitória (‘The Winning Goal’), made in 1945, remained true to these formats, but his second, O Craque (‘The Star’), released in 1953, broke with some of these conventions, suggesting that the attempts to impose eugenic and moral frameworks on to football were waning. O Gol da Vitória centred on a star striker, Laurindo, modelled on Leônidas da Silva, and played by the leading black comic of the era, Grande Otelo. O Craque was set in São Paulo where Julinho, a Corinthians player, struggles with his injured knee and his sweetheart’s father. Elisa loves Julinho, but as ever the father wants
her to marry a doctor instead. The film ends with a game between Corinthians and the fictional Uruguayan club Carrasco Montevideo (played by the Paraguayan side Olimpia) and in a fictional reversioning of the 1950 World Cup final, the Brazilians win 2–1. Julinho’s knee holds up, he scores the winner and gets the girl, and for the first time the hero is not the doctor, nor does his ascent depend on passing exams or climbing the social hierarchy; scoring the winning goal is enough.

  IV

  In 1934 Brazil played a single game at the World Cup. They were defeated by Spain and went home. Few had taken much note and the most significant response in Brazil was the damage inflicted on the clubhouse of Palestra Itália in São Paulo; not because the club had fielded Spaniards, but because so many of the best Italo-Brazilian players from the club were representing Italy rather than Brazil. In 1938 the nation was actually listening in as Brazil’s games were broadcast live on the radio from France. This time Brazil were the only South American side at the tournament and the two undisputed stars of the squad were black: striker Leônidas da Silva – the Black Diamond – and central defender Domingos da Guia. In their opening game against Poland the Brazilians found themselves 3–1 up at half time, 4–4 at 90 minutes and, thanks to a Leônidas hat-trick, the winners of a pulsating match 6-5 after extra time. In the second round they showed they could mix it with the physical Europeans. During their very rough 1-1 draw two Czechs had to leave the field with broken bones and one Brazilian was sent off. Brazil won the replay and headed for Marseilles where they met world champions Italy in the semi-final. Italy proved to be too good, winning 2-1, but the Brazilians regrouped and thrashed the Swedes in a play-off to finish third overall.

  The team’s progress was heard live on the radio, followed avidly in the press, and watched a few days later in the cinemas of the big cities after precious reels of film had been flown home. It was a national triumph, but what did it mean? The most influential interpretation, and one that continues to shape perceptions of Brazilian football today, was given by Gilberto Freyre, one of the country’s leading social scientists and commentators:

  Our style of football seems to contrast with the European style because of a set of characteristics such as surprise, craftiness, shrewdness, readiness and I shall say individual brilliance and spontaneity, all of which express our ‘mulattoism’ . . . Our passes . . . our tricks . . . that something which is related to dance, to capoeira, mark the Brazilian style of football, which rounds and sweetens the game the British invented, the game which they and the other Europeans play in such an acute and angular way – all this seems to express . . . the flamboyant and at the same time shrewd mulattoism, which today can be detected in every true affirmation of Brazil.9

  Freyre had made his name in 1933 when he published Casa-Grande e Senzala (‘The Masters and the Slaves’), which described in extraordinary detail every aspect of life on a north-eastern sugar plantation, and every aspect of life seemed to lead back to sex.10 While the sexual relationships between slave master and slaves in Protestant North America were largely nasty, brutish, short and shameful, in Catholic Brazil, where the demographics of colonialism were so much more heavily weighted against Europeans, miscegenation was a necessity and a virtue. It was an alluring notion, particularly at a moment when the country’s elite was searching for a form of Brasilidade that could turn the nation’s diversity from a source of shame to an advantage. As Peter Robb has written, ‘It was immensely seductive, Freyre’s tropical pastoral of the vanished worlds of the sugar estates, conjured in sensual and living detail. Most seductive of all was the idea that out of Brazil’s sensual and promiscuous past a new society had grown where all races flourished and racism was extinguished.’11

  Freyre’s work has come under increasing attack in recent years, as detailed studies of economic and domestic relations under slavery have revealed a much harsher and more violent society, and of course the notion that Brazil effortlessly acquired a multiracial democracy without discrimination looks ever more laughable. But whatever the sociological truth of his thesis, Freyre left an ineradicable mark on Brazilian culture. Over the next forty years he would rework and republish the argument in a variety of ways. In the 1940s he coined the term Futebol Arte, and made the contrast between Brazilian and European football in terms of Apollinarian and Dionysian characteristics, Brazil, of course, representing the latter.

  Freyre’s arguments did not come out of thin air. For over two decades a small body of work on Afro-Brazilian culture and history had been emerging, and the São Paulo Modernists of 1922 had continued to look for hybrid forms of Brazilian culture. In 1939 Mário de Andrade wrote a noted crônica on a game between Brazil and Argentina played in Buenos Aires. In conversation with his Uruguayan companion he chews over the cannibalistic character of Brazilian football. But this was no nationalist rant. Brazil end up losing because they merely long for victory, whereas the Argentinians want it and act upon this desire. At least Mário seemed to enjoy the spectacle: ‘Gorgeous! What a marvellous dance, the game of football! A hummingbird ballet!’12

  In the visual arts, painters were increasingly turning to football as a component of the everyday landscapes of Brazil. Cândido Portinari, most famous perhaps for his depiction of life on the São Paulo coffee plantations of the era, also painted the extraordinary Futebol in 1935. It depicts a brown, parched, almost surreal environment in the bleak Serrano of the north-east. Among goats and stones and blasted stumps a group of boys, of all colours, strangely float around a ball in motion. In the distance is a graveyard and a garden they do not have access to. By the 1940s football was appearing in more playful landscapes, rural and urban, and was depicted as a more carefree, joyous game in the work of Carybé and Djanira da Motta e Silva.

  Over time Freyre’s argument also served to explain Brazil’s cultures of music, dance and capoeira. Ginga, the basic hip-swivelling moves of the latter, became synonymous with the swerves and feints of footballers and sambistas alike. All, it was argued, could claim a cultural lineage that was not only Afro-Brazilian but retained the body of cultural and physical capital that was required to survive under conditions of brutal slavery – improvisation, quick-wittedness, the capacity for deception and illusion, spontaneity: taking your chance when it came. This was the same set of skills attributed to the malandro. Domingos da Guia, star of the 1938 World Cup, looked back on his youth forty years later in Freyrian terms:

  My older brother used to tell me: a malandro is a cat that always lands on his feet . . . I used to really be good at dancing and that helped me on the field. I swerved a lot. You know, I invented that short dribble imitating the miudinho – the ‘little one’ – that kind of samba.13

  Domingos’s words underline the final but most important factor in explaining Freyre’s impact. His work was absorbed and adopted by Mário Filho, scion of a Rio publishing family, and Brazil’s most influential football writer from the 1930s to the late 1950s. It was Filho that truly popularized these notions and created a language in which intellectuals, public and players alike could frame their shared understanding of Brazilian football. In his 1947 landmark book O Negro no Futebol Brasileiro he argued that Brazilian football’s distinctiveness rested on its mulattoism and proceeded to illustrate, invent and mythologize this in a series of fabulous essays. Filho was more than a writer. An immense red-headed character, all linen suits and fat cigars, he was an editor and networker, an impresario and entrepreneur, inventing competitions for football fans and carnival floats. He set the intellectual framework in which Brazilian football was discussed for three decades and went on to recruit and publish some of the best football writing from some of the nation’s best authors. These included his brother, the playwright Nelson Rodrigues, and the novelist José Lins do Rego.

  Zé Lins, as he is known, was one of a group of writers – like novelist Rachel de Queiroz and poet Jorge de Lima – who had emerged out of the north-east of Brazil and made the desperate poverty and harsh lives of the region the
ir subject matter. In his novels and journalism of the 1920s he had shown no interest in football, but all this changed when he moved to Rio in the 1930s and caught the bug. He joined Flamengo and became a director of the club. His 1941 novel Água-mãe, set in the salt flats outside Rio de Janeiro, is a multi-family saga with a ghost story that features a working-class football star and his inevitable decline. He was recruited by Mário Filho to write regular crônicas for Jornal dos Sports, where he coined the adjective Flamengista. He too absorbed Freyre’s arguments and incorporated them into his writing on football and other matters. Indeed that cluster of ideas linking Freyre’s idyllic model of Brazilian ethnicity with football, music and dance, and all in turn with spontaneity, trickery and artistry, became the common view of Brazilian nationalism and Brazilian football. Writing in 1942, but looking back to the mixed-race Brazilian team of 1932 that won the Copa Rio Branco in Uruguay, Zé Lins, like most of the country’s intelligentsia, now saw the past and the future through Freyrian eyes:

  The young men that won in Montevideo were a portrait of social democracy, where Paulinho, the son of an important family, united with the black Leônidas, with the mulatto Oscarino, with the white Martins. All this done in the good Brazilian style, with the most sympathetic improvisation. Reading this book on soccer, I believe in Brazil, in the eugenic qualities of our mestizos, in the energy and intelligence of the men that the Brazilian land forged with diverse bloods, giving them originality that one day will shock the world.14

  V

  Brazil’s participation in the anti-fascist alliance of the Second World War made Vargas’s own fascist affectations look absurd, and his continuing authoritarian hold over power unsustainable. He stepped down in October 1945, but got himself elected to the Senate and remade his network of power through the Brazilian Labour Party, which he had invented while still in office. The extent of his control over the Brazilian elite remained significant and he anointed the successful candidate in the 1945 presidential election – General Eurico Dutra. Early on in Dutra’s presidency Brazil was confirmed as the host of the 1950 World Cup, and the plans and preparations for the tournament offered an interesting commentary on the broader political economy of the nation. Dutra maintained the football politics of the previous regime, donating a large piece of land to Flamengo. Vargas would later secure the club an interest-free loan that would allow them to build a major residential development on it. However, in the new and more democratic spaces of Brazilian politics, this kind of favouritism and largesse from above was for a short while challenged from the left.