The bulk of this side went to Chile four years later when preparations were equally rigorous – high-altitude training was added to the repertoire and the CBF technical commission approved the Chilean government’s licensed brothels near the team’s hotel. Pelé’s injury in an early game against the Czechs gave the spotlight to Garrincha who seemed to soar, scoring twice against England and gifting a third to Vavá as his shot rebounded off the bar and down to his teammate’s feet. In the semi-final he was the chief architect of Brazil’s 4-2 victory over hosts Chile despite the endless attention of Chilean defender Eladio Rojas. Garrincha snapped in the 85th minute, kicked his tormentor and was sent off. He was only allowed to play in the final after the Brazilian diplomatic machine went into overdrive: at the suggestion of the Brazilians, the Peruvian president got his ambassador to Chile to speak to the Peruvian referee. The referee rescinded his decision. Garrincha played, and though Brazil went 1–0 down to the Czechs in the final they never looked worried. Three goals later they were champions again. Garrincha could be seen repeatedly standing with his foot poised atop the ball, daring the Czechs to take it off him.
It is hard to underestimate the importance of these two footballing triumphs. Of course, there were phenomenal celebrations in the streets, and gigantic crowds gathered in the main cities to see the team parade the cup. Both victories were followed by presidential receptions and speeches; a torrent of memorabilia; photographic specials in the magazines; and the release of celebratory sambas and orchestral marches. But these moments left a deeper legacy. Sérgio Leite Lopes, then ten years old, recalled listening to one of the finals on the radio: ‘It was so intense. I don’t think I was ever more moved by a few minutes of football in all my life. It was football’s turning point.’2 This was the point when football became the national ritual, the barometer of the nation’s health, and the crowning achievement of an unambiguously mulatto Brazil. As Nelson Rodrigues pithily put it, 1958 meant that Brazil could kick its ‘mongrel dog complex’ for ever. Brazil had won, not once but twice; not just a cup but the World Cup; and they didn’t just win, they won in their own style. Brazil was the futebol nation.
The matter of what kind of nation Brazil is, has often turned on the comparative biographies and standing of its two greatest footballing sons, Pelé and Garrincha. Pelé, then Edson Arantes do Nascimento, was born poor in 1940 in the tiny town of Três Corações, deep in the back country of Minas Gerais. His father had played semi-professionally and encouraged his son, who played more than he studied and joined his first organized team when the family moved to the city of Bauru, São Paulo state. He was spotted by the coach of the local team AC Bauru, Waldemar de Brito, who was a veteran of the 1938 World Cup. He took Pelé to Santos, where he scored his first goal at sixteen and embarked on an unbelievable run of over 1,200 games for the club in seventeen years.
Santos were a club on the rise, based in the port city of São Paulo state. The city had prospered and then declined with the rhythms of the coffee industry. Now it was serving as the gateway for São Paulo’s industrial might; in the 1950s it began to boom, the team began to win and then in 1955 they claimed their first Paulista Championship for twenty years. More domestic honours followed, then in 1962 they won their first international trophy – the Copa Libertadores, in an epic three-game marathon against Uruguayan club Peñarol. Their reward was a chance to measure themselves against the champions of Europe in the Intercontinental Cup. Santos beat Benfica at home 3–2 and then, with another Pelé hat-trick, beat them 5–2 in Lisbon. The government declared the next day a national holiday. This golden era continued when the following year they saw off Boca Juniors in the final of the Libertadores as well as retaining the national league title.
Pelé’s coach at Santos, Lula, made the case for his greatness like this:
Pelé can no longer be compared to anyone else because he possesses all the qualities of the ideal football player. He is fast on the ground and in the air, he has the kick, the physique, the ball control, the ability to dictate play, a feeling for the manoeuvre, he is unselfish, good natured and modest. I think he is the only forward in the world who always aims the ball at a precise point in the opposition’s net at the moment of scoring a goal.3
Garrincha was born Manuel Francisco dos Santos into a mestizo Indian-European family in the small industrial town of Pau Grande beyond the edge of the Rio periphery, where the local textile company had been supporting a football team since before the First World War. As a baby it was clear that his left leg curved outwards and his right curved inwards, a condition that, while it never altered, seemed to make no difference to his movement, indeed it may have made his dribbling even more elusive. As a diminutive teenager Garrincha – ‘the Wren’, a nickname given him by his sister – played for the factory team, did light chores in the factory, drank, danced and larked about. He was unconcerned about his talent, and it required his friends to drag him to professional trials in Rio. At Botafogo he was put up against the commanding left back Nilton Santos and destroyed him. He was signed immediately and spent the majority of his career and all his best years with the club of the new bohemian middle classes of the Zona Sul. He was carefree, socially unambitious, ignorant and sheltered to the point of otherworldliness when in the company of his social superiors. His approach to playing football was equally unformed and unstructured. Primarily a winger of some brilliance, he would drift and fade only to reappear and score goals from everywhere. He never knew who he was marking and was allowed to abandon team talks for the ping-pong table. Yet it was for Garrincha that the olé chant of the toreador was transferred to football. If he had a trademark it was this – to find any way, sublime, crafty, cunning or brazen, to get the ball round an opponent. Sometimes, he would enjoy it so much that he would go back and do it all again a second time.
Pelé lived a model professional life; Garrincha ate and drank like the most dissolute factory worker. While Pelé, even through his teenage shyness, was a talker, there is barely an interview of any substance with Garrincha. Pelé, ambitious, knew the value of his talent and though he lost money on a number of occasions to unscrupulous business partners, he always managed to extract something of value. Garrincha had a pathological lack of ambition, neither knowing nor caring how much money he had made or where it might be going. In the unspoken but obvious racial hierarchies of Brazil, Pelé, a black man with a white partner, had married up. Garrincha married down. Pelé planned for the future. Garrincha lived for the moment. Pelé trained. Garrincha slept. Both players would acquire another nickname – an essential suffix. Pelé was O Rei – ‘the King’, honoured but ultimately distant, of another world. Garrincha was A Alegria do Povo – ‘the Joy of the People’, of this imperfect world, disabled, drunk and fragile, and in the end broken. The King was and continued to be revered but Garrincha was loved. Over the next two decades their careers and fortunes would wildly diverge, but for these few short years, the futebol nation, on the pitch and in the collective imagination, could accommodate both stories and both talents.
III
While the success of the Seleção and the brilliance of Pelé and Garrincha provided the core narrative of Brazilian football history in the 1950s and early 1960s, their triumphs rested on a thriving domestic club culture. From the early 1950s through to the early 1970s, Brazilian football clubs constituted one of the most active elements of urban civil society, drawing social classes together and providing somewhere that popular and high cultures could mix. Football was a place where poetry, dance and music continued to take and offer inspiration. In an otherwise highly unequal and immobile society, it offered routes to fame, material comfort and occasionally fortunes for a new generation of activist fans and professional players.
At the apex remained the directors of the clubs. Nearly all were self-made businessmen, though there were routes to the top via politics and public office. The posts were unpaid and one incumbent went so far as to argue that it was a form of ‘public service –
just like waving the flag’.4 There were, however, hidden benefits to the position. Most importantly it put one inside the interlacing network of urban elites, connecting business people, leading figures in the media, civil servants, politicians and developers; a sine qua non of operating successfully in Brazil’s highly personalized and clientelistic economic and political life. Janet Lever reported one Flamengo director describing how ‘he was eventually elected a vice-president even though he had no wealth. During his term in office he made so many friends and contacts that his small business boomed and he made a fortune.’5 The post also opened the door to a whole raft of sinecures in the state and national football authorities and provided an opportunity to bestow patronage and largesse, from which influence and votes could then be reaped: two state governors of Minas Gerais, Juscelino Kubitschek and Antônio Magalhães, were instrumental in getting the Estádio Mineirão in Belo Horizonte built. In return directors were expected to cover clubs’ debts, pay for at least some of the votes that got them elected and, for the richest and most ambitious, a club presidency could be won on the promise of paying for the arrival of the latest star: coffee magnate Amadeu Rodrigues Sequeira won the top seat at Vasco da Gama by promising and then delivering Tostão to the club.
Football, however, was just one element of club life in the 1950s and 1960s. In fact, one could argue that the social and recreational life that centred on the clubs was at its strongest in this era – clubs really were clubs, providing not just facilities and parties but a tangible sense of community and identity. In the 1930s Flamengo had become in effect a mass-membership club, with fees that were within reach of the city’s lower middle classes if not its workers or the poor. By the 1950s all the biggest clubs in Rio and São Paulo counted their members in the tens of thousands. In addition to using their now expanded sporting and social facilities – including ballrooms, dining rooms, swimming pools, tennis courts and gyms – the clubs offered ‘dinners, dances, theatre, movies, fashion shows and picnics to their members. Women and girls [were] very active in the clubs’ yoga lessons, bridge tournaments and other recreational and social events.’6 Smaller clubs fared less well. Teams like São Cristóvão and Bonsucesso in Rio’s Zona Norte had just a fraction of the grand clubs’ wealth and members, and the gap widened in the 1960s. New migrants to the cities invariably chose the big sides over an affiliation to their new neighbourhoods. Bangu’s victory in the 1966 Carioca Championship was the last time a team from outside the big four (Flamengo, Fluminense, Vasco and Botafogo) would win the title.
The position of players at the clubs had barely changed since the formalization of professionalism in the late 1930s. Players’ pay in the early 1950s, while better than that available to most urban workers, didn’t match that of professionals in other fields. Players were tied to the clubs that they originally signed for. If the club didn’t want you to play elsewhere, then you couldn’t play anywhere. In the absence of an exit option, player power inside the clubs was strictly limited. While many did struggle against the authority of directors and coaches, there remained a pervasive culture of deference, made all the more effective by the absence of a players’ union, indeed of any kind of formal organization to represent them. Advisers, agents and managers of the era seemed to be better at looking after their own interests than their players’. By the late 1950s and early 1960s, as the economy boomed and the clubs became better at capitalizing on sponsorship and advertising opportunities, some footballers’ wages did begin to rise. Outside Rio and São Paulo they remained pitiful, but at the big clubs in the big cities the leading players were now comfortable and the stars well heeled. That said, insurance, health care and a pension were not part of a player’s contract. A long and often penurious post-game career awaited many of them.
Finally there were the fans, whose tickets not only paid for the football, but often subsidized the social side of the club too. Despite the presence of the torcidas organizadas, numbering around 3–4,000 at most games, the rest of the crowd was more fickle. Few held season tickets and attendances were notoriously variable. In Rio and São Paulo, games against small teams from the suburbs might attract less than half the turnout for a game against a big city rival. On the other hand, for derbies and finals, demand was huge. The 1963 Fla–Flu, the decisive game of the championship, drew almost 200,000 people to the Maracanã. Flamengo played five similar games in the late 1950s and early 1960s with attendances of 150,000 or more. Whatever the precise numbers, it is clear that Brazilian fans had created a popular spectacle second to none in world football. Jacques de Ryswick, visiting in 1954, saw Brazil’s last qualification game for the World Cup in Switzerland later that year.
As soon as the Brazilian team had won its ticket to Switzerland, a single, formidable cry rang out from the masses ‘Vamos Suiça, Vamos Suiça’. Thousands of shirts were torn off, set alight and waved about like triumphal torches. For me the game here had always been an accessory to the spectacle . . . I had the impression that it was no more than a pretext, an excuse for the extraordinary striving of the people: a sort of safety valve invented to allow the superabundant life of the people, their exuberance and need to escape.7
The emergence of organized groups of torcidas, the creation of bands or charangas and the use of fireworks and smoke bombs all dated back to the late 1940s. In the 1950s and 1960s these groups would grow and dominate the atmosphere in the stadium. The Jornal dos Sports, which had supported the phenomenon in the 1930s and 1940s, sought to encourage it now, as it had with carnival, by making it competitive: the paper started awarding points on the basis of the power and beauty of the displays, their originality and the quality of their costumes. The spectacle was impressive. Torcidas came early and claimed a key spot in the stands. They brought an increasingly large range of home-made flags, banners and icons. Charangas and itinerant musicians helped direct the singing, chanting and whistling. The arrival of the players on the pitch was accompanied by fusillades of flares, firecrackers, fireworks and smoke bombs. From the upper levels a great storm of streamers and newspaper confetti rained down. A newspaper could be rolled into a tight cone and lit as a statement of victory or a curse on defeat.
Jaime de Carvalho remained the most public face of organized fandom, financed by sponsorship and government, to be in the stands for Brazil’s games at the 1954 Copa América, for which his wife sewed the then largest known Brazilian flag – ten metres by eight. He also attended the 1954, 1962 and 1970 World Cups. By the mid-1950s equivalent groups of torcidas and charangas had emerged at the other clubs in Rio and beyond. In 1967, to honour the silver jubilee of the formation of the Flamengo charanga, all the leading figures in Rio’s other torcidas gathered to present him with an American electric megaphone. Flamengo eventually made him a shareholding member of the club, a level of upward social mobility that he was unlikely to have experienced in any other sphere. At Vasco TOV (Torcida Organizada do Vasco) were led, unusually, by a woman, Dulce Rosalina – who won the Jornal dos Sports Best Fan in the City award; at Fluminense it was Paulista; and at Botafogo the key figure was Tarzan.
Born Otacílio Batista do Nascimento in Minas Gerais in 1927, Tarzan acquired his nickname and a reputation as a troublemaker before he walked the 300 miles to Rio in his twenties. As with a lot of migrants of that era, football was his way into Carioca society. He first went to see the team in 1953, and by 1957 he was bringing home-made flags and fireworks to the ground. By the early 1960s he was running a wig shop in the centre of Rio as well as the torcida organizada at Botafogo. Tarzan was a gift to the press, ready to offer his opinion at some length, to stand as a tribune of the fans and to rail against players and directors who, he thought, were not serving the best interests of the club. It might not have looked like the public sphere as imagined in European political theory, but in a society where self-organization was rare, and the confidence necessary to speak truth to power was rarer still, it looked like democratic progress.
IV
In the big c
ities of Brazil, beyond the stands themselves, football had become a multi-media experience.
An ordinary football match in the Rio Championships . . . is listened to in the streets, cafés and public squares by hundreds of thousands of people . . . The principal newspaper column is a football column . . . The biggest circulation of all papers in Brazil is a sports daily, the Gazeta Esportiva de São Paulo.8
Writing in 1963, the author could have added television to the list. Pioneering TV stations in São Paulo began to film football matches and then broadcast them as early as the mid-1950s. However, very few households had a set and the medium would become widespread only in the late 1960s. In any case, some were positively against television. Nelson Rodrigues, appalled by its capacity to take the mystery and uncertainty out of the game, exclaimed: ‘If the videotape shows it’s a penalty then all the worse for the videotape. The videotape is stupid.’9
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