Brazil's Dance With the Devil : Fight for Democracy (9781608464333)

by Zirin, Dave

  The obvious point of comparison, as noted above, is the Brazilian martial art/dance of capoeira, devised by slaves as a dance that masks the use of lethal force. Today in Brazil, capoeiristas gather on beaches and in studios to practice this unique martial art. The movements in both Brazilian soccer and capoeira demonstrate the art of “hiding in plain sight.” In both cases, the imprint of African culture, history, and influence cannot be overstated.

  Soccer achieved even higher prominence with the ascension of military dictator Getúlio Vargas. Vargas understood that soccer was becoming a national obsession and was the first major politician to see the political benefits of being identified with the sport. He started the National Sports Council in 1941 to fund a network of soccer clubs, with the goal of developing talent and making sure the national team had the best possible training and facilities. If we want to understand why Brazil is, as of this writing, the only country to have won the World Cup five times, part of the answer is certainly Vargas. He made sure that all of these leagues and federations were under his central control. He also pointedly and publicly subsidized all expenses for the national team’s trip to France for the 1938 World Cup. This was a savvy move, as the country was enthralled by the thought of its team returning historic favors and conquering Europe. Brazil flourished in the 1938 tournament, coming in third after getting knocked out in the first round of the previous two World Cups. The tournament also made a star out of Leônidas da Silva, winner of the World Cup’s Golden Ball award for most outstanding player as well as the Golden Boot for the tournament’s top scorer. This was a particularly satisfying honor given that European teams held the majority of the votes. Leônidas was a national celebrity, symbolizing the very essence of what being Brazilian could mean in the twentieth century. He was also Afro-Brazilian and his nickname, Black Diamond, was a celebration of this dual heritage. Leonidas is also credited—though the point is disputed—with inventing the “bicycle kick,” a reverse kick that to this day only the truly daring attempt and only the greats pull off.15

  It would be two decades before Brazil actually won a World Cup, but the nation was now hooked not only on playing but also on the idea of setting an international standard, proving its worth to the parasitic powers that had bled it dry over the centuries. Soccer became synonymous with a certain kind of manhood. “Real men” played soccer and, by that transitive property, Brazilian men were equal or superior to any men on earth. (We will deal later in this chapter with the question of Brazilian women in soccer.)

  Gilka Machado, an iconic Brazilian poet of the 1930s, wrote a poem about the 1938 World Cup. She celebrated the team’s “entrancing, winged feet” and gave a glimpse into the rise of soccer and its place in the constellation of Brazilian cultural identity:

  Brazilian souls

  follow in your footsteps

  to the rushing ball,

  to the decisive kick

  of the glory of the Fatherland.

  The players of the national team are playing for the manhood of a nation as they

  Fix in the eye of the foreigner

  The miraculous reality

  That is the Brazilian man

  The poem ends with a salute to the soccer players, the heroes of Brazil:

  The soul of Brazil

  Lays down a kiss

  On your heroic feet.16

  Then there was the 1950 World Cup final, where Brazil lost to Uruguay in front of a packed Maracanã filled to the rafters two hundred thousand strong, by a score of 2 to 1. Not unlike the Boston Red Sox fans who used to talk endlessly about the Curse of the Bambino and relive what they refer to as “Game Six” (of the 1986 World Series, that is), Brazil’s soccer culture obsesses over this loss. It is considered the Maracanã’s most famous moment. It even has its own name: the Maracanaço. Roberto DaMatta, a renowned Brazilian anthropologist, writes of the 1950 World Cup final as “perhaps the greatest tragedy in contemporary Brazilian history. Because it happened collectively and brought a united vision of the loss of a historic opportunity. Because it happened at the beginning of a decade in which Brazil was looking to assert itself as a nation with a great future.”17 Brazil’s goalkeeper, Moacyr Barbosa Nascimento, suffered racist recriminations and was treated as a pariah for decades afterwards. “Under Brazilian law the maximum sentence is thirty years,” Barbosa said in 2000. “But my imprisonment has been for fifty.”18

  To understand how deep this loss goes, consider the year 2000, which marked the thirtieth anniversary of Brazil’s third World Cup victory in a final game that expressed all that is beautiful about the Brazilian way of soccer. That year, 2000, also marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Maracanaço. According to Bellos, the anniversary of the 1970 victory “passed barely without trace,” while Rio newspapers published headlines commemorating the 1950 loss: “A HALF CENTURY OF NIGHTMARE.”19 The Brazilian novelist Carlos Heitor Cony wrote, “Survivors of that cruel afternoon believed they would never again be able to be happy. . . . What happened on July 16, 1950, deserves a collective monument, like the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. These are the things that build nations, a people drenched in their own pain.”20 The 1950 loss carries such cultural weight that it is permanently imprinted on Brazil’s national psyche; its international soccer team, as Alex Bellos writes, is “always playing against itself, against its own demons, against the ghosts of the Maracanã.”21

  One result of the 1950 loss was that Brazil tried to shake off the doldrums by redesigning its uniforms to the now iconic vivid yellow, blue, green, and white. Since 1970, with the widespread commercial availability of color television, their dazzling green and canary yellow shirts have signified a unique kind of soccer. For the world, no one wore that shirt with quite the panache of Edson Arantes do Nascimento, otherwise known as Pelé. Yet within Brazil, which revels in its own uniqueness, the real icon is someone far less familiar to casual and international soccer fans, someone as brilliant and as tragic as the Maracanaço. His name is Manuel Francisco dos Santos, but they call him Garrincha.

  Garrincha and Pelé

  To even have a cursory knowledge of Brazilian soccer or its place in Brazilian culture, you need to know the legend of Garrincha. Born in the impoverished rural town of Pau Grande, a region of Rio de Janeiro, Garrincha was the key player in Brazil’s 1958 and 1962 World Cup victories. Many Brazilians regard the athletically gifted, personally flawed Garrincha as the greatest player to ever come out of Brazil, better even than Pelé. Garrincha is Portuguese for “wren,” a bird defined by both its delicacy and its surprising speed. He has also been called “the Angel with Bent Legs” because he was born with spinal defects that bent his right leg inward and made his left leg six centimeters shorter than his right and curved outward. From this unlikely start, he became a master of ball control and goal scorer without peer.22

  Somehow, on his bent legs, Garrincha was also a speed merchant, blending incredible balance and ability with an inability to be caught. As teenagers, Garrincha and Pelé were on the same triumphant 1958 World Cup team. Stunningly, neither was played during the first two games. They finally were put in for the third, against the USSR. At the very beginning of the game, Garrincha hit the post after dribbling around the field for forty seconds. Pelé also hit the frame of the goal after a pass from Garrincha. This barrage ended mercilessly with a goal by their teammate, striker Edvaldo Izídio Neto, known as Vavá. This is considered the “finest three minutes” in Brazilian soccer history.

  This entire 1958 World Cup squad represented a new, multicultural generation filled with a promise of hope and social mobility unknown to previous generations. David Goldblatt notes that the 1958 World Cup squad was largely made up of

  the youthful elite of the new generation of football players who came of age in the boom. . . . The squad underwent intensive medical checks in Rio’s leading hospitals which revealed an extraordinary catalogue of disease, neglect, and long-term malnutrition. Almost the entire squad had intestinal parasites, some had syphi
lis, others were anemic. Over 300 teeth were extracted from the mouths of players who had never been to a dentist, and but for this episode might never have gone. Epidemiologically, Brazil’s ’58 were a team of the people.23

  Yet alongside their hope, tragedy also lurked in the poverty that malnourished many of these players. Many of them discovered, much like future generations of athletes, that once the cheering stopped, no one was going to look out for their interests—and a fall from greater heights could produce an even more jarring impact.

  No one personified this familiar story of sports, economic adversity, and misfortune more than the everyman Garrincha. He was, in the brightest possible spotlight, a tragic figure, an alcoholic like his father who spent himself to bankruptcy. Anthropologist José Sergio said, “When someone dies, you take stock of all the person’s life. Garrincha was identified with the public. He never lost his popular roots. He was also exploited by football so he was the symbol of the majority of Brazilians, who are also exploited.”24 Garrincha’s was a grand narrative: the wren picked apart by vultures who was not only an able player on crippled legs but beautiful. He lived life with reckless, wicked abandon. His legend is how some Brazilians choose to see themselves. Pelé is a different kind of role model, one Brazilians have been more apt to respect and resist simultaneously. Both are works of art, but Pelé is cold as marble.

  The Cold Cool of Pelé

  When Rio was chosen to host the 2016 Olympics, the man standing by Lula’s side was Pelé. Who else could it possibly have been? Born in 1940 outside of São Paulo, Edson Arantes do Nascimento was raised in poverty. Unlike Garrincha, Pelé was a legacy athlete, the son of a respected Fluminense player known as Dondinho. In 1956, before his sixteenth birthday, he was already a prodigy, stuck with the nickname Pelé against his will for reasons that are still unknown (possibly because he had difficulty pronouncing the name of his favorite player, Bilé). The top scorer in his league in São Paulo at fifteen, he would score the one-thousandth goal of his career thirteen years later at the Maracanã.

  Pelé’s accolades, described in full, would fill an encyclopedia. He was named FIFA’s player of the twentieth century, along with Argentina’s Diego Maradona. He was voted World Player of the Century by the International Federation of Football History and Statistics. He finished ahead of people like Muhammad Ali and Michael Jordan and was voted Athlete of the Century by the IOC, in conjunction with the Reuters News Agency. By any statistical measure, Pelé was the most prolific player and scorer ever to live. A pro at fifteen, he joined the Brazilian national team at sixteen and won his first World Cup at seventeen. At that 1958 World Cup, Pelé became the youngest player to play in a World Cup final match at seventeen years and 249 days, scoring two goals in the final as Brazil beat Sweden 5 to 2. His first goal, a lob over a defender followed by a precise volley shot, was selected as one of the finest goals in World Cup history. When Pelé scored his second goal, Swedish player Sigvard Parling later commented: “I have to be honest and say I felt like applauding.”25 Pelé is still the only player to be a part of three World Cup–winning teams. He still holds the single-game record for goals in a game, with eleven scores (no, that’s not a typo). In 1961, when Pelé was twenty, Brazilian president Jânio Quadros declared him “a national treasure,” both to burnish his own presidency and to prevent Pelé from signing with a club in Europe.26 This would be the first of countless times Brazil’s political leaders would attempt to bask in his glow.

  What Pelé was able to do like no one before him, or perhaps even since, was to transcend Brazil and become an international icon. His face became one with the most popular sport on earth. In the pre-Internet age, his global fame was rivaled only by, perhaps, Muhammad Ali. In 1967, the two armies of the Nigerian Civil War declared a forty-eight-hour ceasefire in honor of—and so they could attend—an exhibition game that Pelé was playing in Lagos. His stardom contributed to black athletes’ new heightened status in Brazil: “Promoted by intellectuals, the media, and the dominant classes as a symbol of Brazilianness, futebol achieved the fullest extent of its influence when blacks, like Pelé, were given full recognition within the system. The outpouring of national pride and self-esteem which accompanied the three World Cup victories could not have been imagined under other circumstances.”27

  During the 1970s, a survey showed that Pelé was the second-most recognized brand name in Europe, after Coca-Cola. By nineteen, the Brazilian Coffee Institute had already asked him to be its international emissary. He was the first athlete to trademark his own name. He also made himself a blank political slate as well as a “brand.” In this Pelé was ahead of his time, paving the way for superstar athletes of African descent like Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods: the neoliberal superstar in an age before neoliberalism. Becoming an international icon was very profitable for Pelé, but it also had the effect of distancing him from Brazil’s masses. If he belonged to international commercialism, then he could never really belong to them.

  This was not all that would distance him from the masses.

  There is no doubt Pelé was an incredibly powerful symbol of pride and excellence at a time when few Afro-Brazilian faces were accorded such status. But he never used his hyper-exalted platform to challenge any of the racism in Brazilian society. Instead, Pelé had an army of publicists programming his every move off the pitch. Even as “the revolt of the black athlete” was on everyone’s lips in the 1960s, Pelé was criticizing Muhammad Ali for resisting the draft and refusing to fight in Vietnam.28 In an era where the rulers and rules of the world were being challenged, Pelé met and entertained European royalty. He allowed Brazil’s dictatorship to use his image on postage stamps and went on “goodwill tours” to newly independent African republics on behalf of whichever of the rotating dictators happened to be in charge. He dressed in African garb, celebrating a Brazil in which the position of the Afro-Brazilian masses was dire.

  It is not that Pelé was a hardline, heartless right-winger as much as he was someone who chose to risk very little. The Brazilian government was, ultimately, his most important patron, and he sided with the ruling power in his country, right or wrong, time and again. He was an industry unto himself—partially owned and subsidized by the state. When asked by a foreign journalist, as he invariably was, about poverty in Brazil and the mushrooming growth of the favelas, Pelé’s stock answer was that God had made people poor and his function was to use his God-given athletic greatness to bring joy into their difficult lives. Textbooks for schoolchildren invariably included his picture “not only as a sports hero but to emphasize teamwork and the virtues of hierarchy.”29

  When Pelé scored his one-thousandth goal in 1969, this hero worship reached levels best described as galactic. “In a schmaltzfest of tears and declarations,” Goldblatt writes, “Pelé dedicated the goal to the children of Brazil. A Brazilian senator composed a poem in his honor and read it from the floor of Congress. The following day’s newspapers, which in every other country on the planet covered nothing but the second Apollo moon landing, were split down the middle in Brazil. Apollo 12 on one side, Pelé on the other.”30 This was life under dictatorship: for all the beauty and democracy he represented on the pitch, Pelé allowed himself to personify a dictatorship. His thousandth goal was Brazil’s moon landing.

  After Brazil’s victory in the 1970 World Cup, the military dictatorship pulled out all the stops to use the national team to solve what Goldblatt calls “the problem of securing popular legitimacy.”31 Addressing the nation, military dictator of the moment Emílio Garrastazu Médici said:

  I feel profound happiness at seeing the joy of our people in this highest form of patriotism. I identify this victory won in the brotherhood of good sportsmanship with the rise of faith in our fight for national development. I identify the success of our [national team] with . . . intelligence and bravery, perseverance and our technical ability, in physical preparation and moral being. Above all, our players won because they know how to . . . play for the c
ollective good.

  Médici was so ham-fisted in his efforts to ride the popularity of Brazil’s team that many on Brazil’s left rooted for the country’s opponents. Medici repeatedly attempted to use the team as a way to symbolize Brazil’s economic miracle.32 Even as his government rounded up political dissidents, it also produced a giant poster of Pelé straining to head the ball through the goal, accompanied by the slogan Ninguém mais segura este país—“nobody can stop this country now.”

  Pelé was no unconscious actor in this. When asked in 1972 about the dictatorship, he responded, “There is no dictatorship in Brazil. Brazil is a liberal country, a land of happiness. We are a free people. Our leaders know what is best for [us], and govern [us] in a spirit of toleration and patriotism.”33 Keep in mind that when Pelé was saying this, twenty-five-year-old Dilma Rousseff was being tortured in prison. One wonders if this has ever come up in conversation.

  In 1974 President Médici and FIFA president João Havelange begged Pelé to play in the World Cup, but he refused, choosing instead to play for the New York Cosmos. In 1978, from his safe New York City perch, he still addressed the dictatorship in favorable terms, this time saying that in a country as uneducated as Brazil, the masses were better off not voting.34 At his final game, an exhibition match at Giants Stadium between the Brazilian team Santos and the Cosmos in which he played one half for each team, Pelé spoke to the crowd, asking them to say the word “love” with him three times—the unbearable banality of the politics of Pelé.35 (This is why soccer great–turned–rebel politician Romário once said, “Pelé is a poet as long as he stays silent.”36)