by Rob Smyth
CONTENTS
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Dedication
Title Page
Epigraph
1 The Star Signing
2 The Alter Ego
3 The Malandro
4 The Orphan
5 The Sicknote
6 The Doppelgänger
7 The World Champion
8 The Prodigal
9 The Marketer
10 The Lover
11 The Fighter
12 The World Cup Star
13 The Corsican
14 The Blackmailer
15 The Piggy in the Middle
16 The Pimp
17 The Friend of Diego
18 The Mallrat
19 The Ladykiller
20 The Black Magic Patient
21 The Freeloader
22 The Animal
23 The TV Star
24 The Decent Scoundrel
25 The King of Beers
26 The Suit
27 The King of Rio
28 The Former Footballer
29 The Husband
30 The Fitness Trainer
31 The Fantasy Footballer
32 The Man They Left Behind
33 The Enigma
Epilogue
Picture Section
Acknowledgements
Copyright
ABOUT THE BOOK
1980s Rio de Janeiro.
There’s only one king in this city and he’s got the mullet, swagger and fake ID to prove it.
Introducing Carlos Henrique Raposo, known to all as KAISER.
This guy’s got more front than Copacabana beach. He’s the most loveable of rogues with the most common of dreams: to become a professional footballer. And he isn’t about to let trivial details like talent and achievement stand in his way… not when he has so many other ways to get what he wants.
In one of the most remarkable football stories ever told, Kaiser graduates from abandoned slumdog to star striker, dressing-room fixer, superstar party host and inexhaustible lover.
And all without kicking a ball.
He’s not just the king… he’s the Kaiser.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rob Smyth has worked on the Guardian sports desk since 2004 and has written or edited eight books, including Danish Dynamite: The Story of Football’s Greatest Cult Team. He has also worked for Manchester United, the Daily Telegraph, The Times, ITV, Sports Illustrated and FourFourTwo.
To Carlos Alberto Torres, a sheer delightful human being.
‘I hope that my truth pleases you, because there are many truths, many truths. It’s up to you to decide which is the true truth’ – Ronaldo Luís Nazário de Lima, talking to Congress about his convulsion on the day of the 1998 World Cup final
CHAPTER 1
THE STAR SIGNING
Carlos Kaiser wasn’t in the mood to play football. The journey from Rio de Janeiro to Corsica had taken the best part of twenty-four hours, during which the only thing in danger of going to sleep were his squashed legs. This was just a fleeting visit, a chance to survey his new kingdom before he introduced himself to his hotel bed. He hadn’t expected a welcome like this. The Stade Mezzavia, home of Gazélec Ajaccio FC, was heaving with anticipation. Hundreds of fans had congregated on the austere concrete terrace behind one of the goals, keen to see the unveiling of the club’s new Brazilian forward.
Word had spread around Corsica about Kaiser’s CV. He’d played for Botafogo, Flamengo and Fluminense, three of the biggest clubs in Brazil, and been world champion with Independiente of Argentina. Kaiser stifled a yawn and waved to the supporters. ‘I bet,’ he thought to himself, ‘they didn’t get this excited when Napoleon came home.’
At twenty-four, Kaiser was approaching his peak. He’d been recommended to Ajaccio by his friend Fabinho, who had joined the club a year earlier. And though Kaiser had been struggling with a succession of niggling injuries for a couple of years, an explosive video of his goals suggested he was well worth the gamble – especially for a mid-table Ligue 2 side. In their seventy-seven-year history, Ajaccio had never signed a player of this stature.
Kaiser decided that, as everyone had made such an effort to greet him, he should put on a bit of a show.
‘Fabinho, get me a bunch of flowers,’ he said.
‘Kaiser, this is a football stadium in the middle of nowhere. Where am I going to get flowers?’
‘I’ve been here five minutes and you’re asking me where to get flowers? Use your initiative.’
Fabinho tutted and set off on his errand. When he returned ten minutes later with a handful of roses, procured from the secretary’s office, Kaiser took them and ran towards the touchline. He jumped over the advertising boards, clambered up the cheap seats and ostentatiously presented the flowers to the wife of the club president. Kaiser dispensed hugs and kisses to anyone in sight before returning to the field, where he grabbed a Corsican flag and used it as a cape. He had been told that Corsicans, like Basques in Spain, were fiercely independent.
Kaiser’s internal monologue celebrated a triumphant unveiling. The serious business – the actual football – was still to come. He noted that a surprising proportion of the crowd were female, and his mind started to wander. Kaiser had an image of Corsica in his head. He saw a bohemian, enlightened milieu, populated by brunettes in pastel-coloured, roll-neck jumpers, smoking pencil-thin cigarettes and teaching him about the Impressionists before seducing him behind sheer linen curtains that billowed in the breeze. He was starting to lose himself when, in his peripheral vision, he noticed a squat old man dragging out a bag of footballs. Kaiser, using Fabinho as a translator, asked what was happening. The answer distressed him. The owners wanted Kaiser to show off his exotic skills to the crowd.
Kaiser was interested in keeping up appearances, not doing keepy-uppies. He started moaning to nobody in particular, still speaking in Portuguese. ‘I flew in on a fucking sardine can and have hardly got any feeling in my legs. Can’t we do this tomorrow?’ As Kaiser harrumphed, a series of balls were lined up on the edge of the penalty area.
‘Fabinho,’ he said, ‘could you go and get my sunglasses? They’re in the Mizuno bag in the dressing room. Thanks, man.’
When Fabinho departed, Kaiser jogged towards the line of footballs and hoofed one into the crowd. ‘A souvenir,’ he explained in Portuguese, calculating that nobody else spoke the language. While everyone tried to work out what Kaiser was saying, he hammered ball after ball into the crowd.
‘I got a standing ovation,’ says Kaiser thirty years later. ‘It was intentional, so that I didn’t have to train. The kit guy kept one ball because he said there was going to be a training session. I grabbed that off him and belted it into the crowd as well. The fans all left with their souvenirs and there were no balls left.’
With none of the supporters wanting to give back their expensive souvenir, the management team decided to call it a day. Kaiser raised both hands above his head and clenched his fists triumphantly before walking towards the dressing room, his work done. He hadn’t been in the mood to play football. What he knew, and what nobody at Ajaccio could ever know, was that their star signing was never in the mood to play football.
CHAPTER 2
THE ALTER EGO
Carlos Kaiser was born at the age of ten. Until then he was a chubby, football-mad kid called Carlos Henrique Raposo, who came into the world kicking and scheming on 2 July 1963. ‘Carlos Henrique is a man,’ he says. ‘Carlos Kaiser is a character. I created that alter ego when I went to play for Botafogo. I promised myself I was going to be somebody. I wanted to show that a kid who came from a tough upbringing could be respected by society.’
A tough upbringing, and a bizarre one. Kaiser w
as born in Porto Alegre, in the south of Brazil, and was barely a week old when he was adopted – though that’s a generous term for what actually happened. His biological mother asked a stranger to look after her baby for five minutes while she dealt with an emergency. She never returned. The stranger, desperate for a child of her own, was in Porto Alegre visiting family. They suggested it was a sign from above and that, rather than go to the police, she should keep the child. A few days later she made the 1600km journey home to Rio de Janeiro with her newfound baby.
As he grew up Kaiser wondered why he was white, like his father, when his mum was black. His parents eventually explained his backstory. He later heard from some of his extended family that his biological father was a famous politician who had an affair with a maid, and that he was discarded so that their relationship remained a secret. Another version is that Kaiser was stolen from his biological mother in Porto Alegre. With Kaiser, there are usually a few sides to every story.
Kaiser didn’t care too much about the past. He had enough on his plate sorting out the future. His childhood was a gradual realisation of the desperate need to escape poverty by any means possible. In 1970s Brazil that was especially tricky – according to different studies, somewhere between 40 and 70 per cent of the population were classified as living in poverty. There wasn’t a gap between rich and poor; it was more of a chasm.
The unique landscape of Rio offered a visual demonstration of that inequality. The backdrop to luxury beachside residences was provided by a giant, sloping maze of poverty. Favelas, the overpopulated shanty towns later introduced to the world in the film City of God, expanded enormously in the 1970s in response to a rural exodus across the country.
Although Kaiser did not live in a favela, his lifestyle was essentially that of a favelado. He grew up on Mena Barreto Street in an area called Cabeça de Porco (‘Pig’s Head’) that was located between two favelas.
‘It was a really poor neighbourhood,’ says Kaiser. ‘Rundown houses, surrounded by favelas. Violence everywhere. There were a lot of black people in my family who wouldn’t back away from a fight. I learned Muay Thai [Thai boxing], so I could hold my own. You become used to living with that kind of violence, with that struggle for survival. I was always involved with the mischievous kids in a good and bad sense.’
The young Kaiser had simple hobbies. He played marbles, flew kites, dodged traffic to win bets and, for his Sunday afternoon treat, sneaked into the cinema without paying. Most of all, he played football. The matches were umpteen-a-side, played on any space the kids could find: long, grassless patches of earth, steep hills, unpaved streets. The fact the matches were such chaotic free-for-alls forced players to develop fast feet and even faster brains to find and exploit any space. It’s no wonder Brazilian players made football look so easy when they had the luxury of playing eleven-a-side games on grass. ‘Brazil is an inexhaustible factory of amazing talent,’ said Carlos Alberto Torres, the captain of the 1970 World Cup winners. ‘It used to be the case even more. We would be churning out players every day.’
Only a few of the local boys owned a football, so much of the time there was a need to improvise. Anything vaguely spherical could be used as a ball, from rolled-up socks to mouldy fruit. Most of the kids played barefoot and topless, as if to advertise the naked talent on display. The most difficult opponents were often the rocks and potholes that caused nasty injuries, and blisters and glass splinters were an inevitable hazard. Kaiser played every day until his feet stung with pleasure.
***
It was compulsory for a Brazilian child to be obsessed with football. They were the undisputed kings of the game, having won three out of four World Cups between 1958 and 1970. Those victories redefined the country – helping it shed what the playwright, journalist and novelist Nelson Rodrigues called the ‘mongrel-dog complex’ – and also the sport. Brazilian football is the cover version that surpassed the original, a pulsing samba remix of a game invented in Britain.
Football became a vital part of Brazil’s national identity, even more so when a military dictatorship ruled the country from 1964 to 1985. In that time, the 1970 team won the World Cup in Mexico with a style of football that looks contemporary almost fifty years later. They played the game with industrial quantities of ginga: an indefinable and almost mystical quality of movement and attitude possessed by Brazilians. It’s in the way they walk, talk, dance and, yes, play football.
‘Brazilian football is like an art form,’ says Bebeto, the waspish forward who starred in Brazil’s World Cup win in 1994. ‘It’s technically brilliant. The creativity and skill of Brazilian players is indisputable. Everybody plays with joy and love.’ A bit of lust, too. At its best the Brazilian game is a euphoric fusion of sport, dance, art and sex. And everyone’s at it.
The lack of expensive equipment made it the most democratic of games, and one of the few areas of Brazilian life in which everyone was equal. Football in Brazil may have started as an upper-class sport but it was soon claimed by the masses. It became a kind of natural lottery – if you were born with talent, you could escape the favela or wherever you grew up. That dream sustained millions of children around the country, and Kaiser was no exception.
His escape began during a kickabout one Sunday in December 1973. ‘There were two men watching the game,’ he remembers, ‘and they asked my dad who the kid with big hair was. He said, “That’s my son.” They were scouts from Botafogo and told him to bring me to the training ground at 7 a.m. the following day for a trial. I didn’t even have boots. They gave me boots that were too big.’
He would never again be too small for his boots. The trial with Botafogo helped spawn an alter ego with an excess of arrogance and swagger. The name of this new character was inspired by Franz Beckenbauer, the elegant West German sweeper who seemed to play international football with a resting heart rate. His imperious demeanour was such that he was known as Der Kaiser. He had been a star of the 1966 and 1970 World Cups and, though they were not televised in Brazil, young football fans had seen Beckenbauer in the greatest theatre of all: the imagination.
‘The kids in the kickabout compared me to Beckenbauer,’ says Kaiser. ‘Being ignorant, they couldn’t pronounce his name but they found out his nickname was Kaiser. They, not me, thought the way I played resembled him. Kaiser, the king of German football. The Pelé of German football. I didn’t give myself the Kaiser mantle. But I’m proud. Who wouldn’t be when compared to Beckenbauer? I never heard of anybody else in football called Kaiser.’
The nickname gave Kaiser instant respect. A black and white-striped shirt gave him even more. It was the official property of Botafogo FR, who had provided the core of the Brazil teams that won those World Cups in 1958 and 1962. Five Botafogo players started the 3-1 win over Czechoslovakia in the 1962 final: Garrincha, Didi, Nilton Santos, Amarildo and Mario Zagallo.
Botafogo are the smallest of Rio’s big four – Flamengo, Fluminense and Vasco da Gama are the others – but their part in Brazil’s emergence as a football nation gave them a prestige that will never fade. And they were the club of Garrincha, the tragic genius of world football. If Garrincha was a right-winger, then the club are also associated with left-wingers. They are the most romantic club in Rio, beloved of many artists and intellectuals.
Kaiser, like his father, was already a fan of the club, not least because his uncle had played for Botafogo alongside Garrincha and Nilton Santos. His hero was Jairzinho, the muscular forward who scored in every round of the 1970 World Cup.
Kaiser impressed during his trial at Botafogo and was asked to stay at the club on an informal basis. Within a week he had gone from the street to the holy ground: the iconic Maracanã Stadium. Kaiser played in the prestigious Father Christmas game, a junior’s match that was part of a citywide festive celebration that included floats, fireworks and a circus. Botafogo beat Flamengo, with Kaiser scoring the winning goal from the penalty spot. The game was watched by over 200,000 people.
A couple
of weeks later, Kaiser could not believe his luck when he saw Jairzinho at the Botafogo training ground. He spent a couple of minutes chatting to him and boasted about it at school, as any excitable fanboy would. The response was not what he expected.
‘Kaiser, man, shouting at him from a hundred yards away doesn’t count as a conversation!’
Kaiser discreetly ground his teeth into his bottom lip. On the way home from school he stole a camera from a local shop and put it in his Botafogo kitbag. When he next saw Jairzinho, Kaiser asked if he could get a picture of them together. When the camera film was eventually developed, Kaiser put the picture in the pocket of his school trousers and strutted into school as he had never strutted before.
‘Lads, I had another chat with Jairzinho last week. He even said I was a natural goalscorer.’
‘Kaiser! Give it up, man. Was Pelé there as well? Have you been out flying kites with Tostão? Or playing marbles with Clodoaldo?’
Kaiser produced the photo of him with his arm round one of Brazil’s greatest footballers. The reaction of his classmates was somewhere between shock and awe. Over the next few weeks, Kaiser noticed how his association with Jairzinho had improved his status with both the boys and the girls at school. He had been popular enough before but now everyone wanted to talk to him about life at Botafogo. Of all the lessons he learned at school, this would be the most important.
CHAPTER 3
THE MALANDRO
Kaiser’s story could only have happened in one place. He is an extreme personification of the roguish charm of one of the most vibrant, vivid places on earth. Rio de Janeiro is a unique microclimate of mischief, passion and optimism; a sensory overload of noise and colour that is powered by the highest voltage of social electricity.
That’s the bit that’s in the brochure, anyway. Rio is a city of two faces. There are severe levels of poverty, violence, misogyny and corruption, much of it in the favelas. But while they may not be out of sight, they are generally out of mind for those who consider themselves the social elite.