by Rob Smyth
There were three formal contenders for the crown. Romário represented Flamengo; Renato Gaúcho was with Fluminense; and Túlio Maravilha was at Botafogo. The season was a memorable mix of brilliance on the field and largely playful trash talk off it. It was elite football with all the pantomime drama of WWE.
The 1990s was a new era in Brazilian domestic football, especially in Rio. The quiet achievement of players like Zico and Júnior, the stars of Flamengo’s 1980s team, was exchanged for the kind of brazen showmanship pioneered by Renato Gaúcho.
The playful nature of the rivalry was typical of Rio; even in purely football terms, it often felt like a separate country rather than a separate state. ‘I have the impression that in the south – where Dunga is from, for example – the culture is very different,’ says the journalist Martha Esteves. ‘It’s a lot harder and more serious. The players are bigger. In Rio it’s lighter, faster and more dynamic.’
Romário and Edmundo represented a new type of Brazilian star: the bad boy. ‘Every team had somebody who would provoke the opposition,’ says Esteves. ‘It wasn’t necessarily a movement of bad boys: they were just individually cunts. They were rebels with no cause. They were people who came from poor backgrounds and weren’t psychologically or socially prepared to deal with fame. They did what they wanted. I think it was around then that the players started seeing the press as the enemy, especially if they did something off the pitch and the press published it.’
Esteves first interviewed Romário when he was nineteen and had just been promoted to Vasco’s first team. ‘He’d just left the favela,’ she says. ‘He was shy and didn’t know how to deal with the press. He was engaged to Monica, who was fifteen then. At that time he was very approachable. I liked him, he was a nice guy. I think the big change was when he had a crisis in his marriage and started turning into a different person, and also when he became a really big player. That’s when he started to put on the bad-boy attitude.’
There is footage of Romário, shot by a Dutch TV station when he was a PSV Eindhoven player, idly fiddling with a handgun on Copacabana Beach. The whole thing was staged, but it’s not hard to imagine how such images would be received in the modern world.
Romário and Edmundo were great friends, and their image was so strong that they even recorded a funk/rap song called ‘Bad Boys’. They both had a rap sheet, too, with a long list of misdemeanours from the sporting to the criminal. Edmundo’s included feeding beer to a chimp at his son’s birthday party; smashing a TV camera during a game in Ecuador and locking himself in a hotel room for three days to avoid being nicked; a 120-day ban for slapping a referee; having it written into his contract at the Italian club Fiorentina that he could go to nightclubs. And a fatal car crash in 1995, when three people were killed. Edmundo was eventually convicted of manslaughter but only spent one night in jail before being released pending appeal. The appeals dragged on until 2007, when the statute of limitations expired.
Romário’s list includes beating up a Fluminense fan who threw chickens at the team during a training session; urinating on pedestrians from a hotel window, for which he was dropped from the Brazil youth team; and even threatening to pull out of USA 94 if he didn’t get a window seat on the flight over.
Edmundo and Romário had a thundering fallout in 2000, when both were playing for Vasco. The speculation as to why it happened ranges from a row over who should be club captain to an alleged threesome gone wrong.
Renato Gaúcho and Túlio did not quite fit the bad-boy profile. They craved publicity but achieved it in different ways – by appearing in soap operas as more extreme versions of themselves, on TV shows as more extreme versions of themselves, or on the football field as more extreme versions of themselves. Túlio also posed naked for G, a Brazilian gay magazine, a bold thing to do in the most macho area of an already homophobic culture.
‘Túlio was brilliant with the media,’ says Martha Esteves. ‘He wasn’t a womaniser, he just had a big mouth. He was a mediocre footballer, but he scored a load of goals. He created this incredible character of himself, and he embodied that character so much that he still doesn’t know who Túlio is. He speaks about himself in the third person.’
When Túlio was involved in a very public love triangle involving his wife and a prostitute, Esteves started to publish a Túlio soap opera in the magazine Placar. ‘He even got involved!’ she laughs. ‘He liked it. Nowadays I’d never dream of doing that. I’d get sued. I’d be harassed or threatened. You’ll never get a player like Túlio nowadays. They just say something boring.’
Túlio was a goal machine (even if his claim to have scored over 1,000 goals in his career might be stretching it) and in 1995 he top-scored in both the Brazilian league and the Campeonato Carioca. His character made him perfect for such a rivalry.
‘There’s another funny story about Túlio,’ says Esteves. ‘When he retired he went to Sport TV, Globo’s channel, where they invited him to be a pundit. Then he went to present a show, and before going live he showed a picture of himself naked with a boner to his fellow presenter. It’s because he did a naked thing for a gay magazine back in the day, so he wanted to show her he was still on form. After that, Globo didn’t show him on anything.’
***
When he heard that Valtinho and Romário, senior players at America and Flamengo respectively, were due to meet Marcello Alencar, the governor of Rio, Kaiser decided he could be of use. In those days, wages were partly linked to ticket sales and some imperfect accounting meant the players were being short-changed. Valtinho and Romário arrived to find Kaiser waiting for them, rambling on about what an important cause it was to him and how he wanted to be part of discussions. He was even wearing a suit, which he had borrowed from his next-door neighbour.
When Valtinho and Romário reached the governor’s office they told Kaiser he had to wait outside. He faked outrage but didn’t mind one bit. There were no paparazzi inside the building. The next day, Jornal dos Sports published a photo of Valtinho, Romário and Kaiser taken outside the hotel; just three wealthy footballers fighting the cause for their less fortunate colleagues.
Kaiser had the picture of himself, Valtinho and Romário laminated and carried it around in his wallet. A few months later, he was at a salad bar in Leblon. ‘I vividly remember where we were,’ says Valtinho, ‘because he was in a phase of eating only salad for his weird bodybuilding diet.’ Valtinho was talking when Kaiser suddenly got up and walked off. Valtinho turned around to see him chatting to a woman.
‘Who is the best looking of us three?’
‘Hang on, isn’t that Romário? What are you doing in a picture with Romário?’
‘Well …’
Valtinho shakes his head as he tells the story. ‘It was another girl he managed to charm with his peculiar methods. I think he still has that photo.’
It’s not the only thing he has kept. Kaiser has a collection of photographs, videos, newspaper articles, even little team sheet boxes that include the name Henrique. You never know when you might need to do a bit of marketing.
***
Fluminense struggled at the start of the 1995 Campeonato Carioca, and many thought Renato Gaúcho was finished: he was thirty-two years old, struggling with injury and had just had a poor spell at Atlético Mineiro. ‘Botafogo and Flamengo were doing really well,’ says Renato. ‘Túlio and Romário were scoring loads and everyone was asking: “Who will be the King of Rio?” And even though we were nine points behind, I said, “I’ll be the King of Rio. Fluminense will go all the way.” Everyone said I was crazy.’
Túlio’s Botafogo finished third, behind Flamengo and Fluminense, although they had the considerable consolation of becoming champions of Brazil. At the time, though, it was probably more prestigious to be champion of Rio than of Brazil, and the last match of the Campeonato Carioca, played in front of a crowd of 109,000, was a classic that went straight into folklore.
The league table was such that Fluminense needed to beat Flamengo, who
in turn only needed a draw. It was also Fla–Flu, the most celebrated derby in Rio football; the aristocrats against the team of the people.
Renato and Leonardo put Fluminense 2-0 up at half-time. Then Romário and Fabinho – not to be confused with Kaiser’s former Ajaccio colleague – made it 2-2. With three minutes to go, Ailton dribbled into the area and hit a shot towards goal that deflected in off Renato’s chest. It went down in legend as Renato’s ‘belly goal’. Some still say it was Ailton’s goal, or that Renato scored with his hand, though replays suggest he instinctively twisted his body to chest it over the line.
The semantic argument didn’t change the fact that Renato’s Fluminense were the champions of Rio, and it certainly didn’t stop him letting everyone know who the King of Rio was. He still does so more than twenty years later. ‘I didn’t score in many games against the smaller teams,’ says Renato, ‘but in all the big games at the Maracanã, mainly against Flamengo, I scored. When it comes to the big games, the big players turn up.’
Renato went to bed at 7 a.m. the next day, after a hard night’s coronation, and was soon woken for a photoshoot in which the press encouraged him to dress up in full costume with a sceptre and crown. He looked utterly, brilliantly ridiculous. ‘My only regret,’ he says, ‘is that I didn’t get Kaiser to do the photos.’
There are some who think that would have been appropriate. ‘Romário and Renato were just squabbling while the real king of Rio was Kaiser,’ says Alexandre Torres. ‘They wanted to usurp the place of a guy that was impossible to dethrone.’
***
The fallout from Flamengo’s defeat included an inevitable change of coach. The artistic differences between Romário and the coach Vanderlei Luxemburgo became irreconcilable and Luxemburgo was sacked. His replacement, Edinho, lasted a couple of months. As speculation mounted over who would be next in line, the journalist Washington Rodrigues received a call from the Flamengo chairman Kleber Leite, who invited him round to discuss who should get the job. Rodrigues suggested Tele Santana. Leite disagreed, and pointed to an upturned plate, underneath which was the name of the man they wanted to manage Flamengo: Washington Rodrigues.
‘This is a joke,’ he said.
‘No. You’re a tough guy and it’s a really tricky situation.”
By the time Rodrigues agreed to take the job it was 5 a.m. and his wife was questioning his sanity, especially as his relationship with the team’s best player, Romário, was less than perfect. ‘I arrived there having fought with him but he was so kind and he was always trying to help. The same with Edmundo. He turns into an animal on the pitch but off the field he’s so nice. I thought the world of both of them. I wasn’t too bad as a coach. I’m the only Flamengo coach not to be fired, that’s on my CV. But those two played a huge part.’
***
When Kaiser’s friend and former Ajaccio team-mate Alexandre Couto joined America de Três Rios, a lower-league club, Kaiser went with him. He even put his boots on, and was doing his usual skit of avoiding the ball during training when Alexandre decided to play a prank. Alexandre pointed to the far side of the field and smashed a disguised pass in the other direction, straight to the feet of Kaiser. As the America de Três Rios captain came to close Kaiser down, Alexandre and others shouted, ‘Man on!’ Kaiser, flustered by the hot potato at his feet, panicked and flicked it up in the air. As he did so the captain slid in, missed the ball completely and ended up face down in the dirt. It looked as if Kaiser had duped him with a sublime piece of skill.
In reality it was the football equivalent of a stopped clock telling the right time at least twice a day. It was all too emotional for Kaiser, who immediately fell over screaming that he had injured his leg. ‘He flicked it over the guy through complete fluke,’ laughs Alexandre Couto. ‘The guy almost snapped him in half. Then he tried to hunt Kaiser down because everybody was taking the piss out of him.’
When he returned from injury, Kaiser decided to get involved with some physical training. The kit man, prompted by Alexandre, gave Kaiser shorts that were a size large – except unbeknownst to Kaiser they were a kid’s size large. Kaiser complained but was told they were the only shorts they had.
‘Those shorts were like Lycra,’ says Alexandre. ‘Everybody was laughing at him, saying, “What’s that, mate? Are you going to do some ballet?” It was a complete mess.’
Kaiser squeaked and moaned his way round a couple of laps of the pitch before he heard a rip and took himself for an early bath. He didn’t return the next day.
***
Even though Kaiser was thirty-three, approaching retirement age for many footballers, his media profile continued to grow. In another newspaper feature, it was reported that Kaiser was considering offers from Olympiacos and Panathinaikos in Greece. It also gave a tantalising glimpse of a new, bohemian side. The article was accompanied by a picture of Kaiser with his head forward, a look of solemn profundity on his face, and two crystal earrings in his hand.
‘Carlos Kaizer [sic] distances himself from the footballer stereotype. He doesn’t use slang or soundbites and he is articulate about many issues other than football. Esoteric, Kaizer believes in the power of crystals and even his look is influenced by this philosophy. He has an earring in both ears (“to draw energy”) and long hair: “I wear my hair long so people can’t touch my head. It’s one of the vital parts of our body and not everybody should be able to touch it. To prevent this from happening, I tell people that I don’t want my hair messed up.”’
The highlight of the 1997 Campeonato Carioca final between Botafogo and Vasco da Gama was not a goal, a red card; not even a corner. It occurred when a loose ball drifted out to the right wing. Edmundo kept it in play and then, as the Botafogo defender Gonçalves came towards him, demonstratively leaned forward and placed both hands on his thighs. Gonçalves, knowing Edmundo’s maverick nature, stepped cautiously towards the ball, like a bomb-disposal expert approaching a suspect package. As he did so, Edmundo, still with his hands on his thighs, started wiggling his backside from side to side. Then he exploded away from Gonçalves before being tackled by another Botafogo player. Edmundo’s showboating almost led to a punch-up on the field. It became known as the ‘danca da bundinha’ – or, as Gonçalves puts it in pidgin English twenty years later, the ‘shake-yo-ass dance’.
It’s not hard to guess what happened next. Botafogo won the Campeonato Carioca after a 1-0 victory in the second leg a few days later, and Gonçalves celebrated by doing the Edmundo dance in front of the opposing Vasco fans. It was a night for memorable celebrations. The goalscorer Dimba got down on all fours and started eating the Maracanã grass.
Edmundo was in the headlines again during that summer’s Copa América in Bolivia, most notably when he chinned a Bolivian defender. His career never quite took off – at international level he had to compete with Ronaldo, Romário, Bebeto and others, and a spell at Fiorentina turned sour when, with the club fighting to win Serie A for the first time in thirty years, he went AWOL so that he could visit Rio carnival.
‘I think Edmundo missed the chance to become one of the best players in the world,’ says Washington Rodrigues. ‘He has exceptional dedication. He transformed into a beast when he played football. But he didn’t manage to moderate that so there was a lot of friction and he ended up having bust-ups with loads of people. He was very short-tempered with the press and even with his own directors. When I managed him I got to know his story really well. I found out that he blames life. He blames his childhood when he had to sleep on the floor of a grandpa’s barber shop. He blames being abandoned. He blames people for not valuing him when he was younger. So he has a kind of chip on his shoulder where he wants to show himself to be something he’s not. And because of all that he missed out on signing big contracts and playing for Barcelona or Real Madrid.’
It would be reasonable to suggest Edmundo divides opinion. ‘He was totally out of his mind,’ says the journalist Renato Maurício Prado. ‘He still is. I love not being at F
ox since they hired him. Don’t even think about working with him. Edmundo’s a nutcase, who’s now posing as a pundit. But in football terms he was a great player, without a doubt.’
***
Renato Mendes Mota was keen to catch up with Kaiser. He had barely seen his old friend since moving to Manaus to become a lawyer but made sure to meet up every time he was back in Rio. This time they planned to meet for dinner at a Japanese restaurant in Alto Tijuca. Mota was tight for time and called Kaiser to see if he could squash two catch-ups into one.
‘Kaiser, do you mind if we have dinner with my friend Carlinhos as well tomorrow? I really want to see him and I need to fly back straight after.’
‘Carlinhos? Is he the one who looks like Valdir Espinosa?’
‘The Botafogo coach Valdir Espinosa?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I hadn’t thought about it but I suppose he does now you mention it.’
‘Great, bring him along. I’ve got a plan.’
Kaiser arrived the following day along with a girl he was keen to impress. Renato Mota was to be his cousin, a lawyer who was overseeing a potential transfer. Mota’s friend, who had the look of somebody in authority, was an agent who had been flown over to discuss a possible move to Germany or Japan.
Kaiser could not have played his role better if he believed it was all true.
‘So how many millions of dollars are they talking about?’
‘Japan are offering more: around $400,000 a season. Bayern Munich are offering less but you have to decide which is best.’