by Alex Bellos
As the crowds left the Maracanã only one act of violence was recorded: the granite bust of mayor ngelo Mendes de Moraes – he who 'saluted the victors' – was knocked over.
Why had Brazil lost? Was it the bump on Augusto's head, the slap on Bigode, the politicians at the São Januário, the excessive confidence or the unbearable pressure of having victory pre-announced? Unable to admit that maybe Uruguay were a better team, or brush off the defeat as a freak result, the idea emerged that it was somehow deserved – that the Brazilians were naturally a defeated people. A victory would have vindicated Brazil's national optimism and euphoria. The defeat reinforced a sense of inferiority and shame.
The writer José Lins do Rego was one of the first to crystallise this view, writing in Monday's Jornal dos Sports: 'I saw people leave the Maracanã with their heads hung low, tears in their eyes, speechless, as if they were returning from the funeral of a loved father. I saw a nation defeated – more than that – one without hope. That hurt my heart. All the vibrancy of the first minutes reduced to the ashes of an extinguished fire. And suddenly a greater disappointment, it stuck in my head that we really were a luckless people, a nation deprived of the great joys of victory, always pursued by bad luck, by the meanness of destiny.'
Eight years later Nelson Rodrigues coined the phrase 'stray dog complex' – meaning 'the inferiority with which the Brazilian positions himself, voluntarily, in front of the rest of the world . . . We lost in the most abject fashion for a simple reason: because Obdulio kicked us around as if we were stray dogs.' His phrase is endlessly resuscitated during any national sporting calamity. Brazil's downfall is its lack of moral fibre. The opposition is irrelevant. Brazil is always playing against itself, against its own demons, against the ghosts of the Maracanã. The Fateful Final is a metaphor for all Brazilian defeats.
There was a racist element to recriminations. All three scapegoats – Barbosa, Bigode and the left back, Juvenal, were black – reigniting theories that Brazil's racial mixture was the cause of a national lack of character. Barbosa suffered most. Journalists voted him best goalkeeper of the 1950 World Cup, yet he only played once more for the national team. More than anyone else, Barbosa became the personification of the national tragedy. His shadow still hangs over Brazilian keepers: when Dida played in the 1999 Copa America journalists remarked that he was Brazil's first black first-choice keeper in fifty years.
Barbosa was never allowed to forget 1950. Before he died, virtually penniless, in April 2000 he said that the saddest moment in his life was twenty years after the match. A woman in a shop spotted him. 'Look at him,' she told her son. 'He is the man that made all of Brazil cry.'
To many Barbosa was the victim of the largest injustice in football history. Colleagues shunned him. When, in 1993, he went to visit the Brazil squad's training camp he wasn't allowed in for fear he would bring them bad luck: 'Under Brazilian law the maximum sentence is thirty years,' he always said. 'But my imprisonment has been for fifty.'
In 1963 Barbosa invited friends to a barbecue at his home in north Rio. Only once the guests had arrived did they realise why. The fire was flaming unusually high and was hissing from burning paint. Barbosa wasn't using normal wood. He was burning the Maracanã's posts, reducing to ashes the object that branded his life. Barbosa describes the bonfire as a 'liturgy of purification'. He was delirious: 'That well-seasoned steak with onion and vinegar sauce that I ate could symbolise Ghiggia's leg pumping with the camphor of the game.' If anything is pumping with camphor it is Barbosa's imagination. Rather than revealing football's first instance of cannibalism, however, the succulent literary morsel shows that there is an endless appetite for Fateful Tales.
Brazil's pain is now interpreted as an inevitable rite of passage. Flavio Costa, the coach, said that Brazil was not psychologically prepared for defeats, because it was a young country with no experience of national tragedies. Since it became a republic in 1889, Brazil had not – barring a few localised skirmishes – been at war with any of its neighbours. It still hasn't. The country has been through political uprisings and passed in and out of dictatorships, but it has very few nationally remembered moments. 'Of all the historical examples of national crises, the World Cup of 1950 is the most beautiful and most glorified. It is a Waterloo of the tropics and its history our Götterdämmerung,' writes Paulo Perdigão. 'The defeat transformed a normal fact into an exceptional narrative: it is a fabulous myth that has been preserved and even grown in the public imagination.'
Britain marks out the twentieth century in blocks divided by the World Wars of 1914-18 and 1939-45. Brazil meters out its recent history in World Cups, since it is during World Cups that Brazil feels most like a nation. Brazil is unique in having participated every time, so it is possible to trace the state of the nation in four-year jumps.
Because 1950 was the start of the unbroken run of World Cups, it is regarded as the beginning of the modern international footballing era. The date, being a round number, is a coherent reference point. It means that no matter how well the national team does, its contemporary history will always begin with the Defeat – just as no amount of Brazilian victories in the Maracanã can mask that it started life as the stage of national humiliation.
Perhaps the greatest irony is that the victorious Uruguayans – who have not won a World Cup since – do not remember the game with quite such importance. A few days before 16 July 2000 I visited the Maracanã. I asked a Uruguayan tour guide, Juan José Olivera, how his compatriots felt about Brazil's obsession with the defeat. 'Young Uruguayans don't really care about the past,' he said. 'They don't talk about the 1950 World Cup. It happened too long ago.'
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The crowd at the Maracanã must have contained thousands of young children since it is easy in Rio to find witnesses of the event. João Luiz de Albuquerque was eleven years old in 1950. He remembers sitting behind the Fateful Posts. 'Both goals were scored in my face,' he says, almost outraged that a child could have been present at moments of such self-evident horror.
João Luiz is a journalist, broadcaster and Colourful Local Figure. He lives in a spacious apartment where Ipanema meets Copacabana. It is cluttered with kitsch objets d'art. A neon bar sign lights a wall and large green sofas are smothered in cushions. Bossa nova lightly fills the room.
'For me the 1950 defeat was a tragedy,' he asserts. 'I thought that I was the only person to have experienced it. I carried the load for many years. It was partly a childish shame – everyone had said something would happen and it didn't happen, and nobody explained why. It was only years later that I discovered there were other people in the stadium who felt the same as me.'
João Luiz has floppy white hair and speaks in smoothly diverging sentences. He puts his whisky down and puts his palms 10cm apart. 'The tragedy was this size. But everyone had a tragedy this size.' He stretches his arms as far apart as they can go. 'It ended up this size.
'I think the defeat took on such big proportions because it is natural to orchestrate reality – you suffer less if you are squashed by something huge. It marks you less. I exaggerated my feelings because there was no bigger tragedy. Even now there are only two dates in the year I remember – my birthday and July 16.'
In the 1970 World Cup in Mexico, Brazil faced Uruguay in the semi-finals. It was the first time the teams had faced each other in the competition since 1950. João Luiz, an inveterate prankster, called up the Uruguayan Embassy in Brasilia. Posing as a sports reporter, he asked for a number where he could reach the ambassador once the result was known. As soon as the final whistle blew on a 3-1 Brazilian victory João Luiz phoned the ambassador and shouted obscenities down the line. 'I needed to shout the goal that I never shouted in 1950,' he admits, almost cringing with embarrassment.
'I am ashamed of that now. It didn't do anything. It was irresponsible. It did nothing to cure the trauma. It was a fan's reaction, not an intellectual attitude.'
João Luiz subsequently discovered a much cleverer way of laying t
o rest the ghosts of 1950. He changed the course of history. It started when he was re-watching Casablanca. He never liked the film's sad ending, in which Ingrid Bergman gets on a plane leaving Humphrey Bogart behind. So he reedited it on video, shuffling scenes so that Bogie keeps the girl. The plane still flew, but Bergman returns to the airport. (News of the edit made the pages of Variety.)
To make the experience as authentic as possible, however, João Luiz felt he needed a Pathe-style newsreel before the main feature. What event in history did he most want to change?
João Luiz plays me his footage of Brazil winning the 1950 World Cup. Ghiggia runs and kicks the ball. But when it passes the post the film spools backwards – making it look like the ball is rebounding off the woodwork. 'Shoots! The post!' says a recognisable voice – Luiz Mendes, who in good humour re-recorded the commentary with a happy ending. The next shot is of Bigode clearing the ball, taken from another match.
'Then I needed to revenge Uruguay, who had caused me so much hurt,' adds João Luiz.
Against Yugoslavia Zizinho had scored a goal with no Yugoslavian in the frame. This became the goal of Brazil's World Cup victory – confirmed by images of the O Mundo front page: 'These are the world champions.'
The cleverest moment of João Luiz's inspired montage is the sequence that portrays the Uruguayan team losing. He did not need to search the archives very far for distraught faces. The Uruguayans had burst into tears when they won the World Cup. João Luiz used the same shots to demonstrate the opposite. With a different commentary the tears of joy are utterly convincing as ululations of defeat. The effect accentuates the feeling that the Uruguayans had won by mistake, their tears emphasising the shock, guilt and their own trauma of the hurt they had caused.
Brazil's celebrations culminate with shots of the Rio carnival and a ticker-tape parade in New York. For scenes of national despair in Montevideo he used shots of Eva Peron's funeral in Buenos Aires. 'In my mind Uruguayans and Argentinians are the same – men with big moustaches in overcoats,' says the revisionist editor. The film, perhaps unintentionally, achieves more than a few visual gags. It is a witty and at times moving commentary on the Brazilian obsession with 1950. For its director it had another effect, achieving closure on a childhood trauma. 'The film was six months' worth of psychoanalysis that I never did, that would have taken me ten years, cost a fortune and I would have discovered I hate my mother.'
Another artistic coming to terms with 1950 is 'The Day In Which Brazil Lost The Cup', a short story by Paulo Perdigão. In it the narrator goes back in time to try to change the result. He finds himself behind Barbosa's goal during the second half. When the Fateful Goal approaches he shouts to the goalkeeper. The plan backfires. Barbosa is momentarily distracted and Ghiggia scores. Failing to erase the bad memory, the narrator instead becomes its cause. The story was turned into an award-winning short film, which is a minor classic of Brazilian cinema.
Thomaz Soares da Silva, a.k.a. Master Ziza, a.k.a. Zizinho, has been described as the best Brazilian player never to have won a World Cup. He is an important figure in the history of Brazilian football, providing a link between the generation of Leônidas, whom he played with at Flamengo during the early 1940s, and Pelé, whom he played against in the late 1950s. Pelé frequently says that Zizinho was the greatest player he ever saw. Were it not for 1950 maybe both men would be remembered equally. Instead Zizinho is marked by the defeat, whereas Pelé is a symbol of the era of World Cup victories that started in 1958.
Zizinho remembers that he hardly slept in the days following the final. He had been given a two-week holiday by his club, Bangu. 'On the fourth day I called them up and said "I'm coming to train". I couldn't bear staying at home any more. So I went to train. I started playing again and I got over it.'
Zizinho is seventy-nine years old, bright-eyed and streetwise. He grins constantly and speaks a musical Portuguese full of malandro colloquialisms. We are talking in his small apartment one block from the beach in Niteroi, across the bay from Rio de Janeiro. I ask him how his contemporaries coped.
'Barbosa died because of it,' he snaps immediately.
'I went on a football roundtable programme and said-"you killed him.'"
The press killed him?
'Yes. I say you're to blame. At the end of the game I left the stadium on foot, no one bothered me, people who saw me said only "Man, it didn't work out". But by Tuesday the press were speaking out, giving reasons why we lost.
'They were on top of Barbosa. Always. Not just him, Bigode too. Bigode didn't leave his house. Bigode only went to two places, to my house or to Ademir's house. I would call him up and invite him to a party at my place and promise that no one would talk about football. I said if anyone touched the subject I would chuck them out.
'Bigode left Rio. He went to Minas [Gerais]. He left Minas too because they were pissing him off always going on about the World Cup. Now he's in Espírito Santo.
'Juvenal is in Bahia and never comes back.'
Zizinho said that his temperament helped him deal with the pressure. 'I was never blamed. If I had been I would have answered back. The others were more humble. I answer back to everyone.' He still does. Despite his age, Zizinho is provocative and outspoken. And funny. When Rosaní, his personal assistant, offers to fetch us some coffee, Zizinho winks at me cheekily, as if to say,'I may be almost eighty, but the ladies still love me!'
Every year in June Zizinho phones his friends and gives them a code. It is to be used to identify themselves when they call him up – to distinguish them from journalists. On 16 July he takes his phone off the hook. 'Otherwise it rings all day, from people all over Brazil, asking why we lost the World Cup.'
On the walls of his apartment are pictures of the football teams he played for and the most treasured mementoes of his career: a sash commemorating Flamengo's three consecutive state titles in 1942, 1943 and 1944 and São Paulo FC's victory in the 1957 São Paulo state championship. He has a poster-sized picture of the 1950 national team, autographed by the players.
It is not immediately obvious where he keeps his World Cup runners-up medal. We find it hidden in a corner of his trophy cabinet. It is the size of a stamp, dirty and black. 'I don't clean it,' he says. 'In Brazil being vice-champion is rubbish. It's better to lose before the final. Losing hurts too much. The only time it's worth being "vice" is vice-president because you get to be president if he dies.'
On reflection he changes his mind. 'In Brazil no one ever kills the president so it's not worth being vice even then.'
After he retired from football Zizinho was, for two decades, a revenue officer in Rio's state administration. His social circle is based around samba musicians rather than football. With an exception: the 1950 Uruguay national team. Their destinies were tied by the game and from that Fateful Friendships grew. 'I had more links with the Uruguayans than the Brazilians,' he admits.
He talks of a telepathic connection with Obdulio Varela. 'I was talking to Ademir once, saying I am thinking about that son-of-a-bitch, why don't we go and see him. Then Ademir went down [to Montevideo] and went to see him to tell him. Obdulio's wife said he was thinking a lot about me too.' Whenever Zizinho was in Uruguay he called the Uruguayan players and whenever they were in Rio they paid him a visit. In the 1970s, Obdulio organised a charity rematch of the 1950 final in Montevideo. Brazil lost by double the amount – 4-2. 'Obdulio told me that the stadium hadn't been so full in years.'
On his bookshelf I spot a virgin copy of Paulo Perdigão's Anatomy of a Defeat. I ask him if he has read it? 'No.' He laughs. 'I don't read sad things.
'What's the point? I played that game. I read the book before he even wrote it. I was on the pitch. Look, I'm sure it's a great book. Everyone loved it. But I don't want to feel bitter. So there are a bunch of things that happened that shouldn't have happened. I'm going to want to read about it?'
He continues: 'Do you want to know why we lost?'
He pulls out several sheets of paper on which he h
as drawn diagrams of football systems. 'Simply because we played WM.' He shows an aerial sketch of a pitch with the ten outfield players joined by a W and a M – the tactical positioning invented by Herbert Chapman at Arsenal in the 1920s.
'The last four games of the World Cup were the first time in my life I played WM. Spain played WM, Sweden played WM, Yugoslavia played WM. The three that played in WM we beat.
'But Uruguay didn't play WM. Uruguay played with one back deep and the other in front. It was a terrible system. But WM is worse.'
Zizinho says he recognised Uruguay's system because he had seen it used before by Carioca, a suburban team that his dad ran in São Gonçalo, near Niteroi. One sheet of paper shows this. It is marked up with the names of players from when he was six years old. Reducing the Fateful Final to the incompatibilities of two tactical systems is Zizinho's way of demystifying the event – or of avoiding answering more personal questions.
'I always knew Uruguay played this way, but I never checked it. Once I was in Uruguay. I called up Máspoli. I got him in my hotel room. I showed him. I asked him: "How did you play?"'
'He agreed with me and I made him sign the paper. I said. "What do you call that system?" He said it was so old no one remembers the name. "Es Viejo sistema,"' says Zizinho mimicking a thick Spanish accent. 'Their system was crazy but it wasn't as bad as WM. WM – it's a load of rubbish. That's why we lost the World Cup.'
Brazil played the 1950 World Cup in white shirts with blue collars. The colours were not immune from blame. They were deemed not sufficiently nationalistic. For Rio newspaper Correio da Manhã the white strip suffered from a 'psychological and moral lack of symbolism'. With the support of the Brazilian Sports Confederation, football's national body, the paper launched an open competition to devise a strip using all the colours of the Brazilian flag: blue, white, green and yellow. The national team would use the winner's design in the 1954 World Cup in Switzerland.