by Alex Bellos
He takes me through the Fateful Final. The night before, he remembers, several members of the Uruguayan delegation went home, assuming that the team had no chance. But Ghiggia believes that Uruguay deserved to win. 'The problem for us was the European teams. There was no TV in those days. We didn't know how to play against what we didn't know. But in South America, we knew all the teams. Brazil were not a surprise. A month before the World Cup we played them three times. We won once, 4-3, and lost the others 2-1 and 1-0. There wasn't much between us.'
A waiter brings us water and miniature glasses of coffee. Ghiggia takes me through the six seconds. He took the ball and ran down the right wing. Juvenal and Bigode had no chance of catching him. 'I was too fast,' he says. Barbosa, he adds, did not make a mistake in not covering his left post. 'He did the logical thing. I did the illogical . . . and I had a little luck. In football you need luck and you need to go after luck.'
He remembers the Maracanã going quiet. 'There really was a silence. It was a complete silence. You could only hear our shouts.' He knew that his goal had won the World Cup before the final whistle. He says that the goal destroyed Brazil's confidence. 'They could not have equalised. They did not react.'
I ask him if he felt bad for having made Brazil suffer. 'I felt a little guilt, but football is like that. In football you win or you lose. Guilt does not come into it. I had achieved what is the greatest dream of any professional footballer.'
After the World Cup Ghiggia moved to Italy. He played first at Roma and later won the Scudetto with Milan. He gained five caps for the Italian national side – and scored one goal, against Northern Ireland in Belfast, in a friendly that should have been a qualifier for the 1958 World Cup (the reason it wasn't was because the FIFA official, a Hungarian ref, did not arrive on time due to fog). He finished his playing career aged forty-two, in 1970, back in Uruguay.
The Uruguayan government made a few tributes to the Maracanã heroes. Ghiggia feels he should have received some financial help. Even the press, he complains, does not value the old champions. The only time he sees the other members of the team is on 16 July every year, when they meet up for a meal in Montevideo. 'We talk about our lives and families. We never talk about football.' Gradually the group number shrinks. Eight of the eleven are left.
Unlike Zizinho, whose home is decorated with football memorabilia, Ghiggia has given all his medals and trophies to his son. 'I don't keep anything. You can't live just from memories,' he says. 'In life you live for the moment. When it passes, you forget it.'
But he knows that, unlike Uruguay, Brazil has never forgotten him. In 2000 he was invited to Rio. At the airport's customs check he handed over his passport.
'The girl was twenty-three or twenty-four years old,' he says. 'She took my passport and stared at it.
'I asked: "Is there a problem?"
'She replied: "Are you the Ghiggia?"
'"That's me," I said, surprised. The girl was very young. "But 1950 was such a long time ago," I told her.
'She put her hand on her chest and told me: "In Brazil we feel it in our hearts every day."'
Ghiggia shrugs and says: 'You know, sometimes I feel like I am Brazil's ghost. I'm always there in their memories.
'In Uruguay we lived the moment. Now it's over.'
Zizinho died of a heart attack on February 7, 2002. He collapsed on the sofa speaking to his daughter, after having gone for a walk. A few months later, shortly before the 2002 World Cup, a book about the 1970 tournament was published in Brazil – the first I had ever seen. The launch, however, was overshadowed by a newer literary phenomenon – books about the 1982 World Cup, reinforcing the point that defeats, rather than victories, are better remembered.
Chapter Four
TRIBAL GATHERINGS
Football arrived in Brazil with Charles Miller and his two balls. Or so the official story goes. Well before the first kick-about, however, an Indian tribe was playing a game that consisted of football's most cerebral element. German explorer Max Schmidt was one of the first witnesses. Trudging through the rainforest, he came across a crowd of Pareci Indians playing with a ball made from the rubbery sap of the mangaba tree. Two teams were facing each other, bouncing the ball back and forth using only their heads. The game had 'no ceremonial meaning, being just of sporting character', he jotted in his notebook. In 1913 the swashbuckling former US president Theodore Roosevelt journeyed through the Amazon. It is said that he saw nothing on his entire trip that caused him such pleasure as the Pareci's game, which he christened 'headball'. News of the indigenous sport reached Rio de Janeiro, provoking great curiosity. One newspaper suggested it would be interesting to invite the Pareci to Rio: 'Interesting and original. Original, especially – which is already something.' Entering the vigorous debate about whether or not football was too European to be a positive influence in the tropics, 'headball' – if nothing else – was at least authentically Brazilian.
Sixteen Pareci eventually fulfilled journalists' wishes and travelled 1,200 miles from their village to play an exhibition match. The visit, in 1922, was treated like an important sporting event. Fluminense offered their stadium, Rio's largest, which only weeks before had hosted the South American football championship. The Indians slept in tents put up on the pitch. Press coverage fuelled an 'extraordinary interest' in the game, now given its indigenous name, zicunati.
The match took place on a Sunday afternoon for maximum attendance. It was staged with the pomp and ceremony of a football international. In front of a packed stadium the Pareci entered the pitch. Dressed in scout uniforms and with their hair brushed to the side, they looked more like Eton schoolboys than Stone Age savages. The absurd scene carried on when they sang, in their own language, their 'national anthem' – upon which the terraces hooted with laughter. After retiring to put on their football kit, they returned as two teams, eight in white tops and seven in blue. The sixteenth member, who had been feeling unwell when the party arrived in Rio, had since died.
The teams stood at either side of a central line. The Indians headed the ball between each other, gaining a point when the opposing side failed to head the ball back – rather like volleyball. Rallies lasted a surprisingly long time. The Pareci jumped, ran and dived, greatly impressing the Brazilians with the speed and agility displayed. As the match progressed, the crowds got the hang of the rules and they started to cheer on the teams – much to the Indians' terror and confusion.
Newspaper reports described the event using football terminology, as if dressing zicunati in football's clothing somehow conferred an urban modernity. On scoring a point the winning team 'shouted between themselves in an extremely original way – like any other goal celebration', noted the Correio da Manhã. After two thirty-minute halves the white team narrowly defeated the blues by 21 to 20. 'Zicunati is not at all violent,' wrote one journalist. 'It doesn't even have the fouls and charges common in football. It's a game exclusively for the head.'
O Imparcial devoted its front page to an interview with 'major' Coloisoresse, the Pareci chief.
You must certainly be very tired?
No. This was nothing. It only lasted an hour. Back home we play zicunati every morning from Sam to 11am, and in the afternoon from 1pm to 5pm. It's our favourite pastime . . . Today was strange for us. All this stuff with boots, shirts and shorts – they just get in the way! The turf gets in the way too because it's slippery. Where we come from we have large pitches carefully prepared for zicunati with no grass at all.
The exchange seems less a comment about heading practice in the jungle than a parody of the growing obsession for football in Rio in the 1920s. One wonders, for example, when the Pareci have time for dull chores like hunting and gathering. Unsurprisingly, zicunati did not catch on. The Indians trekked back to their village. About 1,300 Pareci still live near Rondonia-Mato Grosso state border. They carry on making zicunati balls from mangaba latex, and play the sport enthusiastically among themselves.
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The n
ext native contribution to Brazilian football came in 1957, when a player called Índio – Indian – was instrumental in qualifying Brazil for the following year's World Cup. He scored in the first qualifying game (Peru 1-1 in Lima) and was fouled in the second (Peru in Rio), earning a free kick that resulted in the game's only goal.
Índio gained his nickname because he looked like he had stepped out of a Western. In Brazil if you look vaguely Amerindian – having straight hair and dark skin is often more than enough – then it is a moniker you have a good chance of earning. Because miscegenation occurred on such a large scale, there are many, many Índios. More than twenty have been registered as professional footballers at the Brazilian Football Confederation in the last decade.
At least one of them is genuinely indigenous. The Índio whose real name is José Sátiro do Nascimento was born in an Indian community where his father is the tribal chief. He is twenty-two years old and a right back at the São Paulo club Corinthians. I watch a morning training session at the club ground, and chat with him afterwards in the dugout.
Índio's life is one of the most remarkable journeys in football. Brazil's Indians are at the bottom of the social ladder – poor and excluded, fearful and distrustful of the outside world. Índio managed to reach the top, becoming the first indigenous player to play not only for a big club but also the national team. 'I never thought I would be a footballer,' he says. It's a cliche but you really believe it. 'I used to work on the harvest. Planting watermelons, that sort of thing. My family had no money for anything. We were always going hungry.'
Dressed in his training gear, Índio looks like any other footballer. His thick, black hair is cut short and lightly flicked. Indian features like delicate oriental eyes, high cheekbones and a strong, triangular nose are not uncommon among Brazilians. Differences are clearest off the pitch. São Paulo, a concrete sprawl of eighteen million souls, does not offer him pleasures. Unlike most successful footballers, who live with their wives and young children, Índio lives alone with his agent. He went to the cinema once and did not like it. 'My life is staying at home and coming to train.' He speaks very fast, in staccato sentences, as if he is reciting a list of prepared statements. He tells me his favourite pastime is going to the shopping mall and eating ice cream. 'Indians don't like cities. We like the bush. It's difficult here.'
As a child growing up in the semi-arid northeast of Brazil, Índio played football with anything circular, even coconuts. 'The green ones don't hurt your feet. We were used to it anyway. I never played football with a proper ball.' His first team was a small amateur side from the settlement where his family were living. The settlement was separated but not isolated from the developed world. In 1995 he was noticed by a scout and sent to Vitória, a first division club in Salvador well known for its youth development work. It was the first time he'd travelled, the first time he saw the sea. 'What a big river,' he thought.
The culture shock was almost too great to bear. He found the food inedible. 'At home we ate snake, all that sort of thing. Anything we could hunt we would eat. Meat, fish, we ate quite a lot of that there – but we ate without spices. At Vitória it was really, really difficult to adapt. The food was very different. I thought it was weird, really strong.' Once he ran away. He laughs. 'I wasn't able to eat that food that they made there any more, I couldn't bear it, I went back home. But Vitória came and got me and took me back.'
Staying in football meant giving up the claim to succeed his father as chief of his tribe. It paid off. In 1996 Vitória's junior team played Corinthians in São Paulo and he was transferred. He made his first-team debut two years later and was called up for the national under-21 side. Índio is now his family's only breadwinner. He supports about forty relatives. 'Where I am from everyone is going hungry. I suffered together with them. I'm not going to let them carry on suffering,' he says. He has housed them in a town 180 miles from São Paulo. 'It's difficult to keep in touch because they don't have a telephone. They don't have money to call me all the time, and I'm in the team hotel a lot.' He used to have a mobile phone, but he broke it because his family called it incessantly on reverse charges.
Índio's promotion to the Corinthians first team coincided with winning the 1998 Brazilian league title, a feat repeated the following year. He played in the team that won the World Club Championship in 2000, but since then has struggled to keep in the side. 'He is inconsistent,' says Fábio Mazzitelli, who covers Corinthians for the sports daily Lance!. 'He seems unable to hold a place. Maybe this is something to do with his upbringing – perhaps it shows a lack of confidence.'
Insecurity is not a surprise considering his family's tormented history. Six months before I met Índio I had visited the village where he was born, in Alagoas state. I took a taxi from the capital, Maceió. For the first part of the two-hour journey the fields were full of sugar cane and the air smelled of molasses. The scenery turned more savannah-like until Palmeira dos Índios, where deep greenery reappeared. We entered the town and drove out of it on an uneven track. There were no signs of human activity until the road forked and on the left was a simple brick house.
An elderly woman appeared in a T-shirt and knee-length skirt. I said I was looking for the family of Índio, the footballer. 'He's my grandson,' she replied, and invited me in.
Flora 'Auzilia' Ferreira da Silva is sixty-eight and lives on her own. She sat me on a hard wooden sofa. Her possessions do not stretch to much more than an old television and an antique hi-fi. Indian tribes that have had contact with colonisers for hundreds of years tend to live in homes that copy the way non-Indians live – the main difference is that they are significantly poorer.
A quick glance around the room and I saw no indication that she was related to a famous sportsman – no team poster nor autographed photograph. Several passport photos of her grandchildren were wedged in the frame of a fading colour portrait of her and her daughter. I recognised Índio. The only other image of him was on a badge with a blue border. 'Here's my handsome,' she said clasping it proudly.
Auzilia told me the family's tragic story. Her daughter Josefa married Chief Zezinho, leader of the Xukuru-Cariri. Josefa was fourteen when she had her first child, which died aged two months. Her second also died in infancy. The third, a boy, survived and the fourth was Índio. A feud within the tribe left one man dead and Chief Zezinho accused of his murder. He was forced to leave. Neither he, Josefa or their children have been back since.
The situation of Índio's tribe illustrates the main issue concerning Brazil's Indians – their fight for land. When the Portuguese arrived in 1500 the Xukuru and the Cariri lived on the coast of what now is Pernambuco. With the colonisers' arrival, the Indians settled in jungle near where Auzilia lives today. In the middle of the eighteenth century, pioneers, seeing that the Indians had the best land, set fire to the trees to try to get rid of them. The Indians suffered persecution, slavery and death.
Forced to live in reduced areas and share almost nonexistent resources, the Indians started to fight among themselves. About 2,000 Xukuru-Cariri lived near Palmeira dos Índios. After the bloodbath of 1986, Chief Zezinho began an odyssey looking for a home for his family. He first went to the National Indian Foundation in Brasilia, cap in hand. After several changes of address they finally ended up 120 miles away from Palmeira dos Índios, near the town Paulo Afonso, on the banks of the River São Fransisco. They lived there for over a decade until another bloody episode. Índio's brother killed a man in a row over a game of football. The family moved again, 900 miles to the south – helped out by another group of itinerant Indians, the Atikun.
Índio has since relocated his family to Poços de Caldas, on the São Paulo-Minas Gerais border. Having given up hope of being given territory from the government he hopes to buy a large plot of land for the tribe to live on. He says: 'I spend a lot of money on all of them but I won't even get bothered about it. It's my family. I think it is money being put to good use.'
The inconsistency in Índio's g
ame that is pointed out to me costs him his job at Corinthians. A few weeks after I interview him, he is transferred to Goiás, a smaller first division team, based in the savannah city Goiania. There he asserts his identity further – Goiás already has a player called Índio, so he becomes known by his tribal name, Índio Irakanã.
Índio's emergence is a direct consequence of recent changes to the Brazilian government's Indian policy, I am told by Fernando 'Fedola' Vianna. In 1988, Brazil's constitution recognised for the first time that Indians had rights to the land that they traditionally occupied. 'The Constitution changed the view that Indians should be colonised to an acceptance that Indians should be Indians,' he says. Even if every tribe has not yet won back its land, like the Xukuru-Cariri, the Constitution instilled a sense of solidarity and pride among its indigenous population. 'It meant that Indians were not ashamed to be Indians any more. I wouldn't be surprised if many more Índios appear in the future. Discriminated parts of the population have traditionally found in football a way of climbing through social classes.'
Foroe kings
Top: Anja, Robson and baby Mateus outside their home in Gøta. Right: Messias Pereira, Marlon Jorge, Marcela Marcolino and B68 president Niclas Davidsen in their club uniforms. Behind them is Toftir.
prodigal sun
Back in Rio, Marcelo Marcolino kisses the trophy he won as Best Forward in the Faroese League. He is together with his mother and family, on the roof of their brick shanty overlooking Copacabana.