Futebol

by Alex Bellos

  Another of Brazil's popular creations – certainly the most original, according to Monteiro Lobato, pioneer of Brazilian children's fiction – is the saci-pererê. The imp-like saci-pererê has three defining features: he is black, he smokes a pipe and he has just one leg. He is always making a fool of people, freeing horses at night, breaking ears of corn; causing chaos where there is calm. His one leg makes him light and fast. The only way to stop him is to trap him in a whirlwind.

  curupira

  saci-pererê

  Both of these little monsters have a common characteristic – they use their lower limbs in a cunning way. It is a valued Brazilian trait. When Chico Buarque sang 'There are no sins south of the equator' he was describing the Brazilian anatomy as well as its geography. A samba dancer's gyrating hips, the feigning swing of a capoerista's kick and a footballer's guile are all trademarks of a national style.

  Garrincha was Brazil's most captivating footballer. Like the curupira and the saci-pererê, he had an uncommon profile below the waist. He was also crafty, agile and impossible to catch.

  When Manuel Francisco dos Santos was born on 28 October, 1933, the midwife noticed that the baby's legs were bent. His left leg was curved outward and the right leg curved inward. With proper orthopaedic treatment, his legs could have been straightened in no time. But this was Pau Grande, a small town short on medical specialists and shorter on parents' expectations. Manuel – Mane-grew up looking as if a gust of wind had blown his legs sideways, like in a cartoon, leaving the limbs disfigured in parallel curves.

  Pau Grande might only be forty-five miles from Rio de Janeiro but in the 1940s it was another world – a countryside paradise, nestling in mountains and surrounded by rivers, waterfalls and forests. Mane was a sweet child. As small as a wren, a garrincha, said his big sister Rosa, and the nickname stuck. Later he would be compared to a little bird for the way he flew past defenders. During his childhood he had a different relation to his feathered friends-he liked to kill them. Garrincha spent his youth hunting, fishing, fornicating and playing football. He showed an intuitive talent for all four.

  Because of his distinctive lineament, Garrincha was able to move in unpredictable directions. He also possessed an exceptional ability to accelerate. Combining both, he developed an unbeatable dribble, and was soon the best player in town. Aged fourteen, he started work at the local textile factory, as everyone did in Pau Grande. But Garrincha was an appalling employee. He was sacked for laziness and only reinstated because the president of the factory football club – Esporte Clube Pau Grande – wanted him in the team.

  Garrincha was simple, carefree and unambitious. Football, he thought, was not to be taken too seriously. When Brazil lost the World Cup in 1950 he found it silly that people were upset. He had gone fishing rather than listen to the final on the radio. Reluctantly, he went for trials at big Rio clubs. At Vasco he was told to go home because he had not brought any boots. At Fluminense he left before the end to catch the last train home. A few years later, aged nineteen, Garrincha made it to Botafogo – and only because he was almost dragged there by an ex-Botafogo player who had seen him play.

  On the second day of his trial Garrincha was put on the right wing against Nilton Santos, Botafogo's left back. Nikon Santos was also a member of the national side. Garrincha dribbled him as if it was a Pau Grande kickabout, and in one move passed the ball between his legs – something that no one had ever done. 'I think it's a good idea to contract this guy,' muttered the defender afterwards. 'Better him with us than against us.'

  In his first full game for Botafogo, two months later, Garrincha scored three goals. He was always positioned on the outside right and his style was always the same, based around the dribble, yet the predictability did not make him less effective. He would tirelessly dummy one way and then the other, darting off in one direction and then coming to an abrupt halt, only to dart off again in another. He could dribble out of the tightest situation, like a footballing Houdini. 'His entire body was unbalanced, bent to the right, so that logically he ought to fall every time he tried to run. And yet this anti-athlete, this man who challenged physiology, was straight like a plumb line and fell only when toppled. On the contrary, it was he who unbalanced other players,' wrote the newspaper Jornal do Brasil.

  Gorrincha's legs

  Botafogo's coach tried to teach him to dribble less. He put a chair on the pitch and told him to consider it as a reference from where to cross the ball. Garrincha approached the chair – and dribbled it, sliding the ball between its legs. Asking Garrincha to reduce his dribbles was like asking Carmen Miranda to take the fruit off her head. A referee once threatened to send him off for dribbling a player too much.

  Garrincha seemed to play for the fun of it. He relished fooling defenders with his skilful moves, taunting them like a champion toreador taunts a bull. Garrincha, according to legend, was one of the origins of the popular Latin American terrace chant 'ole!'. It started when on tour with Botafogo. His duel with the Argentinian defender Vairo had the crowds shouting 'ole!' for the way he daintily skipped over Vairo's stampede-like charges. Garrincha's 'oles!' turned into guffaws when on one occasion he deliberately forgot the ball and carried on running. Vairo followed the player without realising the ball was left behind.

  Garrincha was the player, said the playwright Nelson Rodrigues, who taught the fans to laugh. His onpitch clowning is perhaps best illustrated by the occasion when, faced with an open goal, he preferred to carry on dribbling. Garrincha passed three players and then beat the goalkeeper. But instead of scoring, he waited for a defender to run back. Garrincha swerved his body and the defender had to grasp the post so as not to fall over. He then walked into the goal with the ball. He flicked it up, put it under his arm and sauntered back to the centre spot.

  The match was a friendly between Brazil and Fiorentina of Italy, Brazil's last fixture before the 1958 World Cup finals in Sweden. When Garrincha scored, the stadium was silent apart from the shouts of his team-mates. In anger. They were terrified that such irresponsibility in a competitive game would cost them dear.

  Garrincha had first played for his country in 1955. A year before, at the World Cup in Switzerland, Brazil were knocked out 4-2 by Hungary in a hard-fought match remembered as the Battle of Berne. Two Brazilians and a Hungarian were sent off, and it descended into a players' brawl. Hungary's Ferenc Puskas thumped Pinheiro, a Brazilian fullback, in the head with a bottle.

  By 1958 Brazil were feeling the pressure of their unfulfilled potential. The country had still not won a World Cup. Both 1950 and 1954 had been lost by emotional frailty at the crucial moment – first against courageous Uruguayans and then against violent Hungarians. In 1958 the coaching staff introduced a psychologist to make sure the team was mentally prepared. Tests gave pseudo-scientific backing to Garrincha's playfulness. His aggression level was zero and he had below-average intelligence – his score was not even enough to become a bus driver. (In the same tests, Pelé was judged to be 'obviously infantile', lacking the sense of responsibility needed for team spirit. But he had an excuse. He was only seventeen.)

  Brazil left nothing to chance. The squad was based in Hindas, a resort near Gothenburg. Knowing his countrymen's priapic tendencies, the team doctor insisted that the hotel's twenty-eight female staff were replaced with men. His fear of players' distractions had even led him to ask the local nudist colony, visible from the window, to insist on clothes.

  Garrincha did not play in the first two games, a 3-0 win over Austria and a goalless draw with England. Neither did Pelé. The third match was against the USSR. It was the era of the Sputnik satellite. Cold-war propaganda fuelled a fear of the Soviets' 'scientific' approach. Vicente Feola, the coach, shook up the team sheet and dispatched his secret weapons.

  From the kick-off, Garrincha fired himself like a missile into the Soviet defence. After forty seconds of dribble after mesmerising dribble, he shot at the post. Before sixty seconds, Pelé also hit the woodwork, from a Garri
ncha pass. The onslaught of the opening three minutes, ending with a goal by Vavá, showed an audaciousness and skill that had not been seen before in international football. They are considered by many as Brazilian football's greatest three minutes of all time.

  The game, which ended 2-0, marked the beginning of Brazilian football's golden partnership. With Pelé and Garrincha playing together, the national team never lost a match.

  Newspapers reported that Pelé and Garrincha were only picked because there was a player rebellion. A commission of Brazil's players allegedly went to the coach and pressured him to choose them. The story is so evocative that, even though it was denied by the players afterwards, it is firmly established in football lore. The myth conveys the idea that in a Brazilian team the coach is redundant – that the 'beautiful game' emerged from the players themselves, in spite of the coach's wishes, as if it was a divine phenomenon with an immaculate birth.

  The Soviet game was also the moment that Brazil darkened. Pelé was black, Garrincha of mixed black and Indian blood. The team that started against Austria had one black player, Didi. By the time Brazil reached the final they fielded three blacks and two mixed-race players – the first fully multiracial team to win a World Cup.

  Brazil knocked out Wales and France on the way to meet Sweden in the final. Brazil won 5-2, their first two goals identical moves created by Garrincha – he slalomed up the right wing, and Vavá converted the crosses. The Times described Sweden as 'bewildered by a brand of football craft beyond the understanding of many' and added that Garrincha's marker was 'as lonely as a mountain wind. Garrincha . . . was beyond control and that was that.'

  Bellini, the captain, was presented with the Jules Rimet trophy. Brazil's photographers – perhaps because they were shorter than the strapping Swedish pressmen, or perhaps because they were further behind in the scrum – shouted: 'Lift it higher!' So he held the cup above his head, inventing the gesture that subsequently became the internationally imitated sign for sporting victories.

  The World Cup consecrated the man with bent legs. 'He is considered a retard,' wrote Nelson Rodrigues, 'but Garrincha proved in the World Cup that we are the retarded ones – because we think, we rationalise. Next to him, next to the prodigous instantaneity of his reflexes, we are luggards, bovines, hippopotamuses.' The poet Paulo Mendes Campos compared him to an artistic genius: 'Like a poet touched by an angel, like a composer following a melody that fell from the sky, like a dancer hooked to a rhythm, Garrincha plays football by pure inspiration and magic; unsuffering, unreserved and unplanned.' In one game for Botafogo, Garrincha kept on dribbling a defender until the ball went off the pitch and they carried on their cat-and-mouse chase on the adjacent track. The referee refused to stop play – as if the beauty of his dribbling justified suspending the rules.

  Garrincha was the turf's idiot savant. Anecdotes about his country hick simplicity are as plentiful as those about his footballing brilliance. Many were embellished by Sandro Moreyra, a journalist and close friend. Such as the story that he always gave defenders the interchangeable and anonymous sobriquet João, John, because it did not matter who marked him. Or the time the Brazil coach was explaining match tactics to the squad. He saw that Garrincha was paying him no attention, preferring to read a Donald Duck cartoon. 'You,' he said in resignation, 'will do what ever you want.' He did and Brazil won the match.

  Brazil took almost the same team to the 1962 World Cup, in Chile, as it had done to Sweden. Pelé, still only twenty-one, had by then established himself as the most complete forward in the world. In 1961 he scored 111 goals in 75 appearances. But he limped off in the second World Cup game and missed the rest. Most of the other Brazilians were veterans, in the twilight of their playing careers. Except Garrincha. Perhaps only Maradona, in 1986, has so single-handedly – no pun intended – won a country the World Cup.

  Garrincha's importance to the team was so great that after he was sent off in the semi-final – for cheekily kneeing a Chilean defender in the bum – Brazil moved mountains for him not to be suspended for the final. The linesman who saw the incident mysteriously left Chile the following morning. The president of Peru even intervened, asking the Peruvian referee not to blame Garrincha in his match report. Garrincha was exonerated and played, albeit under a different set of adverse circumstances: a 39°C fever and aspirin.

  Later in 1962 Garrincha lived his most glorious moment in domestic football – Botafogo's second consecutive state championship. It was also the beginning of the end. Garrincha's bent legs had been his strength. They were now his weakness. The way his tibia met his femur meant that each time he swivelled his body the cartilage was wrecked in between, a problem even without the violence inflicted by a sporting life. He was first told he needed to have an operation in 1959 but he decided against it. His faith healer in Pau Grande had told him that if he went through with it he would never play again.

  While there was a romance in being a free spirit on the pitch, Garrincha's friends started to worry about his naivete off it. They suggested he employ a financial adviser. Two bank reps went to his home in Pau Grande and were shocked to discover money rotting in cupboards, behind furniture and in fruit bowls. His house was a slum. The two-times World Cup winner was living in the same conditions as a poor factory worker.

  Botafogo had taken advantage of Garrincha's ingenuousness. They always made him sign blank contracts, which they filled in with salaries as low as they could get away with. They also promised him money which they never paid. Garrincha was the club's main selling-point, yet he did not even earn as much as his team-mates. When he complained, the fans turned against him, accusing him of being mercenary and individualistic.

  There was another complication: women. Garrincha had married aged eighteen – before he signed with Botafogo. His wife, Nair, was a plain-looking factory girl whose pregnancy forced the wedding. Uneducated and unaspiring, she excelled in only one activity: daughters. Nair bore him eight in little more than a decade. While he commuted to Rio, she stayed in Pau Grande.

  Footballers womanise. In this respect, Garrincha was world-class.* As well as his children with Nair, he had two with an old Pau Grande girlfriend he maintained in Rio and another in Sweden with a local girl when Botafogo were on tour. He also had an affair with an actress who was the vice-president's ex-lover. And then he met Elza Soares.

  In Elza, Garrincha found a kindred spirit. She was a well-known samba singer, who, like himself, came from a humble background. Yet the timing was unfortunate. Their love affair coincided with Garrincha's demands at Botafogo for higher wages. When the affair became public it was taken as proof that he was selfish and money-grabbing. Elza was portrayed as a savvy showbiz star and marriage-wrecker. Public mood swung against the couple. For their own safety, Garrincha's financial adviser hid them temporarily in a secret plot of land in Rio's rural periphery.

  Yet Garrincha and Elza stayed together. For the 1960s they were Brazil's emblematic couple. In their image Brazil was the country of improvisation and musicality, of triumph through adversity. They were the country's top talents in the country's favourite things – football and samba.

  Elza had a tragic upbringing in one of Rio's favela slums. She was raped aged twelve and, because she was pregnant, forced to marry the rapist. Her first three children died in childbirth and she had four more before she was twenty-five. Yet Elza found a way out thanks to her phenomenal voice. Aged eighteen, she won a radio competition, which led to a singing career. When she met Garrincha she was already an established star and had sung with Louis Armstrong.

  By 1963 Garrincha's knee was in such a bad way that he was hardly able to play two games in a row. Splintered cartilage caused it to swell with liquid, so that it needed to be regularly perforated and drained. Doctors who saw it were amazed that he was still playing football. But both the athlete and the club were happy to delay an operation – Botafogo needed him to guarantee gate receipts and Garrincha knew that by taking time off he would be put in a weake
r negotiating position. He eventually had the operation, in 1964, but was never the same player again.

  Garrincha was called up for the 1966 World Cup in England. He was well past his prime, but who would leave out the star from four years before? On 12 July at Goodison Park, Liverpool, he played with Pelé for the last time. Coincidentally, the opposition was the same as the first: Bulgaria. The score, 2-0. Hungary beat Brazil 3-1 in the second match – the first time Brazil had lost with Garrincha in the side. And the last. His international career ended there, after fifty-two victories and seven draws. Pelé, who had missed the Hungary game, returned to meet Eusebio's Portugal. Again, Brazil lost 3-1, and the champions were out of the tournament in the first round.

  Garrincha liked cars. He drove them badly. He had once run over his father and had also had an accident with Elza that knocked teeth out of her mouth. After returning from England he drove up to Pau Grande with Elza's mother to see his children. On the way back he hit a lorry at fifty miles an hour. The car flipped over. Elza's mother died.

  The accident triggered a depression. Garrincha tried to gas himself – one of the first of several suicide attempts. His football career was over and he had killed the mother of the woman he loved. It did not help that he had been a heavy drinker since his teenage years. Through his career he astounded colleagues by his capacity and desire for booze. When he hung up his boots, the drinking increased.

  Their trajectories had started together – but the distance between Pelé and Garrincha had never seemed so far. In 1969 Pelé scored his thousandth goal – in Rio, at the Maracanã. After the goal – scored from a penalty – Pelé rushed into the net, picked up the ball and kissed it. A new footballing milestone had been achieved. Garrincha was not in the stadium. He was not even watching the game on TV or listening to it on the radio. He overheard it by accident in someone else's car.