by Alex Bellos
With neither income nor savings, Garrincha asked the Brazilian Sports Confederation for a loan to buy a house. He was refused. On the same day he disappeared and was found drunk and crying in front of a church in Rio's city centre.
Elza thought that a change of scene might pull him out of it. They moved to Rome. Elza found work as a singer but Garrincha had nothing to do except drink. Too ashamed to ask for cigarettes, he smoked butts picked up off the floor. Eventually he was made 'coffee ambassador' for the Brazilian Coffee Institute. It was not hard work. All he needed to do was turn up at European trade fairs and shake hands by the Brazilian stall. He failed spectacularly.
An Italian in Bologna asked: 'So, this Brazilian coffee-is it really any good?'
Garrincha replied: 'Dunno. Never drink it. But I'll tell you one thing – Brazilian cachaça's fantastic'
On their return to Brazil Elza had an idea to stop Garrincha drinking: they would have a child. Manuel Garrincha dos Santos Junior – Garrinchinha, Little Garrincha-was born on 9 July 1976. But with a baby in the house it got worse. Garrincha started beating her up. Elza moved out, fearing he would turn his violence on to the child. After fifteen years together, their relationship ended.
Garrincha married for the third time. His new wife bore him another daughter, his tenth. But his ways did not change. On 19 January 1983, Garrincha spent the morning out drinking. When he arrived home in the afternoon he felt ill and lay down. An ambulance was called from the local clinic. The doctors did not even recognise him. His body was bloated with alcohol, unrecognisable from the nimble athlete of his youth. He checked in and then transferred to a psychiatric hospital in an alcoholic coma. He died at 6am the following morning.
He was forty-nine and left thirteen children.
Tragedy pursued him beyond the grave. His son with Elza, Garrinchinha, died two years later, aged nine. He was being driven back from playing in a football match when the car overturned into a river and he drowned. It was on the same patch of road that Elza's mother had died two decades before.
His other son in Brazil, mothered by his Pau Grande girlfriend Iraci, became a footballer. Neném started at Fluminense and was transferred to Belenenses in Portugal. He ended up playing in Switzerland. He also died in a car accident in 1992, aged twenty-eight.
Two of his eight daughters by Nair died of cancer in their forties. The others live in Pau Grande and Rio de Janeiro.
Garrincha's only surviving son – from his Swedish adventure – is called Ulf and lives in Halmstad, near Malmö.
José Sérgio Leite Lopes was eleven years old in 1958. He vividly remembers listening to Brazil vs. the USSR on the radio. About fifteen family members were sitting down at their home in Rio. They had made little bets about who would score first, written on scraps of paper, the way many Brazilians do before games. 'There really wasn't that much confidence in the national team,' he says. 'We had only managed a 0-0 draw against England. The myth about the Soviets being scientific was very strong. We thought it would be very difficult to win.'
The game started. Brazil pushed forward immediately. Three minutes later they had scored. José Sérgio stands up out of his chair to show the flick that Didi made leading to Vavá's goal. There is not much space in his office, which is small and crowded with books and boxes. José Sérgio is head of anthropology at Rio's federal university. It is somewhat incongruous watching a balding academic with large glasses swivel his body and stick his leg in the air.
Garrincha flies against the USSR in the 1958 World Cup
'It was an extraordinary feeling. You got this idea of this incredibly attacking game. It was so intense. I don't think I was ever more moved by a few minutes of football in all my life. It was football's turning point.'
Didi was voted best player in the 1958 World Cup. For José Sérgio he was the strongest character in the team, more experienced and more versatile than the other forwards. Pelé was a phenomenon for being so young, but it was Garrincha who had the most popular appeal. 'It was the way Garrincha played. He was the guy who undid defences. He humiliated people. When he had the ball you could not get it off him.'
The anthropology department is situated in the buildings of the National Museum, a grand colonial palace that the Brazilian royal family lived in during the nineteenth century. It is at the top of a hill surrounded by landscaped gardens, lakes and the city zoo. José Sérgio's room looks out on to a quad with a disused fountain, palm trees and surrounded by fading pink walls. A bright red and blue macaw is perched by a cage. 'It used to screech so loudly we couldn't teach,' he says.
As a young boy José Sérgio went to the Maracanã and saw Garrincha play. 'His dribbles were like a one-on-one duel. You really didn't know which way he was going to go. He could quite easily dribble backwards towards his own goal. No one did that. I remember laughing. People really laughed. They rarely laughed at other players.' José Sérgio remembers that Garrincha played with a look of great concentration that reminded him of Buster Keaton. He thinks the comparison is a good one, since Keaton's private life was also ravaged by alcoholism.
When I first arrived in Brazil, conversations with friends, acquaintances and strangers would inevitably turn to football. The first time I heard mention of Garrincha, I heard someone say that he was the best player Brazil had ever produced. What about Pelé? Even though I am too young to have seen Pelé play, I was brought up learning that he was incontrovertibly the world's all-time greatest – as if that fact were one of football's fundamental truths. Perplexed, and suspicious that I was being taken for a ride, I started to ask everyone who they felt was Brazil's best-ever player. The reply, invariably, was Garrincha. Even those born years after he stopped playing preferred him.
I had decided to speak to José Sérgio after reading a long article he wrote in the 1980s on Garrincha's funeral. It went some way to explaining the nature of Brazilians' overwhelming affection for the man the poet Vinicius de Moraes called the 'angel with bent legs'.
At about noon on the day that he died, Garrincha's corpse was taken to the Maracanã. Family, former colleagues and fans arrived there for the wake. A quarrel erupted between his family from his first wife and the third. Then another tricky incident occurred when a Botafogo fan covered the coffin with the club flag. One of Garrincha's nephews objected – since the club was a symbol of how he had been taken advantage of. The argument was only resolved when Nilton Santos, the former Botafogo player, intervened and arranged for a Brazilian flag to be put there too.
Nilton Santos was the defender whom Garrincha humiliated at his Botafogo trial. He had become like a responsible elder brother during Garrincha's career. He insisted that, according to the deceased's wishes, he would be buried in Pau Grande – against the wishes of others who wanted him buried in a newly built mausoleum for professional footballers.
Since it is usual for Brazilian celebrities to be buried at prominent, city-centre cemeteries, the day of Garrincha's funeral provoked unique scenes. His coffin was driven to Pau Grande on a fire engine – the same object that he was paraded on after the World Cup victory in 1958. All along the way mourners gathered on the side of the road, on bridges and in buildings. Many waved flags. The cortege drove along the main road, as it left the city, passing warehouses, industrial plants and housing projects. Nearer Pau Grande the crowds were larger. Extra trains were laid on, which blew whistles when they arrived. The local church was packed to bursting point.
A sign on a tree said: 'Garrincha, you made the world smile and now you make it cry.'
At the cemetery in Raiz da Serra, a few miles away, about 8,000 people had been waiting since early morning – far too many people than it could cater for. Mourners climbed trees, gravestones and neighbouring roofs to be able to get a view. When the fire engine arrived anonymous mourners took the coffin to the grave. But the grave was too small. There was not enough earth to cover the coffin properly. Local people threw grass on top. Once the chaos subsided, the cemetery was left half destroyed.
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The reaction to Garrincha's death went far beyond what was expected. José Sérgio says there was a national sense of guilt. 'When someone dies you take stock of all the person's life. Garrincha was identified with the public. He never lost his popular roots. He was also exploited by football so he was the symbol of the majority of Brazilians, who are also exploited.'
Pelé and Garrincha are named in the same breath so often that it is like they are a performing double act, or a brand name of bottled sporting excellence. Together, they sum up an era. Yet Brazilians remember them more for their differences than their similarities. They were unexpectedly opposite characters. They did not even particularly get on. Pelé is known in Brazil as O Rei, The King. In 1963, a biographical film was released called Garrincha, Alegria do Povo-Joy of the People. The nicknames say it all. Pelé is revered. Garrincha is adored. When they say that Garrincha is the best of all time, they are voting with their hearts.
José Sérgio's argument is that even though both players embody the same generation, they are figures from conflicting epochs. There was no player as amateur in spirit as Garrincha. 'It was a miracle that he stayed in the professional game,' says José Sérgio. 'For him he played for the pure pleasure of playing.' Pelé, on the other hand, was unmitigatedly professional. His life story is well known: Pelé's father was a little-known professional footballer whose career was curtailed by injury. From a young age Pelé set his sights on achieving the glory his dad had been denied. He left home aged fifteen to live at Santos FC's boarding house. He never knew anything but a footballer's life.
Whereas Garrincha indulged in most of the vices available to him, Pelé behaved always as a model player. He led a self-imposed ascetic life, concentrating on training and self-improvement. Pelé learned from others and improved over time. Garrincha was unteachable. Pelé had an athelete's perfect body. Garrincha looked like he should not be able to walk straight. When Garrincha was still stuffing his wages into a fruit bowl, Pelé had registered his name as a trademark, employed a manager, invested money in business projects and advertised products – one of the few players to do so at that time. During the 1970s, a survey showed that Pelé was the second-most recognised brand name in Europe after Coca-Cola.
Garrincha demonstrated, quite spectacularly, that there is no safety net in Brazilian society – while Pelé, unlike almost all his peers, found a career beyond football. Garrincha only ever thought of the short term. Pelé was – and is – always making plans. Garrincha argued with the establishment. Pelé became the establishment.
Pelé and Garrincha in Santos and Botafogo colours
One of the most noticeable aspects when reading books and articles on Garrincha's life is that there are virtually no interviews with him. He rarely expressed an opinion. He comes across as a man without a voice. In this way he was like a silent movie star. Re-watching the little footage there is of him, you really are reminded of Buster Keaton. For a start, the images are in black-and-white and, in the transference from film to TV, slightly speeded up. Garrincha makes his darting runs, swaying his body in an almost slapstick way. It is very comical the way he repeats the same move again and again – like a determined child that never learns.
Pelé, on the other hand, has strong convictions. When he scored his thousandth goal, regarded as his crowning moment in Brazil – since his World Cup victories took place abroad and his club successes were too partisan to cause unanimous joy – Pelé was surrounded by journalists wanting a comment. Instead of thanking his family – which was what was expected – or his coach, or even the goalkeeper, he said: 'Let us protect the needy little children . . . for the love of God, the Brazilian people can't forget the children.'
Journalists laughed. Footballers were not meant to say that sort of thing.
Pelé never stopped talking. He even has a (frequently parodied) catchphrase: 'Entende?', meaning 'Geddit?'. After Pelé retired from the New York Cosmos in 1977 he became a businessman, running his own sports marketing company. In 1993, he stood above the parapet and accused Brazilian football of being corrupt – which led to an eight-year feud with the Brazilian head of FIFA, João Havelange. Between 1995 and 1998, he was Brazil's Extraordinary Minister for Sport. He could have spent the time shaking businessmen's hands, making after-dinner speeches to visiting dignitaries and opening factories. He didn't. He tried to make a difference, drafting ambitious legislation to make football administration more ethical. (His critics, however, claimed he was only interested in 'modernising' so his company could have a larger piece of the cake.) He also writes a weekly football column and he has his own show on cable television. Pelé is so driven and ambitious, one of his friends told me, that he believes he is God both on and off the pitch.
Unlike the rest of the world, Brazil has lived with Pelé for more than two decades since he retired from professional football. They judge him as a businessman, a politician and a journalist, not just as a footballer. It is a complicated and controversial legacy. Garrincha is no longer around to tarnish his own myth.
Even though Pelé helped Brazil win three World Cups, more than anyone else as a player, he was never the team's one outstanding member – unlike Garrincha in 1962. There is a sense that Pelé belongs more to global heritage than he does to Brazil's. He is an international reference point, and one who is simple to understand: a poor black man who became the best in the world through dedication and skill. In Brazil, perhaps unfairly, he is not a black role model. It is partly because Brazil, despite its racial mixture, does not have a black movement of any visibility. It's also because Pelé's current and ex-wife are white. Garrincha, on the other hand, married black.
It is not that Brazilians dislike Pelé. Far from it. In 1999 his Mercedes was stopped at traffic lights in São Paulo. Two armed men approached the car. On realising who was inside they apologised, hid their guns and went away. Few people – including footballers – command such respect. A year later in Rio, a similar incident occurred to Romario. The robbers took his Mercedes, mobile phone and Romario was made to walk home.
But while Brazilians put Pelé on a pedestal, they do not love him the way they love Garrincha. It is more than the fact that tragic figures are naturally more appealing, since they are more human, although this probably helped. It is because Pelé does not reflect national desires. Pelé, above everything else, symbolises winning. Garrincha symbolises playing for playing's sake. Brazil is not a country of winners. It is a country of a people who like to have fun.
The week in August 2001 that Pelé announces a contract with Coca-Cola – pushing his annual earnings from sponsorships to £18 million a year, according to Brazil's main financial newspaper – I go to see Elza Soares in concert.
She may have lost her wealth and her prominence, but Elza has lost none of her glamour. I see her at the Teatro Rival, a cabaret-style venue in the centre of Rio. When she comes on stage she is wearing a lilac silk dress and scarf with a large lilac bracelet. She is standing in red platform high heels. Elza later slips into a second outfit – a slinky yellow and black sequin dress that barely reaches her knees. It would be risque for a woman half her age, but Elza is at least seventy years old.
The theatre is full, with a crowd that is a peculiar mix of middle-aged white couples, darker-skinned samba aficionados and gay men. During the 1980s Elza became a cult figure in the gay community, who in a certain way identified with her struggle.
Someone in the crowd shouts: 'We love you.'
Elza can still put on a terrific show. She performs samba standards and modern popular Brazilian songs. There is an authentic rawness to her voice. She sings and skats; gutsy and powerfully soprano. In Elza you can hear echoes of the twentieth century's greatest divas: Ella Fitzgerald, Edith Piaf and Billie Holliday.
She begins 'O Meu Guri', My Boy, a song by Chico Buarque that could have been written in answer to Pelé's cry to the 'little children'. It is about a woman in a favela whose son is murdered. Elza performs it like a torch song. Her voice fill
s the theatre. As the tragic story unfolds, teardrops start to move down her cheeks. It is terrifyingly convincing. I feel that everyone in the audience believes she is really crying those tears. The beauty of the song and the power of delivery are overwhelming. It is impossible not to think of the husband and son that she lost.
Modernity has bypassed Pau Grande. This is not a bad thing. The town is geographically isolated, enclosed on three sides by mountains thick with atlantic rainforest. The air feels divinely fresh. The cobbled streets and neatly planned homes are a legacy of the English, who ran the factory and built houses for their workers. You could almost call Pau Grande quaint – an adjective rarely aired in Brazil, and certainly never in connection with Rio's dirty, chaotic suburbs and satellite towns that I drove through before I arrived. The original factory still survives, although it now produces soft drinks instead of textiles.
I park my car by the Mane Garrincha Stadium, the first reference to Pau Grande's most famous son. His painted name above the entrance gate is faded, blemished and stained. Inside there is a grass pitch surrounded by a fence. Some children are messing about. One mishits the ball and it bounces on to the water tank, breaking a pipe. A bar at the back of the terraces has a wall of pictures and trophies. Garrincha is recognisable, dressed in the black-and-white stripes of both Pau Grande and Botafogo. The memorabilia is neither well-arranged nor particularly extravagant. It could be a club bar anywhere in the world.
A teenager arriving for training tells me that about five years ago a mural tribute to Garrincha was painted around the inside of the perimeter wall. 'It was really pretty,' he says. 'But one of his daughters got drunk and smashed it up with a hammer.'