by Alex Bellos
The Hawks' parade is a megaproduction involving 4,700 people in fancy dress. To take part you do not need to be a member of the supporters' club. You do not even need to be a Corinthians fan – although almost everyone is. I decide to parade with them in the carnival of 2001. In order to choose my costume I visit the headquarters during a rehearsal, on a balmy Sunday night in January.
I am one of the first to arrive. In the hall a man is lining up drums. He has a hawk tattoo on his arm and a scar mark on the left side of his face. I introduce myself. His name is Pantchinho. He explains that he is the leader of the bateria, the 300-piece percussion section. He is twenty-five, and is friendly and soft-spoken. Like many involved in the Hawks' parade, Pantchinho only became involved in carnival through being a football fan. As a teenage Hawk, he learnt how to drum on the terraces. He still goes to matches but he hardly has time any more. For the three months before carnival he holds rehearsals six days a week.
Most of Rio and São Paulo's main samba schools are community-based. Only the Hawks originate from a football supporters' club. 'We don't restrict ourselves geographically. We attract people from everywhere,' says Rodiney, one of the men reponsible for the costumes. He is setting up a mannequin on the balcony. 'At the Hawks you are representing your samba school but you are also representing your football team. It's like you are part of your team. Like you are a football player.'
He adds: 'The parade is a spectacle, but it is also a competition. It's all about adrenalin – look, I'm getting goose-pimples just thinking about it. Corinthians is synonymous with fanaticism.'
Each samba school has a different theme for its parade. This year, the Hawks have chosen the Big Bang, spelt out as 'Myths and Magics in the Triumphal Odyssey of Creation'. Rodiney has finished assembling his costume. It has a blue helmet, a blue shoulder-piece and blue tunic scattered with apple-sized white bubbles. 'It's Water,' he says. Soon the other elements arrive – Earth, Wind and Fire.
Next to Rodiney is Carlao, Big Carl. He is a large man and speaks in basso profundo monosyllables. He was one of the original Hawks in the early 1970s. Carlao seems to best represent the contrast of macho football fans fussing over brightly coloured felt, feathers and sequins. He is responsible for the 150 people who will be dressed as Fire. The costume costs me £70.
The second time I see Carlao is in February, on carnival Saturday. I go to the workshop where he has contracted the costumes to be made. It is underneath one of São Paulo's many flyovers. Flimsy planks mark out a room. On wooden tables workers are rushing to finish in time. Carlao says he has not slept in days. His voice is deeper and he is more monosyllabic than usual. A tropical storm starts and the whole place darkens. Water starts pouring through holes in the ceiling, splashing within metres of the worktops. I take my costume and drive away, down a street that is about 2ft high in water.
The weather has cleared when I arrive at the Hawks' headquarters in the evening. On the wall opposite someone has painted a huge hawk and a drum, with the words 'Uma Torcida Que Samba', or 'The Fans That Samba'. Like going to a match, the atmosphere is tense with an excitement that we are about to do battle.
I am wearing red espadrilles and red jodhpurs with yellow ribbons trailing from the hem. The costume's central section is a metal-framed shoulder-piece with hanging red felt. For good measure I have a detachable red flame with purple feathers that will eventually be attached to my back like a giant wing. As I and several other Fires carefully negotiate our way on to a bus, we look like exotic butterflies squashing into a tupperware box.
The parade takes place in the sambadrome, which is an avenue about a kilometre long bordered by stands on either side. It takes us about an hour to drive there because, this being São Paulo, the traffic is bottlenecked all the way. The buses are shaking with football chants. 'Hey, driver – why don't you fly,' we shout, whacking the ceiling for rhythm. 'Corinthians fans aren't afraid to die.'
I have a chance to speak to my friendly Fires. They are evenly divided between men and women, and mostly young white professionals in their twenties. None are card-carrying Hawks members but they try to parade with the samba school every year. 'There is more energy here,' one says. 'We have two badges. Samba and football. The other schools just have one badge.'
At the sambadrome our floats are already in line backstage. Women are craned on to the podiums in outfits as minimal as mine is elaborate. Like footsoldiers we gather in our positions. There are several Hawk helpers dressed in white, whose job is to make sure that everything proceeds smoothly. And to make sure we look ecstatically happy. Gulp! I've never felt so scared.
Pantchinho leads in the drummers. The volume is colossal. A vocalist sings the Hawks' song, which is accompanied by a miniature cavaquinho guitar and belted out from speakers the length of the sambadrome.
Our first float enters the arena. It is decorated in black and silver. It has a six-metre-high hawk whose wings surround a globe. The globe supports a podium with a gyrating, bikini-clad woman. Behind her there are eight more podiums and eight more women. At the back of the float there is a ten-metre-high podium, another woman, and if you really look hard, the Corinthians crest.
The chorus rings out:
I bring love and hope
To this triumphal odyssey
Fly, hawk, party for the people
Burst forth at carnival time
When I step into the stadium the thrill is euphoric. My eyes well up. I understand what Rodiney meant about feeling like a football player. The stands look like a football stadium. People are waving flags and balloons in Corinthians colours – black and white. The jubilation is contagious. On both sides there are banners the length of the sambadrome saying Hawks of the Faithful. Our vocalist is drowned out because it seems that everyone in the crowd is singing along too.
When we sing 'Fly, hawk' we all stretch our arms out, and turn from side to side as if we are flying too. It strikes me that the football experience has come full circle. With the Hawks, the football fan is no longer a spectator. He is the spectacle. The Hawks are the football fans that have their own fans.
The parade lasts about an hour. I almost do not recognise Eduardo at the end. He is in a snazzy white suit, the uniform given to the Hawks' senior members. He is very worried. The penultimate float broke its axle as it was moving into the sambadrome and had to be left behind. He hopes it will not cost them in the judging. Last year one of the introductory dancers dropped a part of his costume. The Hawks were docked a point and they lost the championship by half a point – the winners had 199.5 and they had 199.
Voting takes place at the sambadrome three days later. Judges give marks out of ten on various aspects of the parade. About 3,000 Hawks turn up – by far the largest contingent of any of the fourteen competing samba schools. But the Hawks only achieve third place. Their supporters start to fight. Riot police move in and fire plastic bullets and tear gas.
Corinthians were named after the English amateur team Corinthians, which toured Brazil in 1910. They are the only one of São Paulo's big clubs that was founded by the working class. Corinthians are known as the team of the masses-the Timao, the Big Team, a word that embodies their deep-rooted popular support.
Likewise, the Hawks of the Faithful were founded in opposition to the elite who ran the club. 'They were the humble people who turned against the institution. It was an urban uprising that included the idea of political thought. When they talk about having an ideology, they are not stupid. They are right,' argues Luiz Henrique de Toledo, who is an anthropologist and a leading authority on football supporters.
The Hawks' emergence, says Toledo, cannot be disassociated from the social context of the late 1960s and early 1970s. With civil liberties curtailed because of the dictatorship, football was one of the only spaces where Brazilians could express a political voice. People with few citizen's rights could, within groups like the Hawks, at least affirm their rights as fans.
We are sitting in an ice-cream café off the Aven
ida Paulista, an aggressively affluent valley of business skyscrapers that could be New York. Toledo, who has a young face and a goatee, says that the Hawks were the first supporters club to organise themselves independently of the team. All supporters clubs now follow the Hawks model. Football clubs usually have several, based around different networks of friends or even criteria including gender, sexuality or age. To be a member of São Caetano's Blue Walking Stick, for example, you need to be over sixty-five, rheumatic and have false teeth.
During the 1970s and 1980s, supporters clubs like the Hawks became focal points for delinquence. It was partly because São Paulo was expanding faster than it could cope with, attracting typically urban social problems. Toledo suggests that perhaps the thuggery was an inevitable consequence of an organisation founded out of a desire for confrontation. I can tell he respects the Hawks. He argues that they are different from hooligans in other countries. Usually, he says, groups of hooligans operate covertly. The Hawks wear their logo T-shirts with pride. They have a very strong presence in the city. 'The Hawks revitalised the São Paulo carnival,' he says. 'They brought a competitive spirit – and they also brought numbers. This was very visible the year they won.'
Toledo goes further in his praises. He believes that the Hawks strengthen democracy. 'They are against apathy in general. They provoke their members to see society differently. The person in the organised supporters group has a political appetite. He might have started because he likes football but once he is part of it he sees the world as political.'
To me, the Hawks are a good metaphor for what I see as one of Brazil's most striking contradictions. Brazilians are a happy, creative, excessively friendly people, yet-because of the country's social problems – they live with levels of murder and violent crime almost equivalent to a country in civil war. The Hawks combine these two extremes; they are a magnet for both awe-inspiring beauty and premeditated brutality.
During the 1980s and 1990s violence between supporters clubs became a public issue. The straw that broke the camel's back came in August 1995, when rioting broke out at the Pacaembu stadium during a match between Palmeiras' and São Paulo's youth teams. The toll was more than a hundred injuries and the coma and subsequent death of a young São Paulo fan. In the aftermath, all supporters clubs were banned from the state's stadiums. Members are allowed to attend matches – but cannot wear T-shirts or bring banners that refer to the organisations.
The two supporters clubs involved at the Pacaembu-Palmeiras' Mancha Verde, or Green Streak, and São Paulo's Independente, or Independent-were both shut down after legal action by the State Attorney Fernando Capez.
Capez's scruffy and underfunded offices are five minutes walk down the Avenida Paulista. He looks oddly out of place in them. Capez is thirty-six years old, tall, preppy and clubbable. He speaks loudly and quickly – as if he is in a fast-paced city firm.
After his success with Green Streak and Independent he has turned his attentions to the Hawks.
'They're testing me, they're testing me,' he says. 'They stop traffic in the street, they break doors, they smash up cars, they fight at stadiums, they invade the federation's building. I've called them in here. I don't want to close them down unless it's absolutely necessary. I've already told them that. So then what do they do?'
He gets out a blank piece of paper and draws a plan of the motorway where the Hawks assaulted the Corinthians bus. 'They say they didn't do it. That's a lie. They put their bus in front of the Corinthians bus. It was almost a tragic accident. Everyone got out and they used sticks and stones.
'So I entered a petition to have them closed down. I will be sad to see them extinct. There is a happy side to them. But they judge themselves above the law. They say: "We put on the party, everyone likes us, so we can do what we like. We have been going for thirty years, some lousy attorney can't shut us down."'
Judges voted 2-1 in Capez's favour. The process is currently in appeal. He does not believe the Hawks' appeal will be successful. I ask what will happen if they lose. What about the samba school? 'I will confiscate all their funds. I will close down their lovely headquarters. They will have to find another base, find a new name and start all over again.'
He says that the Hawks are the most difficult fans to take on because of the popularity of their samba school. 'During carnival no one wants to stop them. But then if there is a violent episode everyone comes to me to have them shut down. There is this ambiguity. It's Jekyll and Hyde. When the beautiful side is apparent I am a detestable person. But when the ugly side shows I am the person everyone runs to. I am both hated and loved.'
The problem with the Hawks, he adds, is that they lack a leader of social standing. 'Metaleiro is a good kid. He's just stupid. Dentinho is honest, a worker. But within their number there are bandits.'
He realises that doing away with the Hawks won't stop football violence. But he is neither a politician nor a social worker. 'When violence is institutionalised, when it is in a gang, you have to break the gang. You don't stop the violence, you pulverise it. The police have to do the second part.' He sighs. In Brazil the police are neither well-trained nor well-equipped to fulfil their part of the bargain.
At the end of the interview I ask Capez if he likes football. 'I love it,' he says. I ask what team he supports. 'Look, I've something to show you.' He stands up and goes to a metal cupboard. He pulls out a big wooden engraving. He says that he cannot hang it on the wall, much as he would like to. It is the Corinthians shield with his name at the bottom.
'Do you think I am happy closing down the Hawks?'
He stares at me for a slow second.
'But you have to look at the safety of the population. Justice has to be dispassionate.'
In 2002 Joe Radio had a heart transplant. At first it was thought that the donor supported Ndutico, which provoked concern that the heart of Sport's most vociferous fan belonged to a rival club. The donor's father then put minds to rest saying that he was, in fact, a Sport fan.
The same year, Cotton Bud missed his first World Cup in more than two decades, because of the expense of travelling to Korea and Japan. He is already planning his trip to Germany 2004.
Chapter Seven
MY LITTLE TONY
The backlands of northeastern Brazil are widely known for their dusty, sun-scorched landscape and for their centuries-old tradition of improvisational poetry. When I arrive in Brejinho I approach two troubadour types and ask them to compose an ode to the local football stadium. They oblige immediately. The men strum their guitars. One begins with the following verse:
We're from a humble town a long way away
The place is so small; it's with reason I say
That our pride, our Big Tony, lights up our day.
The slow strumming continues and the second man joins in, again following strict rules of rhyme and meter:
Big Tony's really huge, it's got all you need:
Changing rooms, floodlights and grass
that's grown from seed.
When you see it you think: 'perfection indeed'.
Brejinho is three hundred miles from the coast. When it rains, it is possible to eke out a living planting rice, beans and corn. When it does not – and it often does not – the people go hungry. In 1993, Brejinho suffered the worst drought in memory. With no harvest, families were forced to eat cactus. Desperate measures were sought to avert starvation. In scenes reminiscent of an African famine, crates of cereals were trucked into the town. Yet amid the hardship, 1993 was special. Work began on Big Tony, the most costly project in the town's history.
Brejinho has a population of 3,000. About 4,000 others live in the surrounding rural area. Its stadium was planned with a capacity of 10,000.
'Do you think Brejinho will stay with its current population?' asks João Pedro, the mayor who built it. 'I didn't do something just for the present. I did something that would last for a long time. The people wanted a stadium more than anything. I promised that one day I would build i
t for them. And I did.'
I am speaking to João Pedro as he gently rocks in his chair, under a chestnut tree on the pavement outside his house. His voice is slow and hoarse. Sunglasses shade his eyes. His close-cropped white hair and full moustache make him look like a retired military general.
The stadium's inauguration was the peak of João Pedro's career in public life. He remembers it clearly. The state's political chief turned up, as did the president of the electricity company from Recife, the state capital. 'I was very moved because many people were present. And everyone who was there liked it,' he says. Dignitaries feasted on a grand barbecue. A bull was slaughtered especially.
I walk towards the stadium, which is named after João Pedro's late son-in-law, Dr Antonio Alves de Lima, giving it the nickname Tonhdo, or Big Tony. Brejinho is a simple town of cobbled streets surrounded by hills covered in cactus and giant rocks. When I first see Big Tony I stop and stare: The painted white stadium looks like an ocean liner beached in a dried-up lake.
The stadium is resplendent with the trappings of sporting sophistication. A three-metre-high wall in clean white paint encloses the ground. It has four ticket booths and three separate changing rooms: for the home side, the visitors and the referee. The pitch is of a professional size and has the only green grass for dozens of miles. A curved bar is built into the structure. There is floodlighting, terracing and even a concrete box kitted out for radio commentators.
I enter and sit down on the terraces with João Vilarim, Brejinho's sports secretary, a position that I am surprised is provided for in such a tiny, impoverished place. For a few minutes we watch local teenagers kicking a ball about. Then he tells me: 'We used to feel ashamed because we didn't have a proper stadium. Every town has to have one. We asked and asked and asked. Finally the mayor came to his senses.' My eyes wander to outside the stadium. The land is a dusty light brown. Outside a woman walks by barefoot, balancing a green plastic bucket on her head.