Futebol

by Alex Bellos

  We're from the land where football is played

  Upcountry, where great strikers are made

  All who come by try to make the grade.

  During the 1970s the military regime built mega-stadiums in many of Brazil's largest cities, a populist policy and one which increased feelings of local and national pride. By 1978, according to the Guinness Book of Records, Brazil had twenty-seven with a capacity of at least 45,000 and five that held more than 100,000 – more giant stadiums than any other footballing nation. To be blessed with a 'football landmark' became important for a town's self-respect.

  In the same way that Rio is unimaginable without the Maracanã, Brejinho is unimaginable without Big Tony. It is part of the city's soul and a reference point throughout the region.

  Brejinho's inhabitants like being from the small town with the big stadium. They do not complain, for example, that the town does not have a public market – a venture that would attract commerce and help alleviate the unrelenting misery of daily life. To residents João Pedro had the right priorities. The vast cost was money well-spent. The young town – it was founded in 1963 – needed to affirm its existence with a football shrine.

  No one seems to whisper that the ticket booths have only been used once since it opened, that the radio cabin is entered an average of once a year and that the floodlights are about as powerful as a battery torch. Nor does anyone question the logic of the perimeter wall. The thousands of bricks and the breeze blocks used took up the lion's share of the budget. Yet if every match except one has been free of charge, what purpose is there keeping people out?

  João Pedro asks me. 'Isn't every stadium walled?' Before I can reply, he tells me the answer: 'Stadiums are always walled.'

  In the bakery opposite João Pedro's house, the sales boy agrees. 'A stadium without a wall would be really ugly and weird. It wouldn't really be a stadium any more.'

  Food and jobs alone do not win elections round here. As the defining legacy of his mayorship, Big Tony helped assure João Pedro's other son-in-law to electoral success. José Vanderlei was the only mayoral candidate in Pernambuco in the 2000 elections to stand unopposed.

  Vanderlei lives in a brand-new house at the highest point of the town. He looks less fearsomely authoritarian than his father-in-law does. When he talks his dark eyes, scrunched forehead and pudgy features often break out into a cheeky smile.

  'Some people say we should have built a public market instead. But a politician depends on the demands of the people. We don't just do what we want. We do things for the people. The same person who wants the public market, after the market he wants leisure facilities too. Football is important here, just as it is important all over the world. The stadium brings people together.'

  He defends the money João Pedro spent, saying that at least it showed that João Pedro did not pocket the money himself. 'OK, so we spent £50,000. Another mayor might have done nothing and the £50,000 disappeared.'

  In Vanderlei's manifesto he pledged to finish the stadium to its original designs. He wants to complete the terraces' current capacity from 3,000 to 10,000, build an artesian well to irrigate the turf and install fencing around the pitch – so pitch invasions are impossible. The total cost will be about £30,000. 'Take your house,' he says. 'Don't you always want to make improvements?'

  At the time of the stadium's inauguration Brejinho had two football clubs. Sport Centre Brejinho United, known by its acronym Ceub, which was financially backed by the mayor's office and consequently the town's official team. Its rival was Juventus, named after the Turin club side, and run by the disaffected Ceub player Arlindo Formiga.

  Arlindo owns Brejinho's only nightclub, Night Commotion. He is the danceteria's factotum. Every week he drives the six miles to a music shop in the nearest large town to rent about twenty CDs – mostly of regional folk music – for 35p each. On Fridays and Sundays, the only evenings Night Commotion opens, he DJs all night.

  One hundred metres from João Pedro's rocking chair, on the same street, is Arlindo's front door. When I arrive he looks at me suspiciously. He spent the morning shooting rare birds and thinks I have come to arrest him.

  Whether it was his innate sense of motivating the public, his rivalry against Ceub, or simply his passion for football, Arlindo built Juventus into a potent local force. The team was unique in the town in having an organised supporters club. Juventus was for a while the most popular team in Brejinho.

  'We called our team Juventus because we had a vote and it won out over Arsenal,' says Arlindo. He fetches blue and white banners with slogans like 'Juventos – The Most Loved' and 'Juventos – Animal'. His spelling is not much better than his sense of colour. Juventus of Turin play in black and white stripes. I ask Arlindo why he chose blue and white. 'Doesn't the Italian Juventus play in those colours?' he replies, a little confused.

  Arlindo Formiga (left) and his Juventus supporters

  To increase Juventus' glamour he painted Coca-Cola on the front of their strips – not because there was any financial backing, which there would never be in Brejinho, but because the soft drink company sponsored the national team.

  Big Tony would have been the perfect stage for a Ceub vs. Juventus local derby. When he tells me that it never happened, I am astonished.

  'I don't know what it's like in there,' Arlindo tells me. 'I've never been.'

  Arlindo, aged fifty-two, used to be a local councillor. He did himself no favours by opposing João Pedro, a politician who in the tradition of backwoods politics ruled unforgiv-ingly over dissent. 'João Pedro asked a cousin of mine to tell me I was banned. Whoever opposes him never gets to play at Big Tony.'

  Where did Juventus play? For several years the team made do with a dirt pitch opposite the new stadium, on the other side of the one road that passes through the town. The two Brejinho teams only ever played each other in tournaments away from home. Then, in 1999, the owner of Juventus' pitch sold the plot and Juventus ceased to exist. Arlindo sold the posts, the net, the substitutes' bench, four sets of shirts, twelve pairs of football boots and two balls. All he has left is the supporters' banners.

  He is left with a bitter taste in his toothless mouth. 'The stadium belongs to the people. It's not private. But they say it's theirs, so what can I do?' His pride stopped him begging for permission. 'If you came to my house and on the first day I sent you away, would you come back? I will never enter a place from where I have been expelled.'

  João Pedro was a classic despotic local chief who received favours from his representatives in federal government in exchange for guaranteeing electoral support. João Pedro played the role par excellence. He boasts that Brejinho always has the highest rate of support in Pernambuco for the state's right-wing congressman. The payback has been generous. Thanks to the congressman's influence in Brasilia, in 1998 the Sports Ministry built Brejinho – already endowed with the best facilities in the region – a brand-new indoor sports centre.

  The town is still without a public market.

  I will always sing to the sound of my guitar

  That our stadium has admirers near and far.

  Big Tony is a stage for every football star.

  Chapter Eight

  CARS, GIRLS AND KEEPING IT UP

  Walter Lacet, Flamengo's Number 4, takes possession in his own half. The car dominates the ball with its front left wheel. It accelerates towards the oncoming goal. Nought to thirty in sixty metres. As Lacet approaches the area the angle is tight. He attempts a sharp left. Too late. The car crashes into the side of the post.

  'Mmm. It was a wonderful time. God, how I miss it,' yearns Mário Bucich. We are watching a video of automobile football, or autoball, a radical sporting crossbreed from the 1970s played by two teams of cars and a 1.2m-diameter leather ball. Mário talks of his autoball days with the dreamy gaze of a cricketer reminiscing about Sunday afternoons on the village green.

  'The referee was always on foot,' he points out softly, proudly. 'And never once did he
get run over.'

  'Yes he did,' interrupts Ivan Sant'Anna, sitting next to him.

  'Sometimes we knocked the ref over,' Ivan adds brusquely, 'but there was never a serious accident in autoball, because the pitch was small. If the pitch were four times the size, full of empty space, then it would have been dangerous. But the size of the pitch limited the speed of the cars.'

  We are in the living room of Ivan's eleventh-floor flat in Rio de Janeiro's nouveau-riche suburb Barra da Tijuca. From the window, you can see beyond nearby malls and tower blocks towards miles of flat land until a lagoon meets a ridge of green mountains. It is a triumph of dramatic landscape over the immediate urban banality. 'I think autoball has something to do with what you are seeing out there,' says Mário, pointing to the horizon. 'With being free. The Carioca feels free.'*

  The video plays on. Ivan serves us coconut water, adding that it is from a very efficient coconut home-delivery service. Autoball is an entertaining spectacle: It's A Knockout meets Demolition Derby, a mixture of childish fun with adult danger, of absolute simplicity with noisy, dirty, mechanical aggression. Since the ball is so big – twice the height of a car bonnet – the drivers and their machines look exaggeratedly small and childlike, no matter how fast or recklessly they drive. The ball is made of buffalo leather, and it bounces around like a big, heavy balloon as if obeying lunar laws of gravity. The referee runs up and down the touchline, blowing unheard and unheeded whistles and occasionally dislodging the ball from a mass of twisted steel. He's more a glorified traffic warden than a referee, but he gets the surreal thrill of showing a yellow card to a roaring automobile.

  Ivan, sixty, and Mário, fifty-seven, have kept in touch since they hung up their driving shoes. Mário, who now works in the solar energy business, is a soft-spoken, well-mannered man whose serene air is accentuated by a professorial white moustache and goatee. I ask what was the worst accident that happened.

  'Was it the guy whose car exploded?' says Ivan.

  Mário shakes his head: 'No. It was when a spectator was where he shouldn't have been, just behind the touchline, about half a metre lower than the pitch. A driver lost control, spun in a circle and landed on this guy's chest. But I think he only broke an arm, isn't that right?'

  Ivan agrees: 'An arm, a collarbone. That's right. The driver was prosecuted. There was a court case. Running someone over is a criminal offence – even if it happens as part of a sporting event. It took five years to come to court.'

  'Autoball was exciting,' enthuses Ivan. 'Cars were often flipped over, there were lots of fires. But we were prepared for these things. It wasn't dangerous in the sense that someone could have died, like in a race of Formula Indy. You only risked breaking an arm or a leg, that sort of thing.' For Mário it was good clean fun: 'There was no danger at all. It was a sport. It wasn't a circus show.'

  For more than five years autoball was the sport of Rio de Janeiro's young elite, who would buy and trash cars like they were pairs of boots. Autoball acquired rules, a federation and teams endorsed by the five major football clubs, Flamengo, Fluminense, Botafogo, Vasco and America.

  It produced its own stars. Ivan scored on his first appearance in 1970 and was subsequently autoball's most prolific striker. 'The other day I was in the fish market, and a man comes up and asks me for an autograph,' says Ivan, slightly mystified that anyone could still remember. 'He said "because you were the best autoball player there ever was".'

  Ivan is tall and has a small round head with closely cropped white hair. He is wearing shorts with socks up to his knees. Whereas Mário is reserved, Ivan is loud, direct, domineering and distinctly cavalier. For him, of course autoball wasn't dangerous. When the sport was banned he took up flying acrobatic planes.

  His pilot's licence had already come in handy. He and Mário, once 300 miles away in Belo Horizonte for an exhibition match, realised that their cars were in a freight wagon stuck somewhere on the rail line from Rio. Ivan decided to fix the problem. He rented a plane. He flew above the track and followed it back towards Rio.

  'He found the train, and then buzzed it three times at the level of the driver, yelling for the guy to get moving,' says Mário, still in awe of his colleague. 'You ask me what was exciting in autoball – it's memories like that.'

  Ivan shrugs: 'I was a pilot. We needed the cars.'

  Autoball emerged as a solution for what to do with a 1.2-metre, 12kg ball that had been made by the São Paulo ball factory Drible to commemorate a match of the Brazilian national team. The giant leather orb had stayed in the factory until 1970, when it was lent out for an attempt to create equestrian football. One might have thought polo already fulfilled this need. Not so. In the town of Taubate the horses were expected to, most unBrazilianly, hoof the ball. 'The game would have been a success – the stadium was full,' wrote O Globo, 'except that the horses were scared to death of the ball, and one of the few to risk a kick broke his leg.'

  The buffalo-skinned supersphere ended up in the hands of Mário Tourinho, former member of the Competitive Drivers Association and for two decades team medic of America Football Club. Mário had dreamt up autoball by accident. He was driving along Copacabana and a ball came flying towards his windscreen. Instead of averting the collision he charged into it. Thwack! The ball bounced back like a 'perfect kick'. Eureka! He saw at once that his two passions could be merged into a unique new sport.

  Mário was a surgeon. It could be argued that he behaved so as to create new clients. Yet he believed that autoball, despite its violence, was a good way to relax drivers' nerves: 'It's a necessary therapy in today's age, when stress is creating a great human mass of neuroses,' he said. Years later, Mário underlined his position as football's most controversial medic when he performed Garrincha's long-awaited knee operation.

  The first autoball match took place on 19 September 1970 – three months after Brazil won the World Cup in Mexico – during the half-time period of a game between Flamengo and Madureira. Luiz Mendes, the radio commentator, remembers that about ten cars drove on to a side pitch and started driving into each other. The match, however, entered football folklore for something else. Twenty-six minutes into the second half Ubirajara Alcantara, Flamengo's goalkeeper, booted the ball upfield. In the air it was carried by a gust of wind and bounced straight into the opposing net. Never before or since has a keeper in Brazil scored from his area. Autoball was the most crackpot development of the year, yet its launch was overshadowed by a goal kick.

  Autoball player shows off control technique

  The sport gradually evolved its practical procedures. Depending on the size of the pitch, autoball could be three, four-, five-or even six-a-side. The cars were old Fords, Chevrolets, Volkswagens and Renaults. Rules were kept simple. They followed the spirit of football, with the modifications that reversing was only allowed off the ball, goalkeeper cars were not permitted to save using the side of their vehicles and there were no throw-ins or corner kicks. Scorelines were high, such as 9-6 or 7-5.

  The first matches were between a team in yellow 'shirts' and a team in red. But there were teething problems; the cars were old and broke down, technique was poor and the turnouts were low. The following year, in 1971, Mário Tourinho organised an exhibition game on Copacabana's Atlantic Avenue, the most glamorous stage for a sporting event after the Maracanã.

  The road was closed. Crowds gathered. Ivan turned up in a brand-new Alfa Romeo. He asked his colleagues not to bump into him. Another player had the same request. He had rented a car to take part. 'We all took a lot of care not to squash his car,' says Mário Bucich. 'The rental shop should have loved it – the car hardly added mileage and returned scratchless.'

  'It was in the middle of the road, it was crazy. But seriously, no one ran into anyone,' swears Ivan.

  To raise the sport's profile its enthusiasts approached Rio's football clubs for permission to have teams play under their colours. In 1973 the first Carioca Championship began with fortnightly games between Fluminense, Vasco, F
lamengo and America. It lasted six months. The following year America made way for Botafogo.

  The cars were painted in team colours and, like team shirts, featured a number and the club emblem. They were fitted inside with a pole from the floor to the ceiling, to make sure the roof would not cave in if they overturned. Different cars had different uses and required different techniques. If a Volkswagen Beetle hit the ball, the curved bonnet would lob the ball in the air – enabling other cars to 'head' the ball with their windscreens or roofs. Cars with square bonnets could be used for penalties and for passes along the ground. Specialist repairmen were on hand. In case of a breakdown 'the mechanics, nicknamed "masseurs", [rush] on to the field with levers, wrenches, and hammers to see if the car can be kept running,' wrote one newspaper in 1975. 'Doctor' Castro, a masseur, surpassed himself when he managed to fix a car that twenty minutes beforehand had caught fire.

  Autoball required skill, courage and deep pockets. Ivan, then a partner in a financial broker's, bankrolled his hobby personally. 'It was a very expensive sport. I spent lots of money, say US$3,000 a time,' he estimates. 'You needed to buy a car almost every game. We bought taxis. You had to customise the car. Some people liked even to have two or three cars per game. It really wrecked the clutch, so you had to swap the car a lot.'

  There is a certain unavoidable logic to the emergence of autoball, since it suited Brazilian traits of playfulness, reckless driving and wanton destruction. It also combined the two mainstream sports of which Brazil boasts the best international record: football and motor racing. Brazil is the only country to have won the football World Cup four times. Brazilian drivers have won the Formula One championship eight times – more than the drivers of any other nationality. Autoball coincided both with Brazil's post-1970 World Cup honeymoon and with the triumphs of Brazil's first Formula One champion, Emerson Fittipaldi, in 1972 and 1974. Brazil was the best in the world in racing cars and kicking balls. Why not capitalise?