Futebol Nation

by David Goldblatt

  Television’s time would come, but until the 1970s radio remained the most popular way in which football was consumed. In fact, as almost the entire nation came within reach of a radio with the advent of the new transistor radio, the audience for football grew. Listening to the football on a portable radio was so ubiquitous that it appears as a well-worn gag in Amácio Mazzaropi’s 1966 comedy O Corintiano. Sitting in full evening dress in a fancy theatre, Mazzaropi’s character has a small radio in his lap to listen to the Corinthians game. He sees a police officer stalking the aisles and guiltily hides it beneath his jacket. The officer leans over conspiratorially and asks, ‘So what is the score?’ Films of crowds from the era show many fans with small earphones or a set jammed against the side of their head.

  The new stars of the medium brought wit and warmth to the game. Fiori Gigliotti, who was the key commentator for the 1962 World Cup final, announced kick-off with, ‘The curtains are open, it’s the start of the show,’ and mordantly noted of a team chasing a game, ‘Time goes by . . .’ The final minutes of the drama were the ‘twilight hour’; conceding a goal evoked stern sympathy, ‘Now there’s no use crying’; while a winner was met with ‘Uma beleeeeza de gol! ’ (‘A beeeeautiful goal!’) and ‘Um beijo no seu coração’ (‘A kiss in your heart’). Pedro Luiz approached new records of exasperation and words per minute in the maniacal school of commentary while Waldir Amaral, who meandered through the game well into the 1970s, had a gift for catchphrases and nicknames: when a team looked like scoring, the goal was smoking; when they had scored, there was a fish in the net.

  Literacy rates began to rise in the 1940s and 1950s, creating a real mass market for the printed press in general and sports publications in particular. The tradition of football writing established in the 1940s by Mário Filho and his collaborators was consolidated. It was a genre which crossed the boundaries of the public and the private, popular and high culture, journalism and literature, and for three decades it would flourish. Filho had something of the air of the twinkle-eyed uncle spinning you a yarn, offering a homely and uncontroversial Freyrian reading of Brazilian football as a bountiful multi-ethnic melting pot. Nelson Rodrigues, his brother, was cut from very different cloth. Playwright, critic and polemicist, his prose was by turns witty, barbed and scandalous. Alongside football his work explored Rio in search of perversion, infidelity and hysteria; fuelled by a cocktail of caffeine, nicotine and alcohol, he cut a frenetic arc across the cityscape. His partiality was more extreme than Ary Barroso’s: ‘I’m Fluminense. I always was Fluminense. I’d say I was Fluminense in a past life.’ His penchant for the mysterious and the conspiratorial led him to personify the role of chance in football in the character of Sobrenatural de Almeida – the ghost of a medieval madman living in a northern suburb of Rio whose life was devoted to the creation of flukes and upsets.

  Filho and Rodrigues, though continuing to write into the 1960s and 1970s respectively, gave way to a new generation of Freyrian commentators like Armando Nogueira and João Saldanha. And as the São Paulo Modernists of the 1920s and the north-eastern writers of the 1940s aged and died, their place was taken by a new generation of poets and artists engaged with football. Carlos Drummond de Andrade wrote a series of crônicas for Folha de São Paulo for every World Cup between 1958 and 1986. Informed and playful, he slyly suggested that the 1962 World Cup-winning squad would make a better and more unified ministerial team than President Goulart’s turbulent executive. In dry sparse lines of poetry he compared football’s place in Brazilian culture to that of an informal ludic cult, a zone of playful fantasy and joy:

  Football is played in the stadium?

  Football is played on the beach,

  Football is played on the street.

  Football is played in the soul.

  The ball is the same: a religious order

  for superstars and stilt-walkers.

  The same pleasure of playing

  An imagined World Cup,

  A game on a dusty hill.

  João Cabral de Melo Neto, the diplomat-poet from Recife, had played for his local club Santa Cruz as a teenager and fiercely supported another Recife side, América. In a letter to his cousin he wrote of one victory, ‘What more could one ask of life?’10 His works include poems about fans of América, the defensive midfielder Ademir da Guia, and a dialogue between a Brazilian player and a Spanish coach that reworked the old Freyrian notions of Brazilian and European football. His description of Ademir’s capacity for wearing down players is almost sultry: ‘He sends him where he wants, rotting him. The rhythm of walking on warm sand . . . numbing and tying down the most relentless opponent.’ Even Clarice Lispector, the brilliant but enigmatic Ukrainian-Brazilian author, was lured into writing football crônicas. One of her short stories featured someone having a nervous breakdown in the concourses of the Maracanã, which perhaps explains why she, unlike earlier generations of writers, watched the games almost entirely from the comfort of her armchair.

  To the small canon of football painting produced in the Vargas era, the 1950s and 1960s added considerably more and in a variety of styles: Ivan Serpa’s cool, geometrically composed players; the gaunt football figurines of Aldemir Martins and their comic, elastic counterparts in the work of Roberto Magalhães; Claudio Tozzi’s pop-art football shirts; and Rubens Gerchman’s large playful canvases of crowded football stands. For the most part these were celebratory works, but in the football paintings of José Aguilar we can also see the emergence of a more critical position. His canvas of the Seleção, painted just after the military coup of 1964, had all their faces obscured by white paint, a haunting and hollow depiction of the futebol nation.

  The link that had been established between music and football, metaphorically and literally, in the 1930s and 1940s was even stronger in the following two decades. The 1958 and 1962 World Cups alone saw over thirty-five football-related tunes released on to the market. The range of performers, composers and genres drew on the rich brew of contemporary Brazilian music and expressed a confidence that had hitherto been very rare in Brazilian culture. The breezily patriotic and massively popular march ‘A Taça do Mundo é Nossa’ (‘The World Cup is Ours’) exemplified this: ‘That Brazilian abroad/Showed how football really is/He won the World Cup / Sambando with the ball at his feet/Goool!’ Straight-ahead sambas like the song ‘Aquarela da Vitória’ (‘A Victory in Watercolours’) were plentiful. Old stars like Jackson do Pandeiro sang ‘O Rei Pelé’. A new star, Jair Rodrigues, sang ‘Brasil Sensacional’. Comic actor Ronald Golias cut a disc, while the back-country rhythms of catarete got a football workout from São Paulo guitar duo Tonico e Tinoco with ‘The Big Brazilian Squad’.

  Radio, music and literature all played their parts in creating Brazil’s distinctive football culture of the 1950s and 1960s, celebrating and explaining its new brilliance and global victories. However, the most interesting art form of the era, and certainly the medium that offered the sharpest insights into football’s problems, was film. For the mass audience there were more of the kinds of football films produced in the 1930s: the 1953 melodrama O Craque set at Corinthians in São Paulo was followed by O Preço da Vitória, Oswaldo Sampaio’s bizarre adventure movie, half faux documentary, half fiction, that told the story of the 1958 World Cup. In the mid-1960s the strong demand for slapstick saw two football comedies released, The Man Who Stole the World Cup in 1963 and the aforementioned O Corintiano in 1966. The former was a shambling detective caper, the latter a more chaotic but illuminating family comedy from Amácio Mazzaropi, the undisputed star of Brazilian cinematic clowning. Mazzaropi plays a Corinthians-obsessed barber who fights with his Palmeiras-supporting neighbours, buys up every copy of the paper at the local stall on the days Corinthians lose, and ejects customers from his shop when they complain about the volume of football talk. In a fabulous reversal of the moral universe depicted in the football movies of the Vargas years, he deplores the thought that his son wants to become a doctor and his daughter a bal
let dancer, suggesting that he should play for Corinthians and that she should marry the side’s star – Rivelino. Not intentionally comic, but so sentimental and contrived that it was laughable, was the 1963 homily cum hagiography O Rei Pelé, which told the story of his life through a series of fictionalized flashbacks and edited footage from his playing career. It was based on a book by writer Ruy Barbosa, who went on to be one of the pioneering writers of Brazil’s telenovelas. The football player, certainly a black one, was no longer a eugenic missionary, but he could be drenched in sentimentality, be cast as the humble hero, a model of hard work, personal discipline and deference.

  Testament to the new creative energies of the time, this mixture of pantomime comedy and uncritical melodrama was challenged by the emergence of Cinema Novo, the collective product of a group of producers and directors working from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s. It drew on Italian neorealism’s use of street scenes and amateur actors, borrowed the documentary techniques of American cinéma-vérité, and infused both styles with a political and aesthetic agenda that would take the camera to Brazil’s poorest and most troubled places. Among the earliest and most important Cinema Novo films, predating the term itself, was Rio 40 Graus (‘Rio 40 Degrees’) of 1955, directed by Nelson Pereira dos Santos. The film is made up of a series of interconnecting short stories of life in the favela of São Sebastião in Rio de Janeiro. These tales are linked by the journeys of five kids selling peanuts on the city’s streets and at its famous landmarks – Sugar Loaf Mountain and a Sunday game at the Maracanã. It was shot entirely on location and with many of the cast drawn from local amateurs. This was groundbreaking – the first Brazilian film located among the poor where football was an everyday part of life – and disturbing enough to conservative Brazil for Rio’s chief of police to seek to ban the film, on the fabulously pernickety grounds that Rio was never hotter than 39.6 degrees. Football also features in one of the stories in which an ageing star worries about his place in the team and an impending transfer to São Paulo; players are depicted, for the first time in a Brazilian film, as commodities to be bought and sold at another’s whim. A decade later in A Falecida (‘The Deceased’), a film based on a Nelson Rodrigues play, football was entwined with matrimonial strife in a poor neighbourhood in Rio’s Zona Norte. The film tells the story of the unhappily married Zulmira and Toni. Zulmira, having a premonition of her own death, begins to plan an extravagant funeral. Toni shoots pool, drinks and worries about Vasco versus Fluminense. When Zulmira’s premonition comes to pass and a bout of pneumonia takes her to her deathbed she sends Toni to see an old friend, Pimentel, who will pay the funeral expenses. Pimentel, it turns out, is an ex-player and an ex-lover of Zulmira. Toni threatens to blackmail the old boy, and leaves with the money. He spends a fraction of it on the cheapest funeral he can manage. The final scenes of the film show Toni watching Vasco at the Maracanã, crying and ranting to the crowd as he lets the money go. Football, supposedly an escape valve and a solace, does not actually offer joy or happiness, but just enough abandon to feel grief.

  Cinema Novo went on to produce two important football documentaries in the early 1960s: Subterrâneos do Futebol and Garrincha: Alegria do Povo. Subterrâneos do Futebol (‘Underground Football’) was one part of a quartet of documentaries titled Brasil Verdade trying to get under the surface of the country that were produced by the great photographer Thomas Farkas. Directed by Maurice Capovilla, the film weaves together the lives and thoughts of three players at different phases of their careers at Santos. The film begins with Pelé, the established star, but its heart is with Luís Carlos Freitas, a young man just starting his career in professional football, and Zózimo, who is nearing the end of his. In scenes of training sessions, medicals and interviews, the film depicts the narrow confines of the player’s life, regimented and controlled by club directors, coaches and doctors, all of whom are white, while all three players are black. Zózimo, a member of two World Cup-winning squads, has fallen from grace. He is bitter, players are just slaves and his wife complains of the long tours that take him away from home. The film ends with scenes of violence on the pitch during the São Paulo Championship, and the drunken, chaotic behaviour in the stands. Military police and helmeted soldiers rush the crowd, blood drips from a player’s head wounds.

  The central thread of Garrincha: Alegria do Povo (‘Joy of the People’), directed by Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, is a portrait of the player, his life on and off the field, and his place in Brazil’s new mythic football history. A fragmented, non-linear montage, the film includes footage of the Maracanazo, Garrincha’s brilliant performances at the 1958 and 1962 World Cups, and visually roots those stories in the football-playing cultures of the poor. Garrincha plays a game of five-a-side in the dirt, shirtless and shoeless, in his home town of Pau Grande before enjoying drinks and cigarettes and gossip. Kids play football on Copacabana beach, when it was still open enough for the poor to play, and in the streets when Rio’s traffic was light compared to today’s gridlock. Like Subterrâneos do Futebol, the film gives a clear sense of the fragility of players’ bodies and the authoritarian, controlled environment in which they live and work – the camera often lingers on Garrincha’s pet bird in its cage. But its finest moments are its depictions of Garrincha as a player and the game as a popular spectacular. Against sparse percussive samba, Andrade rapidly cuts between dramatic pictures of Garrincha in action, his fabulous low centre of gravity allowing him to bend and twist down and around his opponents. Slow-motion pictures, filmed from the touchline, reveal Garrincha’s delicacy of touch as he guides and slides the ball past a defender, cleverly uncluttered frames show him stopping the ball dead, sending his opponents sprawling then spinning round to scoop the ball back up. Simultaneously, the camera roves around the stands of the Maracanã with the eye of the portraitist, brilliantly framing dozens of faces, revealing the real demographics of Brazilian football: black, mulatto and white, so many with missing teeth and scrawny frames, so many looks of expectation, anticipation, anxiety and hope. These elements of the film combine most powerfully in the sequences that intercut Garrincha’s goals and the riotous celebrations of the crowd. The firecrackers and the yells of pleasure explode over Bach’s ‘Crown Him King of Kings’, a filmic climax equivalent to Vinicius de Moraes’s poetic evocation of the divine joy of these moments.

  One dribble, two dribbles; the ball like a braid

  It’s happy between your legs – you are one wind!

  A single moment, the crowd poised

  In the act of death, stands up and yells

  united, their song of hope.

  Garrincha, the angel, listens and answers: Goooool!11

  The Brazil of the late Vargas and the Kubitschek regimes that had proved so culturally fertile, which had both nurtured and embraced the nation’s greatest footballing triumphs, was coming to a close sooner than many had imagined. In 1960 the unpredictable but electric Jânio Quadros, governor of São Paulo, was elected president on a right-wing anti-corruption, anti-inflation platform. After just seven months his nerve appeared to fail or a wild bluff was called as he suddenly offered his resignation to the Brazilian Congress, which accepted it. His replacement was the vice-president João Goulart, previously the ultra-populist minister of labour in the last Vargas cabinet. His three years in power grew increasingly turbulent. The massive spending programmes of the Kubitschek years and the tendency to print money saw inflation climbing from less than 10 per cent a year to over 100 per cent in 1964, a collapse in the value of the currency and a real foreign-exchange crisis. As the economy spiralled out of control, political opinion polarized. The left in Brazil, though fragmented and querulous, pressured the government from one side, calling for radical measures of redistribution and public control of the economy. On the right, the military in particular looked askance at the economic chaos and social ferment that Brazil’s democracy had helped produce.

  Brazil’s football clubs, like every other institution, were desperat
e for foreign currency that would hold its value. Unlike most of its exports, football was massively in demand, burnished by the two World Cup victories. Brazilian football went on a global tour. Santos and Pelé were the biggest attractions, playing on every continent, but Fluminense went to Scandinavia and the Soviet Union, Vasco da Gama played in West Africa, and Botafogo toured in France and Morocco. A tiny team from Rio’s lower divisions, Madureira, could make a living on a three-month tour of Central America and the Caribbean. They even played in Cuba, just a year after the Missile Crisis, and were pictured in the Brazilian press with a smiling Che Guevara – a photograph that must have raised a few eyebrows in the officers’ common rooms of the Brazilian military, where a paranoid anti-communism, provoked by the successes of the Cuban revolution, was already at fever pitch.

  In late 1963 and early 1964 Goulart, who had tried hitherto to hold a centrist position, opted for the left and announced a series of nationalizations and land reforms backed by major public demonstrations in the big cities. The right rallied with their own counter-marches. Then in spring 1964, with the tacit agreement of the US government, the military stepped in. Key government offices in Rio and Brasília were occupied, and major figures on the left were rounded up and imprisoned. The vice-president called for the people to fill the streets, but they remained deserted, while Goulart fled to Uruguay. In February and March Santos and Pelé had left Brazil, still a democratic state and with a vibrant and inventive culture, for a short tour of Argentina, Uruguay, Peru and Chile. They returned to a Brazil in which the generals were settling down to almost two decades of power. Then, as if nothing had changed, Santos went out and won the São Paulo State Championship again. There would be blood and fire to come, but for the moment the military had taken power with a minimum of resistance, bloodshed or drama. It would only become apparent in retrospect that Brazilian football and society would be profoundly deformed by their presence.