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Futebol

Filed under: Imported

Alex Bellos's book Futebol: Soccer, the Brazilian Way opens in the Faroe Islands, a God-forsaken, snow packed, volcanic hiccup midway between Iceland and Scotland. In this unlikely outpost Bellos tracks down a handful of comically miserable Brazilians who have traveled to the country to play professional soccer.

Rio it is not. Their matches take place in sub-freezing temperatures before spectators who refuse to leave the warmth of their automobiles. "Once the wind was so strong that the referee ordered all the players to crouch on the ground so they were not blown off the pitch," Bellos writes.

Despite having traveled halfway around the world to play soccer, the Brazilians aren't particularly adept at the sport. In fact one of the players, Robson, is so incompetent that he plays just one match for his new club. Robson stays on in the Faroes anyway, finding work in a fish factory and marrying a local girl.

Such tragicomic vignettes crop up throughout Futebol, just published in paperback in the U.S., Bellos's dissection of Brazilian culture through the prism of soccer. In the century since the game was first introduced in Brazil, it has come to permeate every aspect of society and--as evidenced by the hapless Faroese exiles--developed into one of the country's primary exports. Of course, Brazilians are also the best soccer players in the world, having won an unprecedented five World Cup Championships.

Bellos is a correspondent for the Guardian and Observer newspapers. He arrived in Brazil just five years ago. Despite this short gestation period, Bellos proves an adept, engaging tour guide. He criss-crosses the country, picking through the cultural detritus and sketching sharp, funny portraits of the many eccentrics who have impacted Brazilian soccer. Bellos concerns himself with the nuts and bolts of the game only in as much as it provides a window into the larger culture. In fact, it's not until page 274 that he describes a live match--and even then the action lasts for just a page.

Nothing better exemplifies the country's obsession with soccer than the collective psychosis that afflicted it following Brazil's 1950 World Cup defeat to Uruguay. In the ensuing decades, the loss has become immortalized in Brazilian minds as a tragedy on par with Hiroshima. Consider the fate of Barbosa, the losing goalkeeper. "Barbosa was never allowed to forget 1950," Bellos writes. "Before he died, virtually penniless, in April 2000 he said that the saddest moment in his life was twenty years after the match. A woman in a shop spotted him. 'Look at him,' she told her son. 'He is the man that made all of Brazil cry.'"

Not even Bill Buckner has been abused in such a manner.

Manuel Francisco dos Santos, better known as Garrincha, suffered an even more ignominious fate. While even non-soccer fans the world over are familiar with Pele, Garrincha is largely unknown outside of Brazil--even though many consider him the greatest player the game has ever seen. Garrincha's most distinguishing physical characteristic was that his legs were crooked--the left curving outward and the right inward. He led Brazil to World Cup championships in 1958 and 1962, dazzling defenders with his dribbling expertise, before crippling injuries forced him out of the game in his early thirties.

Off the field Garrincha was a hapless goof. He lived in squalor, had a penchant for crashing cars, and fathered scads of children. After leaving the game he spiraled into suicidal alcoholism and died in 1983 at the age of 49. In a particularly heartbreaking passage, Bellos tracks down one of Garrincha's daughters, Nenel. She's living in a tiny, fetid apartment with her grown son, the two of them seemingly subsisiting entirely on beer. "Nenel lives ten miles from the beach," Bellos notes. "Yet she has never been."

Such intrepid reporting and telling details make Futebol worth reading--even if you don't give a rip about soccer.

Posted by Paul Demko at June 3, 2003 5:43 PM

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