In few, if any other countries, is a love of football so strongly linked to the national identity than Brazil, where the game's roots are both elite and populist, spreading across all sectors of society. The roots of football in Brazil begin in the late 19th century and just over fifty years later it was so ingrained in the national psyche that the events which led to the loss of the World Cup in 1950 have yet to be erased by multiple subsequent wins of the Jules Rimet and World Cup trophy. To examine Garrincha, perhaps the last and the greatest of the amateur factory or worker footballers turned professional, a man beloved by Brazil as a nation and one who embodied the spirit of the game in the country, I will first look at the Brazil's past and its relationship with football.
Brazil's history is one which has been influenced by many factors: colonisation, slavery, European industrial exploitation, its wealth of natural resources and its unique demographic. As a result, the culture of the enormous country is as diverse as the people within it. However, as Brazilian anthropologist Roberto DaMatta argues, the most powerful sources of social identity are the various manifestations of popular culutre, such as carnival, soccer and popular religiosity (Shirts, 1989: 122). If one element of the Brazilian psyche is common to all of Brazil, it is that of football. The Brazilian national seleção is widely regarded as one of the world's best and is the most succesful team in the history of the World Cup, with an unparallelled five wins. As such, Brazil's obsession with the sport is justified, as Bellos notes, “no other country is branded by a single sport [...] to the extent that Brazil is by football” (Bellos, 2003: 2). So how did a game of a leather ball, imported by Charles Miller from England in 1894 when he arrived in Santos, grow to be such a phenomenon in Brazil within fifty years?
The secret is possibly in the timing. In 1888, with the abolition of slavery, there was now a large disenfranchised population, who became the new lowest tier of society. The lure of the new foreign, elite game was powerful, and as it required little or no equipment bar a ball, which could be made of any material, it was easily immitated by the lower classes also. “Football was acquiring opposite reputations. It was both the private hobby of the rich and the preferred past time of gangs of poor youths” (Bellos, 2003: 31). While the lower class Afro-Brazilians and mulattos were not allowed to play or even attend the games, they were able to play in their impromptu games, and football became a universal feature of Brazilian society.
The opening up of football clubs to those of non-elite, white stock was a longer process however. Football took hold first in São Paulo, but eventually Rio de Janeiro became the hub of Brazilian football. There were two main leagues set up as a result, the Campeonato Paulista for the teams from the São Paulo region and the Campeonato Carioca for the teams from the Rio region, in 1902 and 1906 respectively. At this point, the games were still attended by men in “suits, ties and hats, and smartly dressed young girls and women, showing by their clothing that they belonged to Rio's [or São Paulo's] finest families" (Leite Lopes, 2000: 243). While the original clubs were set up within rowing clubs, another popular English sport in Brazil at the time, they soon became attached to businesses and factories, where it was promoted as a leisure activity which fostered integration amongst the employees. As such, the local teams and factory towns began to field players who were employed in their businesses, and the real break with elitist tradition came from the club Bangú, an offshoot of the Companhia Progresso Industrial textile factory (Leite Lopes, 2000: 244-5). It was geographically isolated and as such could not draw on a base of white elitist support, and needed to recruit locally. While there were many Europeans in their original line up, they eventually moved on (promoted or returned home) and had to be replaced by workers from the factory, mulattos or Afro-Brazilian players. Bangu's stadium was home to a crowd of non-elites, another break with tradition, as the fans were not segregated and were either co-workers or family and friends. Bangu however, “was not strong enough to threaten the status quo, and, paradoxically, it buttressed the game's 'amateur ethic' since its players earned their wages as industrial workers” (Bellos, 2003: 32). While the taboo had been bent it had not been broken, and the first club to really threaten the elites was Vasco Da Gama, a club set up and run by Portuguese business owners in Rio. Their actions in recruiting from the talented suburban leagues and not sticking to the elite meant that they forced the hand of the elite clubs. When Vasco won the championship in 1923 after being promoted that season, the rest of the traditional clubs were outraged with the semi-professionalism of the team. A new league was formed and Vasco were excluded, on the grounds that they had no stadium. Many other measures were introduced to keep the lower class players out of the league, by introducing the requirement to sign one's name before every game. Vasco however, were not to be stopped and responded by building the largest stadium in Rio and giving their players crash literacy courses. They also offered their players jobs with local merchants so as to disguise their incomes. Between both Bangú and Vasco, the concept of the worker footballer had been invented and popularised. Bangú had done so in the early part of the century (spurring on América Fabril in the town of Pau Grande to form their own team, Sporting Clube Pau Grande) and Vasco had shown that such a policy yielded success in the 1920s1.
With the introduction of these players to the leagues, the other squads began to recruit players from a lower social class. As a result, the clamour for professionalism grew, coupled with Brazil's poor performance in the World Cup of 1930 with a squad which largely excluded players of other races2. The Confederção Brasileira de Desportos (CBD) was faced with a problem: “not only were the desirable, potentially professional soccer players to be found among the lower classes, but the overwhelming majority of them were mulatto or [Afro-Brazilian]” (Levine, 1980: 237). By 1933, Brazilian football had turned professional, spurred on by the experience of the Argentine clubs, who lost players to professional European clubs, particularly to Italy.
One of the advantages of the new professionalism was a change in attitude, albeit a slow one. Vasco's success and style had created a great interest in football, and with the lower classes finally entering the sport, the upper class elites would regularly ensure they knew they weren't welcome on the pitch. As such, they developed a different style, based on guile and ability, and derived from a variety of factors. As Domingos da Guia noted, “I was scared to play football, because I often saw black players, there in Bangu [sic], get whacked on the pitch, just because they made a foul, or sometimes for something less than that” (da Guia in Bellos, 2003: 35). As such, the new Brazilian style of football represented another break from tradition, with roots in capoeira and samba, a style replete with a swinging of the hips and guile. As Freyre notes, “the Dionysiac style of football [...] [sat] in contrast to the originally Apollonian style of this sport imparted by the British3 (1986: xxvi). In his work Masters and Slaves, Freyre also notes several facets of the Brazilian character which lend themselves to this footballing style, particularly an “indolence with a love of sport and adventure” (1970 :9), something which was definitely present in Manuel Francisco dos Santos, or Garrincha.
Born in the town of Pau Grande in 1933, with crooked legs, Garrincha began his life on the same path as the rest of the young men in the town, attending shcool (although Mané, as he was known, was not particularly fond of it), and on his fourteenth birthday beginning work in the local factory América Fabril. However he was not a diligent worker, and spent most of his time, as he had in his childhood, playing football whenever possible. He moved from his local team of Pau Grande to Botafogo4 in 1953, where he was a sensation from his first trial training session, where, after one half of play, the coach sent him to meet the directors to sign a contract that day (Castro, 2005: 41). His dribbling was unparallelled and unstoppable, and he would regularly beat an opponent, wait for them to return to their position, and beat them again. Although his crooked legs often led people to believe that he wouldn't pose a problem, he often bewildered them with his movement, and his favourite trick: To run and leave the ball behind, forcing the defender to run with him. He would repeat it several times before eventually moving with the ball, leaving the defender standing still and the crowd cheering and laughing. “People hadn't yet realised that Garrincha was the most amatuer footballer professional football would ever produce. Or that for him, the joy of playing didn't come with scoring goals or winning games ot even making money. Goals, victories, win bonuses – they were all just the inevitable products of the business of football. For Garrincha, the fun was in dribbling. Just dribbling” (Castro, 2005: 45). Although immediate success did not come to Botafogo, they eventually did assemble a team which won the Carioca championship. Furthermore, Garrincha was called into the World Cup Squad for 1958 – and became an instant sensation. Although he didn't play for the first two games, Garrincha earned his spot for the third, and most crucial game: A group decider against the USSR. Within the first three minutes, Garrincha had sealed his place in the hearts of the Brazilian nation, as well as the onlooking Swedish crowd. There had been a great fear on the part of the Brazilians, as they felt the USSR played a scientific football, and that they had computers or “electronic brains” (Castro, 2005: 117) to plan out their strategies. However, Garrincha could not be figured out by any computer, as Luis Mendes put it: “They put the first man in space, but they couldn't mark Garrincha” (Mendes, BBC). He was able to run the defenders in rings, and leave them fighting amongst themselves as to who should be marking who. Garrincha also, at one stage in the match, sat his opponent down with his skill, turned around, offered him his hand to help him up, and ran on with the ball. The first minute or so of this youtube video concentrates on Garrincha's performance in the 1958 World Cup: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_kiJjMS2K4&NR=1 . From that point Garrincha was known as a star, however his personal life was not as brilliant as his performances on the pitch. He was, at heart, a rural boy, but he also inherited a reliance on alcohol from his father which was eventually to kill him. Another trait he inherited from his father was his love of women, and he is said to have fathered many more than the 15 children, on whose birth certificates his name appears. His love affair and marriage to singer Elza Soares was the stuff of tabloids, but his drunken car crash in 1968, which killed his mother-in-law was not. Towards the end of his career, his drinking ruined any chance of continuing in football, and his name soon became synonymous with farcical contracts, having been sold to Corinthians, appearing once for Colmbian club América, and also having a short spell at Flamengo. Many other clubs offered him contracts, but having seen his fitness and bloated appearance from alcoholism, they decided aginst taking the risk. Garrincha had come crashing to earth having won the World Cup in 1958 and again in 1962. It was a rags to riches story which had turned on its head again by the end, and by 1963, the former hero had become “a man who abandoned the mother of his children for a famous singer, who had fought with his club over money, and who no longer flew free but sped around in a sports car [...] the man had replaced the myth, and no one liked the man” (Castro, 2005: 246).
Although Garrincha had run the gauntlet of fame and fortune and returned to his starting place, his funeral was still attended by thousands of mourners who blocked the traffic on the local highway for hours in a procession. It was indeed alcohol which killed him in the end, dying of a pulmonary oedema on the 19th of January 1983. While many footballers have also struggled with alcohol and drug addiction, similar to Garrincha, few are remebered as fondly as he was. As the last of what was perhaps a generation of worker footballers, he represented the amateur love of the game and the professional desire to succeed and for reward. He also represented a hope, to rise beyond stigma of race and appearance, to become a well loved star. The racial utopia which the Brazilian football team represents is often a mask for a more seirous undercurrent of social problems, and with a decline in the worker footballer, those who would once have had both employment and access to the sport, now find themselves in areas of high unemployment, deteriorating school systems and where crime is prevalent (Leite Lopes, 2000: 265). Although the need to cover one's face in rice powder before turning out for the football team may no longer be necessary5, within Brazil the need to have a certain complection may still be a pre-requisite to jumping the social boundaries. Futebol offers an “elusive success substitute [to the lower class], a fleeting point of identification with the (briefly) glamorous stars of the football panoply” (Levine, 1980: 247). The “factory footballer” has disappeared, yet the problems which plagued Garrincha and those who followed him have not.
1América Football Club (where Brazilian legend Romário was playing up until 2009), were another club which attempted to have a similar policy to Vasco. However, with their recruitment of Manteiga, a hugely talented Afro-Brazilian player whom they recruited from the navy squad, many of the team's players resigned in protest and were absorbed into Fluminense (Leite Lopes, 2000: 252). It did not yield for them the same success as it had for Vasco.
2Interestingly, the seleção which won the South American Championship in 1932, containing players of various backgrounds and races, were proclaimed as “mirrors of our social democracy” (José Lins de Rêgo in Levine, 1980: 240). Years later, the troubles of the squad defeated by Uruguay in 1950 in their home stadium, the Maracanã, were blamed mostly on the lack of desire of three players: Barbosa, Juvenal and Bigode, all of whom were Afro-Brazilian. While the team outwardly presented a sense of racial utopia, the tensions which were evident, not only in the squad but in society in general, were exacerbated by defeat.
3Freyre also notes that the Brazilian foot, as a reuslt of years of miscegination, lent itself to a style of play which was “more like a Dionysiac dance than the Britishly Apollonian game” (1963: 378)
4Garrincha also played briefly at Cruzeiro while still registered to Sporting Clube Pau Grande, and it was from Cruzeiro that Botafogo eventually bought his registration.
5Carlos Alberto, a famous brazilian footballer who played for Fluminense, ashamed of his dark complection, used to apply rice powder to his face to lighten it. Fluminense still carry pó de arroz as a nickname, although it was originally intended as an insult from Flamengo fans. Similarly, their rivals carry pó de carvão, originally intended as an insult from the Fluminense fans.
Bibliography
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