Soccer in Sun and Shadow

From Mutilation to Splendor

In 1921 the South American Cup was played in Buenos Aires. The president of Brazil, Epitácio Pessoa, issued a decree: for reasons of patriotic prestige there would be no brown skin on Brazil’s national team. Of the three matches they played, the white team lost two.

Friedenreich did not play in that championship. Back then, to be black in Brazilian soccer was simply impossible, and being mulatto was a trial. Friedenreich always started late because it took him half an hour to iron his hair in the dressing room. The only mulatto player on Fluminense, Carlos Alberto, used to whiten his face with rice powder.

Later on, despite the owners of power, things began to change. With the passage of time, the old soccer mutilated by racism gave way to a soccer of multicolored splendor. After so many years it is obvious that Brazil’s best players, from Friedenreich to Romário, by way of Domingos da Guia, Leônidas, Zizinho, Garrincha, Didi and Pelé, have been blacks and mulattos. All of them came up from poverty, and some of them returned to it. By contrast, there have never been blacks or mulattos among Brazil’s car-racing champions, which like tennis requires money.

In the global social pyramid, blacks are at the bottom and whites are at the top. In Brazil this is called “racial democracy,” but soccer is one of very few democratic venues where people of color can compete on an equal footing — up to a point. Even in soccer some are more equal than others. They all have the same rights, but the player who grew up hungry and the athlete who never missed a meal do not really compete on a level playing field. At least soccer offers a shot at social mobility for a poor child, usually black or mulatto, who had no other toy but a ball. The ball is the only fairy godmother he can believe in. Maybe she will feed him, maybe she will make him a hero, maybe even a god.

Misery trains him for soccer or for crime. From the moment of birth, that child is forced to turn his disadvantage into a weapon, and before long he learns to dribble around the rules of order that deny him a place. He learns the tricks of every trade and he becomes an expert in the art of pretending, surprising, breaking through where least expected, and throwing off an enemy with a hip feint or some other tune from the rascal’s songbook.