Soccer in Sun and Shadow Read online

  Soccer in Sun and Shadow

  By Eduardo Galeano

  Translated by Mark Fried

  BYLINER CLASSICS

  Copyright © 2013 by Eduardo Galeano

  Translation copyright © 2013 by Mark Fried

  Original copyright © 1997 by Eduardo Galeano and Mark Fried

  First published by Fourth Estate (London, 1997) and Verso (New York, 1998)

  2nd edition copyright © 2003 by Eduardo Galeano and Mark Fried

  4th edition copyright © 2009 by Eduardo Galeano and Mark Fried

  First published as El futból a sol y sombra by Siglo XXI Editores, S.A., and Ediciones del Chanchito © 1995 by Eduardo Galeano

  All rights reserved

  Cover image © Getty Images

  Interior design by Eduardo Galeano

  ISBN: 978-1-61452-077-1

  Byliner Inc.

  San Francisco, California

  For press inquiries, please contact

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  Author’s Confession

  Soccer

  The Player

  The Goalkeeper

  The Idol

  The Fan

  The Fanatic

  The Goal

  The Referee

  The Manager

  The Theater

  The Specialists

  The Language of Soccer Doctors

  Choreographed War

  The Language of War

  The Stadium

  The Ball

  The Origins

  The Rules of the Game

  The English Invasions

  Creole Soccer

  The Story of Fla and Flu

  The Opiate of the People?

  A Rolling Flag

  Blacks

  Zamora

  Samitier

  Death on the Field

  Friedenreich

  From Mutilation to Splendor

  The Second Discovery of America

  Andrade

  Ringlets

  The Olympic Goal

  Goal by Piendibene

  The Bicycle Kick

  Scarone

  Goal by Scarone

  The Occult Forces

  Goal by Nolo

  The 1930 World Cup

  Nasazzi

  Camus

  Juggernauts

  Turning Pro

  The 1934 World Cup

  God and the Devil in Rio de Janeiro

  The Sources of Misfortune

  Amulets and Spells

  Erico

  The 1938 World Cup

  Goal by Meazza

  Leônidas

  Domingos

  Domingos and She

  Goal by Atilio

  The Perfect Kiss Would Like to Be Unique

  The Machine

  Moreno

  Pedernera

  Goal by Severino

  Bombs

  The Man Who Turned Iron into Wind

  Contact Therapy

  Goal by Martino

  Goal by Heleno

  The 1950 World Cup

  Obdulio

  Barbosa

  Goal by Zarra

  Goal by Zizinho

  The Fun Lovers

  The 1954 World Cup

  Goal by Rahn

  Walking Advertisements

  Goal by Di Stéfano

  Di Stéfano

  Goal by Garrincha

  The 1958 World Cup

  Goal by Nílton

  Garrincha

  Didi

  Didi and She

  Kopa

  Carrizo

  Shirt Fever

  Goal by Puskás

  Goal by Sanfilippo

  The 1962 World Cup

  Goal by Charlton

  Yashin

  Goal by Gento

  Seeler

  Matthews

  The 1966 World Cup

  Greaves

  Goal by Beckenbauer

  Eusebio

  The Curse of the Posts

  Peñarol’s Glory Years

  Goal by Rocha

  My Poor Beloved Mother

  Tears Do Not Flow from a Handkerchief

  Goal by Pelé

  Pelé

  The 1970 World Cup

  Goal by Jairzinho

  The Fiesta

  Soccer and the Generals

  Don’t Blink

  Goal by Maradona

  The 1974 World Cup

  Cruyff

  Müller

  Havelange

  The Owners of the Ball

  Jesus

  The 1978 World Cup

  Happiness

  Goal by Gemmill

  Goal by Bettega

  Goal by Sunderland

  The 1982 World Cup

  Pears from an Elm

  Platini

  Pagan Sacrifices

  The 1986 World Cup

  The Telecracy

  Staid and Standardized

  Running Drugstores

  Chants of Scorn

  Anything Goes

  Indigestion

  The 1990 World Cup

  Goal by Rincón

  Hugo Sánchez

  The Cricket and the Ant

  Gullit

  Parricide

  Goal by Zico

  A Sport of Evasion

  The 1994 World Cup

  Romario

  Baggio

  A Few Numbers

  The Duty of Losing

  The Sin of Losing

  Maradona

  They Don’t Count

  An Export Industry

  The End of the Match

  Extra Time The 1998 World Cup

  The 2002 World Cup

  The 2006 World Cup

  The 2010 World Cup

  Acknowledgments

  Sources

  About the Contributors

  About Byliner

  The pages that follow

  are dedicated to the children

  who once upon a time, years ago,

  crossed my path on Calella de la Costa.

  They had been playing soccer and were singing:

  We lost, we won,

  either way we had fun.

  Author’s Confession

  Like all Uruguayan children, I wanted to be a soccer player. And I played quite well. In fact I was terrific, but only at night when I was asleep. During the day I was the worst wooden leg ever to set foot on the little soccer fields of my country.

  As a fan I also left a lot to be desired. Juan Alberto Schiaffino and Julio César Abbadie played for Peñarol, the enemy team. I was a loyal Nacional fan and I did everything I could to hate them. But with his masterful passes “El Pepe” Schiaffino orchestrated the team’s plays as if he were watching from the highest tower of the stadium, and “El Pardo” Abbadie, running in his seven-league boots, would slide the ball all the way down the white touchline, swaying back and forth without ever grazing the ball or his opponents. I couldn’t help admiring them, and I even felt like cheering.

  Years have gone by and I’ve finally learned to accept myself for who I am: a beggar for good soccer. I go about the world, hand outstretched, and in the stadiums I plead: “A pretty move, for the love of God.”

  And when good soccer happens, I give thanks for the miracle and I don’t give a damn which team or country performs it.

  Soccer

  The history of soccer is a sad voyage from beauty to duty. When the sport became an industry, the beauty that blossoms from the joy of play got torn out by its very roots. In this fin de siècle world, professional soccer condemns all that is useless, and useless means not profitable. Nobody earns a thing from that
crazy feeling that for a moment turns a man into a child playing with a balloon like a cat with a ball of yarn, a ballet dancer who romps with a ball as light as a balloon or a ball of yarn, playing without even knowing he’s playing, with no purpose or clock or referee.

  Play has become spectacle, with few protagonists and many spectators, soccer for watching. And that spectacle has become one of the most profitable businesses in the world, organized not for play but rather to impede it. The technocracy of professional sport has managed to impose a soccer of lightning speed and brute strength, a soccer that negates joy, kills fantasy and outlaws daring.

  Luckily, on the field you can still see, even if only once in a long while, some insolent rascal who sets aside the script and commits the blunder of dribbling past the entire opposing side, the referee, and the crowd in the stands, all for the carnal delight of embracing the forbidden adventure of freedom.

  The Player

  Panting, he runs up the wing. On one side awaits heaven’s glory; on the other, ruin’s abyss.

  He is the envy of the neighborhood: the professional athlete who escaped the factory or the office and gets paid to have fun. He won the lottery. And even if he has to sweat buckets, with no right to failure or fatigue, he gets into the papers and on TV. His name is on the radio, women swoon over him and children yearn to be like him. But he started out playing for pleasure in the dirt streets of the slums, and now plays out of duty in stadiums where he has no choice but to win or to win.

  Businessmen buy him, sell him, lend him, and he lets it all happen in return for the promise of more fame and more money. The more successful he is and the more money he makes, the more of a prisoner he becomes. Forced to live by military discipline, he suffers the punishing daily round of training and the bombardments of painkillers and cortisone that hide his aches and fool his body. And on the eve of big matches, they lock him up in a concentration camp where he does forced labor, eats tasteless food, gets drunk on water, and sleeps alone.

  In other human trades, decline comes with old age, but a soccer player can be old at thirty. Muscles tire early: “That guy couldn’t score if the field were on a slope.”

  “Him? Not even if they tied the keeper’s hands.”

  Or before thirty if the ball knocks him out, or bad luck tears a muscle, or a kick breaks a bone and it can’t be fixed. And one rotten day the player discovers he has bet his life on a single card and his money is gone and so is his fame. Fame, that fleeting lady, did not even leave him a Dear John letter.

  The Goalkeeper

  They also call him doorman, keeper, goalie, bouncer, or net-minder, but he could just as well be called martyr, pay-all, penitent, or punching bag. They say where he walks the grass never grows.

  He is alone, condemned to watch the match from afar. Never leaving the goal, his only company the two posts and the crossbar, he awaits his own execution by firing squad. He used to dress in black, like the referee. Now the referee doesn’t have to dress like a crow and the goalkeeper can console himself in his solitude with colorful gear.

  He does not score goals; he is there to keep them from being scored. The goal is soccer’s fiesta: the striker sparks delight and the goalkeeper, a wet blanket, snuffs it out.

  He wears the number one on his back. The first to be paid? No, the first to pay. It is always the keeper’s fault. And when it isn’t, he still gets blamed. Whenever a player commits a foul, the keeper is the one who gets punished: they abandon him there in the immensity of the empty net to face his executioner alone. And when the team has a bad afternoon, he is the one who pays the bill, expiating the sins of others under a rain of flying balls.

  The rest of the players can blow it once in a while, or often, and then redeem themselves with a spectacular dribble, a masterful pass, a well-placed volley. Not him. The crowd never forgives the goalkeeper. Was he drawn out by a fake? Left looking ridiculous? Did the ball skid? Did his fingers of steel turn to putty? With a single slip-up the goalie can ruin a match or lose a championship, and the fans suddenly forget all his feats and condemn him to eternal disgrace. Damnation will follow him to the end of his days.

  The Idol

  One fine day the goddess of the wind kisses the foot of man, that mistreated, scorned foot, and from that kiss the soccer idol is born. He is born in a straw crib in a tin-roofed shack and he enters the world clinging to a ball.

  From the moment he learns to walk, he knows how to play. In his early years he brings joy to the sandlots, plays like crazy in the back alleys of the slums until night falls and you can’t see the ball. In his early manhood he takes flight and the stadiums fly with him. His acrobatic art draws multitudes, Sunday after Sunday, from victory to victory, ovation to ovation.

  The ball seeks him out, knows him, needs him. She rests and rocks on the top of his foot. He caresses her and makes her speak, and in that tête-à-tête millions of mutes converse. The nobodies, those condemned to always be nobodies, feel they are somebodies for a moment by virtue of those one-two passes, those dribbles that draw Z’s on the grass, those incredible backheel goals or overhead volleys. When he plays, the team has twelve players: “Twelve? It has fifteen! Twenty!”

  The ball laughs, radiant, in the air. He brings her down, puts her to sleep, showers her with compliments, dances with her, and seeing such things never before seen his admirers pity their unborn grandchildren who will never see them.

  But the idol is an idol for only a moment, a human eternity, all of nothing. And when the time comes for the golden foot to become a lame duck, the star will have completed his journey from burst of light to black hole. His body has more patches than a clown’s costume, and by now the acrobat is a cripple, the artist a beast of burden: “Not with your clodhoppers!”

  The fountain of public adulation becomes the lightning rod of public rancor: “You mummy!”

  Sometimes the idol does not fall all at once. And sometimes when he breaks, people devour the pieces.

  The Fan

  Once a week, the fan flees his house for the stadium.

  Banners wave and the air resounds with noisemakers, firecrackers and drums; it rains streamers and confetti. The city disappears, its routine forgotten. All that exists is the temple. In this sacred place, the only religion without atheists puts its divinities on display. Although the fan can contemplate the miracle more comfortably on TV, he prefers to make the pilgrimage to this spot where he can see his angels in the flesh doing battle with the demons of the day.

  Here the fan shakes his handkerchief, gulps his saliva, swallows his bile, eats his cap, whispers prayers and curses and suddenly lets loose a full-throated scream, leaping like a flea to hug the stranger at his side cheering the goal. While the pagan mass lasts, the fan is many. Along with thousands of other devotees he shares the certainty that we are the best, that all referees are crooked, that all our adversaries cheat.

  Rarely does the fan say, “My club plays today.” He says, “We play today.” He knows it is “player number twelve” who stirs up the winds of fervor that propel the ball when she falls asleep, just as the other eleven players know that playing without their fans is like dancing without music.

  When the match is over, the fan, who has not moved from the stands, celebrates his victory: “What a goal we scored!” “What a beating we gave them!” Or he cries over his defeat: “They swindled us again.” “Thief of a referee.” And then the sun goes down and so does the fan. Shadows fall over the emptying stadium. On the concrete terracing, a few fleeting bonfires burn, while the lights and voices fade. The stadium is left alone and the fan, too, returns to his solitude: to the I who had been we. The fan goes off, the crowd breaks up and melts away, and Sunday becomes as melancholy as Ash Wednesday after the death of Carnival.

  The Fanatic

  The fanatic is a fan in a madhouse. His mania for denying all evidence finally upended whatever once passed for his mind, and the remains of the shipwreck spin about aimlessly in waters whipped by a fury that give
s no quarter.

  The fanatic shows up at the stadium prickling with strident and aggressive paraphernalia, wrapped in the team flag, his face painted the colors of his beloved team’s shirts; on the way he makes a lot of noise and a lot of fuss. He never comes alone. In the midst of the rowdy crowd, dangerous centipede, this cowed man will cow others, this frightened man becomes frightening. Omnipotence on Sunday exorcises the obedient life he leads the rest of the week: the bed with no desire, the job with no calling, or no job at all. Liberated for a day, the fanatic has much to avenge.

  In an epileptic fit he watches the match but does not see it. His arena is the stands. They are his battleground. The mere presence of a fan of the other side constitutes an inexcusable provocation. Good is not violent by nature, but Evil leaves it no choice. The enemy, always in the wrong, deserves a thrashing. The fanatic cannot let his mind wander because the enemy is everywhere, even in that quiet spectator who at any moment might offer the opinion that the rival team is playing fairly. Then he’ll get what he deserves.

  The Goal

  The goal is soccer’s orgasm. And like orgasms, goals have become an ever less frequent occurrence in modern life.

  Half a century ago, it was a rare thing for a match to end scoreless: 0–0, two open mouths, two yawns. Now the eleven players spend the entire match hanging from the crossbar, trying to stop goals, and they have no time to score them.

  The excitement unleashed whenever the white bullet makes the net ripple might appear mysterious or crazy, but remember, the miracle does not happen often. The goal, even if it be a little one, is always a goooooooooooooooooooooal in the throat of the commentators, a “do” sung from the chest that would leave Caruso forever mute and the crowd goes nuts and the stadium forgets that it is made of concrete and breaks free of the earth and flies through the air.

  The Referee

  In Spanish he is the árbitro and he is arbitrary by definition. An abominable tyrant who runs his dictatorship without opposition, a pompous executioner who exercises his absolute power with an operatic flourish. Whistle between his lips, he blows the winds of inexorable fate to allow a goal or to disallow one. Card in hand, he raises the colors of doom: yellow to punish the sinner and oblige him to repent, and red to force him into exile.