When, some three weeks ago Germany defeated Brazil and Argentina in the Finals of the World Cup, I could not help feeling kinda discomfited.
Not that I am a lover of the game and had taken sides with the usual fan fanaticism, pun unintended. I didn’t even watch the games — never have. I don’t know and I don’t watch football!
Last week, Recah Trinidad, the sports columnist of Philippine Daily Inquirer, asked me if I’d been following the football or soccer games. I answered in the negative but texted back, promised I was going to watch from hereon.
My football layman’s understanding that South Americans are the kings of this game was why I was vaguely thrown off balance. The perception has been calibrated thus: South Americans can’t lose on South American soil.
South America — particularly Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Colombia — regard this sport with passion, take to the game, one might say, with soul as much as sole.
As the idiom of the day would hyperbole it, they own football.
Perhaps mainly because of a phenomenon of a man named Pele.
The first time I came across this athlete was in some sports news item that had Muhammad Ali saying of him, ”He is the greatest; I am the prettiest.”
Possibly an apocryphal invention but it sounds typical Ali enough.
And anyway, Pele is our point. Brazil’s national treasure. More, even. A world wonder. A football genius who gave spectators “moments so worthy of immortality that they make us believe immortality exists,” as Uruguay novelist Eduardo Galeano writes in his book Soccer in Sun and Shadow (El Futbol a Sol y Sombra in the original Spanish).
The book, published in the mid nineties, seems to have been some kind of toast among the local literati in facebook during the World Cup. But of course. No one writes on football like Eduardo Galeano who has been called ‘the Pele of soccer writers’ by the Guardian. Not a hyperbole at all.
We read his Century of the Wind as the century waned, and the page where we marveled most at the author’s virtuosity was the one that has the gem-like passage on the great football idol.
Here’s to say it with a rhyme:
a fool/for football/ a sucker/ for soccer/ but that’s only/ you and me/ and the next guy/ what’s his name/ what’s the word/ the beautiful game/ its wizard/ whether/ look-alike of Binay/ or Don Cheadle.
As it turns out, the loss inflicted by Germany on Brazil in the penultimate round is not a dimension short of being tragic. The country whose immortal son Pele is loses a match played on its soil.
But the thing is tragic from the beginning. Brazil was spending billions of dollars to host the games, and Brazilians were unhappy that the beautiful game was used, exploited, ‘corporitized.’
Galeano wrote: “Brazilians, who are the most soccer-mad of all, have decided not to allow their sport to be used any more as an excuse for humiliating the many and enriching the few. The fiesta of soccer, a feast for the legs that play and the eyes that watch, is much more than a big business run by overlords from Switzerland. The most popular sport in the world wants to serve the people who embrace it.”
(I did see football being played — in the 1981 blockbuster movie, Escape to Victory, that starred Sylvester Stallone, Michael Caine, and Max van Sydow. An international cast that included real-life professional football players, not the least being Pele, who blew your mind with his tricky dribble and an aerial bicycle kick).
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Author’s email: cezaruis@gmail.com
