Pickup Soccer in Brazil Has An Allure All Its Own

5/25/2014 Pickup Soccer in Brazil Has an Allure All Its Own - NYTimes.
com
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/20/sports/soccer/pickup-soccer-in-brazil-has-an-allure-all-its-own.html?pagewanted=print 1/8
October 18, 2013
Pickup Soccer in Brazil Has an Allure All
Its Own
By SAM BORDEN
RIO DE JANEIRO In Brazil, the ball is always moving. It moves on grass and on sand, on
concrete and on cobblestone. Sometimes, during the rainy season, it even moves on water.
Organized soccer, the kind the Brazilian national team will play next year in the World Cup, is
known as futebol (pronounced FOO-chee-ball) in Portuguese. But the pickup variety, the kind
played in the cities and the countryside, is called pelada, a term Brazilian men also use to refer
to a naked woman. One night last month, a hotel doorman waiting to play at a game in the
Flamengo neighborhood here explained the odd symmetry this way: Football and women, he
said, are the only two things we really love.
The doorman was idling beside an asphalt court. The court was lighted by three dim
streetlamps and the glint of the moon. It was nearly 11 p.m., and in the distance, the lights of
the Glria and Catete neighborhoods twinkled. Teams were divided into shirts and skins.
Games lasted until one team scored a goal or for 10 minutes, with a cellphone alarm beeping to
signal full time.
There was no crowd; just the bay on one side, the highway on the other and a concrete
underpass, coated in graffiti and stained the color of dried lager, leading away from the court
and back to the city. Before midnight, the game included students, day workers and beach
bums; after midnight, busboys and waiters and valets arrived, kicking and running and
sweating their way toward morning. Some played in sneakers or trainers. Others played
barefoot, the blisters on their heels a nubby reminder of their devotion.
One of the players, a teenager named Lucas Daniel, did not have shoes with him at all. He
played languidly, gliding up and down the court on his calloused soles. His team was beaten
quickly. Afterward, he sat with his cousin Diego and pointed to the side of his foot. My toe was
dislocated once, he said. The ball hit it hard, and it just bent. It hurt so much, I cried.
He laughed. But then I pushed it back into place. And then I kept playing.
Lucas and Diego watched the cellphone between them, waiting for their turn to play again. As
they waited, they talked about another game, another pelada, with a visitor sitting nearby. This
MORE IN SOCCER
On Soccer: Dropping
Donovan, Klinsmann Shows
His Clout
Read More
5/25/2014 Pickup Soccer in Brazil Has an Allure All Its Own - NYTimes.com
one was situated in the hillside favela where they live, Fogueteiro, up near the bohemian-chic
neighborhood of Santa Teresa. Some days, they said, that game starts after breakfast. Some
days, it finishes just before breakfast the next morning.
We just play whenever, Diego said.
Remember the kid who played so much we called him Neymar? Lucas said.
Diego shook his head. What happened to him?
Lucas shrugged. I dont know. He was scouted by a big team. I dont see him anymore.
They paused. That is the dream, of course, the fantasy. Romrio, one of the greatest Brazilian
scorers ever, played in the streets, too. So did Ronaldo. So did Rivaldo.
Sometimes, scouts come to the favelas and organize a game. Sometimes, a player is picked.
Lucas said he once played for one of the junior teams of Flamengo, a popular Rio club, but it did
not pan out. I am too old now, he said. (He is 16.) So I just play.
He and Diego looked at the cellphone, and their lips moved silently. Cinco. Quatro. Trs. Dois.
Um. You want to see a real street game? Lucas said to the visitor as the phone began to beep.
Come see us tomorrow. We will show you.
Inside the Quadra
The ball moves differently in every city. In Rio, there are games on the beaches and in the
favelas and on the aterro, the strip of land between the water and the road. Fred, the forward
for the Brazilian national team who scored five goals at last summers Confederations Cup, grew
up in Minas Gerais and recalled that sometimes the ball he played with was not even a ball at
all.
I used to make a ball of socks, he said. I made one of cardboard. I made one out of plastic
bags. Sometimes, it wasnt even round. We didnt care.
He shrugged. We would put two rocks or two sandals to make the goal. We would even play on
a hill. The goal was always on top, and it was two-on-two or three-on-three, and you would
fight to get to that same goal. It was fun. But if the ball went down, you had to run over the
rocks.
Pelada has always been a part of Brazilian culture, and it has adapted to the countrys changing
face. In So Paulo, for example, the hub for pelada used to be on the edges of the citys two
rivers, the Pinheiros and the Tiet. Players would scamper alongside the water in games that
were known collectively as futebol de varzea, or lowlands soccer.
As So Paulo developed into a South American business hub, though, it transformed into a vast
city, a labyrinth of concrete buildings and tangled streets. That meant open space was at a
premium, and so now games have frequently shifted to courts that are penned in on all sides by
metal fences. These fake cages are called quadras.
One quadra sits at a traffic-heavy intersection in the Vila Maria neighborhood, a working-class
area in the northern part of the city. The grass around the court is brown and dusty, and the
door does not close all the way, so the ball sometimes rolls out toward the cars. Despite the
conditions, there was a line of players waiting to play on a recent Saturday afternoon, their
backs pressed against the droopy railings in the fence and their feet ready to intervene if the
ball tumbled toward the open door. Water breaks and bathroom breaks were taken at the
gas station across the street.
The game was oddly silent. With five players on each side, there were the occasional shouts for
a teammate to pass the ball or a warning that an opponent was approaching. Otherwise, there
were just the scuffs and scrapes of rubber soles on concrete. On this smaller court, shots and
goals were more frequent than in the games in Rio. Games were played to three goals. No time
limit was needed.
At first, the players were all male. This is standard; the vast majority of games feature only
men. At this quadra, one player played in dress pants. Several wore Brazilian club team jerseys,
like those of Corinthians and Palmeiras. Outside the fence, sitting on a wood bench, Anesio
Cornelo watched his 12-year-old son, Robson, play with men who were two or three times his
age.
I think this is good for Brazilian players, Cornelo said, sharing a popular theory. They play
this way, on the court. They learn how to touch the ball, how to control the ball. It is a lot faster
here than on a field. They become more skilled than if they just played on grass.
For the most part, that skill was not altogether evident inside the quadra. The game was mostly
ragged, with little defending and even fewer moments of quality. It was only when a girl, Clara
Chaves, returned from a water break at the gas station and rejoined the game that the level
increased.
Chaves was wearing a Palmeiras shirt. She is 14 and plays for one of the clubs womens teams
in a regional league. She readily admitted that her league and womens soccer in general in
Brazil was a work in progress. There is no national league, and the most talented women, like
Marta, a five-time world player of the year, earn livings abroad.
Still, Chaves dreams, just as the boys do, and she was sharp and aggressive on the court,
chasing the ball deep into the opponents end. She played quick, slick passes to teammates on
the attack. She scored two goals in about five minutes.
Chaves began playing at this court when she was 9, she said, and it took a while before she felt
comfortable. Initially, the boys and the men targeted her. They pushed her. They jostled her.
They tripped her, sometimes when she was so close to the fence that she would fall against the
rusty metal. Sometimes, they directed a particularly vile homophobic slur toward her. The
treatment brought her near tears at times.
On this day, though, she was the best player on the court. Her team won. Then it won again.
Then it won again. For an hour, the only girl in the quadra never left the court.
The boys treated me that way in the beginning because they think they have some right to
play, like this is their neighborhood and they are the only ones who want to be here, she said.
A lot of men think like that. Maybe someday it will change.
Chasing the Dream
It must be said: the ball has always had meaning, always resonated far beyond a foot and a goal
and a game. As just one example, some believe the roots of Brazils attachment to joga bonito, or
the tenet that one must play beautifully or not at all, was born from the countrys long history
with racism.
There was a time, the theory goes, when a dark-skinned Brazilian could not even touch a white
man without fear of retribution or punishment. Because of that, some say, the silky, slippery,
slinky feints and shimmies that Brazilian players hone while playing pelada were developed as a
form of survival: the goal was to be able to get past an opponent without even grazing him, lest
a societal code be broken.
Now pelada remains a form of escape. The notion of a poverty-stricken young boys finding
fame and fortune after being discovered in a slum is shopworn, to be sure, but that is because
there remains some truth to it: Brazil is annually among the nations exporting the most players
to foreign professional leagues (nearly 300 in 2011 alone, according to a recent study), and
hundreds more play for varying wages in the countrys league system.
In more remote places like Manaus, the main city in the Amazon, young players will often leave
home, traveling south to bigger cities on the murky advice of a scout or representative from one
of the countrys larger teams. There are no guarantees of success or even basic
accommodations in these situations, and horror stories abound. In 2012, the So Paulo state
club Portuguesa Santista was fined by a Brazilian court for endangering the safety of children,
according to a report by the Brazilian investigative journalism center Publica.
The details were disconcerting: a dozen teenage boys had left their homes in Par, in the
Amazon, to go to the city of Santos on a promise from a scout that they could play in a youth
tournament there. Once they arrived, they were crammed into a tiny room, given three
mattresses to share and, over a period of several days, provided no food. Once the court
intervened, Portuguesa Santista was ordered to either let the boys go home or put them in a
proper hotel and feed them.
In many ways, though, it does not matter. Young boys will forever want to chase the dream,
climbing aboard one of the countless small ships that leave from the port of Manaus, and
sleeping in tiny hammocks hung from the ceiling for days until they arrive at the next stop on
their journey to maybe, possibly, being discovered. To them, that is what pelada can represent.
There is no famous player that everyone in the world knows who came from Manaus, a
talented young player, Kaleb Campelo, said one day in August. But that does not mean there
cant be someday.
Campelo was standing alongside a dirt field in Santo Agostinho, a neighborhood on the west side
of Manaus known mostly for its drug trafficking and crime. A crumbling wall was the divider
between the playing surface and a steep hill littered with garbage, plastic bags and the
occasional needle. The game, which featured Campelo, 17, and other teenagers, was interrupted
at least once when a stray dog ran through the middle of the action.
This was, essentially, organized pelada. Manaus is known for being home to the pelado, a huge
soccer tournament and beauty pageant, but this weekend was more typical with two teams,
wearing mostly matching jerseys, playing in the rough equivalent of a neighborhood
championship.
The juxtapositions were striking: there was a referee but no real boundary lines once the chalk
was shuffled away. There were coaches, but the players did not pay to participate in the game
or to be a part of the team. There was a halftime, but once the players took a sip of water, they
were destined to wear dust mustaches for the rest of the afternoon as the swirling dirt clung to
their wet upper lips.
Some players, like Campelo, who fired home a goal for his team with a graceful volley, may well
play their way out someday.
But even if he doesnt, and for the others who have no chance, it is not about that, said Berg
de Souza, a longtime government employee in Manaus who helps organize the games in Santo
Agostinho. There are about 50 players playing in these games. They would be drug dealers if
they werent. Last year, there were gangs in the neighborhood. They would play on the field
and fight on the field. There were guns. It was terrible.
De Souza shrugged. Now, it is a little bit better. I know some of the drug dealers. I organize
things here. Sometimes, I even ask the drug dealers for money to help me get the games going,
if I need it.
Sometimes, the escape is more metaphorical. As the hub of the Amazon, Manaus is an industrial
city where men work long days. Some haul heavy bags of flour and sugar up from the docks;
others work in electronics factories or on the boats. Pelada is their haven, the only place and
time that they can relax their shoulders.
In the East Zone of the city, in an area known as So Jos Operrio, there is a sand pit carved
out of a thicket of trees. Lizards hang from the branches. Araras, or macaws, chirp overhead. A
tabby crawls out of an overturned refrigerator near the edge of the forest. The men who play at
this field do not bother with lines to mark the penalty area or the touchlines on their 40-yard
surface.
We just know it by heart, said Cleivison Correa, who plays almost every day after work.
Everyone just stops playing when they are supposed to.
Games are held from Tuesday to Saturday. Players wait their turn to play, sitting on logs or
felled trees. Newcomers are welcomed enthusiastically. We need this, Marcus Painaba, 28,
said. This game when you live in Amazonas, this is where you go to be yourself.
Nonstop Action
Lucas, the boy in Rio, played at the aterro until 5:30 in the morning. Then he went home and
slept for a few hours. Then he got up and played again.
Around noon, he heard a commotion. The visitor from the night before was outside. Addresses
in the area are murky, so the visitor had wandered through the streets that wind like cobwebs,
climbing the hillside and asking neighbors if they knew someone named Lucas. Finally, a few
women shouted his name down the alley.
Lucas waved. His neighborhood is pacified, one of the favelas in the city that has a perpetual
police presence. This generally eliminates heavy drug trafficking and other serious violence,
though muggings and lesser crimes are not uncommon. Still, the street nearest Lucass home is
where children play, kicking a ball up and down the sloping road. The goals are multiple: to
score; to show off ones substantial ball-control skills; and to keep the ball from going down the
steep stairs toward the bottom of the neighborhood or, really, anywhere else that would
jeopardize the status of the game.
One time, the ball bounced off the mirror of a car and knocked over an old lady, Lucas said.
The neighbors complain a lot. They want us to stop and go to bed.
But the boys do not stop. They never do. That afternoon, they clattered around a street barely
wide enough for one car at time, bumping into curbs and walls and one another. They ran under
wires dangling overhead. They sprinted up and down a hill so graded there were places where
the ball, even though it was on the ground, could have easily rolled through a houses window.
After a little while, Lucas said that it was almost time to go to a nearby quadra, a place where
some of the best players in the neighborhood played. This was not a childs game, Lucas said.
Men played there, some who had even played for local professional teams. The game is very
good, Lucas said.
First, he stopped at his familys home. The entrance was up a thin flight of steps from the street
and then down another staircase of 34 steps, with no railing on either side, that led to a door cut
out of the hillside.
Fifteen people stay in this structure, which is roughly 35 feet from end to end and about 10 feet
wide: Lucas, Diego, Eduardo, Ilza, Z, Penha, Rafael, Felipe, Gabriel, Monica, Tonho, Raiane,
Rennan, Edjane and Mrcio. Lucass parents are housecleaners. He and one of his sisters look
after the other children most days. He is not in school now but hopes to return this fall. I have
played football every day of my life, he said.
Moments later, he led the way to the nearby quadra, up steps and then down steps, past the
men carrying laundry baskets and around the corner where the dogs barked from behind a
fence. Unlike in So Paulo, the quadra itself did not have a metal fence around it. Instead, it
looked more like the top of an abandoned parking garage, its concrete walls covered in spray
paint and its cracked floor dotted with water stains. On one side, the sheer edge of the mountain
rose up and tendrils of long grass hung over the edge of a retaining wall.
Lucas walked up and looked surprised. There were a few children running around near one of
the goals but no big game and no top players. Lucas turned to the visitor with an apologetic look
on his face. This is Rio, he said. Maybe they will be here later?
He shrugged, sheepishly, and lingered for a moment by the entrance. But immediately, he
began inching his way toward the children. They were running and spinning and passing and
dribbling, and it was not long before Lucas was, too. It was as if he were drawn to the game, as if
he could not resist. And maybe he could not. In Brazil, the ball is always moving.
Taylor Barnes contributed reporting from Rio de Janeiro and Jill Langlois from So Paulo, Brazil.

Pickup Soccer in Brazil Has An Allure All Its Own

Enviado por

Dados do documento

Título original

Direitos autorais

Formatos disponíveis

Compartilhar este documento

Compartilhar ou incorporar documento

Opções de compartilhamento

Você considera este documento útil?

Este conteúdo é inapropriado?

Direitos autorais:

Formatos disponíveis

Pickup Soccer in Brazil Has An Allure All Its Own

Enviado por

Direitos autorais:

Formatos disponíveis

5/25/2014 Pickup Soccer in Brazil Has an Allure All Its Own - NYTimes.

Você também pode gostar