Goal by Piendibene
It was 1926. The scorer, José Piendibene, did not celebrate. Piendibene, a man of rare mastery and rarer modesty, never celebrated his goals, so as not to offend.
The Uruguayan club Peñarol was playing in Montevideo against Espanyol of Barcelona, and they couldn’t find a way to penetrate the goal defended by Zamora. The play came from behind. Anselmo slipped around two adversaries, sent the ball across to Suffiati, and then took off expecting a pass back. But Piendibene asked for it. He caught the pass, eluded Urquizú, and closed in on the goal. Zamora saw that Piendibene was shooting for the right corner and he leaped to block it. The ball hadn’t moved: she was asleep on his foot. Piendibene tossed her softly to the left side of the empty net. Zamora managed to jump back, a cat’s leap, and he grazed the ball with his fingertips when it was already too late.
The Bicycle Kick
Ramón Unzaga invented the move on the field at the Chilean port of Talcahuana: body in the air, back to the ground, he shot the ball backwards with a sudden snap of his legs, like the blades of scissors.
It was some years later when this acrobatic act came to be called the chilena. In 1927 when club Colo-Colo traveled to Europe and striker David Arellano performed it in the stadiums of Spain, Spanish journalists cheered the splendor of this unknown gambol, and they baptized it chilena because, like strawberries and the cueca, it had come from Chile.
After several flying goals Arellano died that year, in the stadium at Valladolid, killed in a fatal encounter with a fullback.
Scarone
Forty years before the Brazilians Pelé and Coutinho, the Uruguayans Scarone and Cea rolled over the rivals’ defense with passes from the thigh and zigzags that sent the ball back and forth from one to the other all the way to the goal, yours and mine, close and right to the foot, question and answer, call and response. The ball rebounded without a moment’s pause, as if off a wall. That’s what they called the River Plate style of attack back in those days: “The Wall.”
Héctor Scarone served up passes like offerings and scored goals with a marksmanship he sharpened during practice sessions by knocking over bottles at thirty meters. And though he was rather short, when it came to jumping he was up long before the rest. Scarone knew how to float in the air, violating the law of gravity. He would leap for the ball, break free of his adversaries, and spin around to face the goal. Then, still aloft, he would head it in.
They called him “The Magician,” because he pulled goals out of a hat, and they also called him “The Gardel of Soccer,” because while he played he sang like no one else.
Goal by Scarone
It was 1928, during the Olympic final.
Uruguay and Argentina were tied when Píriz fired the ball across to Tarasconi and advanced toward the penalty area. Borjas met the ball with his back to the goal and headed it to Scarone, screaming, “Yours, Héctor!” and Scarone kicked it sharply on the fly. The Argentine goalkeeper, Bossio, dove for it but it had already hit the net. The ball bounced defiantly back onto the field. Uruguayan striker Figueroa sent it in again, punishing the ball with a swift kick, because leaving the goal like that was bad form.
The Occult Forces
A Uruguayan player, Adhemar Canavessi, sacrificed himself to avert the damage his presence would have caused in the final match of the 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam. Uruguay was to play Argentina. Every time Canavessi had faced the Argentines, Uruguay had lost, and the last time he had the bad luck to score a goal against his own side. So he got off the bus taking the players to the stadium. In Amsterdam, without Canavessi, Uruguay won.
The previous day, Carlos Gardel had sung for the Argentine players at the hotel where they were staying. To bring them luck, he had brought out a new tango called “Dandy.” Two years later, just before the final of the 1930 World Cup, it happened again: Gardel sang “Dandy” to wish the team success and Uruguay won the final. Many swear his intentions were beyond reproach, but there are those who believe therein lies the proof that Gardel was Uruguayan.
Goal by Nolo
It was 1929. Argentina was playing Paraguay.
Nolo Ferreira brought the ball up from right at the back. He broke open a path, leaving a string of fallen bodies, until he suddenly found himself face-to-face with the entire defense lined up in a wall. Then Nolo stopped. He stood there passing the ball from one foot to the other, from one instep to the other, not letting it touch the ground. His adversaries tilted their heads from left to right and right to left, in unison, hypnotized, their gaze fixed on that pendulum of a ball. The back-and-forth went on for centuries, until Nolo found a hole and shot without warning: the ball pierced the wall and shook the net.
The mounted police got off their horses to congratulate him. Twenty thousand people were on the field, but every Argentine will swear he was there.
The 1930 World Cup
An earthquake was shaking the south of Italy and burying 1,500 Neapolitans, Marlene Dietrich was singing “Falling in Love Again,” Stalin was completing his usurpation of the Russian Revolution, and the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky was committing suicide. The English were jailing Mahatma Gandhi, who by demanding independence and loving his country had brought India to a standstill. Under the same banner in the other Indies, our Indies, Augusto César Sandino was rousing the peasants of Nicaragua and U.S. Marines were burning the crops to defeat him by hunger.
In the United States some were dancing to the new boogie-woogie, but the euphoria of the Roaring Twenties had been knocked out cold by ferocious blows from the crash of ’29. When the New York Stock Exchange tanked, it devastated international commodity prices and dragged several Latin American governments into the abyss. The price of tin took a nosedive off the precipice of the global crisis, pulling Bolivian President Hernando Siles after it and putting a general in his place, while the collapse of meat and wheat prices finished President Hipólito Yrigoyen in Argentina and installed another general in his place. In the Dominican Republic, the fall in sugar prices opened the long cycle of dictatorship of also-general Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, who was inaugurating his regime by baptizing the capital city and the port with his own name.
In Uruguay, the coup d’état was not to strike until three years later. In 1930 the country had eyes and ears only for the first World Cup. Uruguayan victories in the previous two Olympics held in Europe made the country the obvious choice to host the tournament.
Twelve nations arrived at the port of Montevideo. All Europe was invited, but only four teams crossed the ocean to these southern shores; “That’s far away from everything,” Europeans said, “and the passage is expensive.”
A ship brought the Jules Rimet trophy from France, accompanied by FIFA president Monsieur Jules himself and by the reluctant French team.
With pomp and circumstance Uruguay inaugurated the monumental showcase it had taken eight months to build. The stadium was called Centenario to celebrate the constitution, which a century before had denied civil rights to women, the illiterate, and the poor. In the stands not a pin would have fit when Uruguay and Argentina faced each other in the final. The stadium was a sea of felt hats and canopies over cameras with tripods. The goalkeepers wore caps and the referee black plus fours.
The final of the 1930 World Cup did not merit more than a twenty-line column in the Italian daily La Gazzetta dello Sport. After all, it was a repeat of the Amsterdam Olympics in 1928: the two nations of the River Plate insulted Europe by showing the world where the best soccer was played. As in ’28, Argentina took second place. Uruguay, losing 2–1 at the half, ended up winning 4–2 and was crowned champion. To referee the final, the Belgian John Langenus demanded life insurance, but nothing more serious occurred than a few tussles in the stands. Afterward, in Buenos Aires, a crowd stoned the Uruguayan consulate.
Third place went to the United States, which had among its players several recent Scottish immigrants, and fourth place went to Yugoslavia.
Not a single match ended in a draw
. The Argentine Stábile headed up the list of scorers with eight goals, followed by the Uruguayan Cea with five. Louis Laurent of France scored the first goal in World Cup history, against Mexico.
Nasazzi
Not even X rays could get through him. They called him “The Terrible.”
“The field is a jar,” he liked to say. “And the mouth of the jar is the penalty area.”
There, in the box, he was boss.
José Nasazzi, captain of the Uruguayan teams of ’24, ’28 and ’30, was the first caudillo of Uruguayan soccer. He was the windmill of the entire team, which worked to the rhythm of his shouts of warning, disappointment, and encouragement. No one ever heard him complain.
Camus
In 1930 Albert Camus was Saint Peter guarding the gate for the University of Algiers soccer team. He had been playing goalkeeper since childhood, because in that position your shoes don’t wear out as fast. Son of a poor home, Camus could not afford the luxury of running the fields; every night, his grandmother examined the soles of his shoes and gave him a beating if she found them worn.
During his years in the net, Camus learned many things: “I learned that the ball never comes where you expect it to. That helped me a lot in life, especially in large cities where people don’t tend to be what they claim.”
He also learned to win without feeling like God and to lose without feeling like rubbish, skills not easily acquired, and he learned to unravel several mysteries of the human soul, whose labyrinths he explored later on in a dangerous journey on the page.
Juggernauts
One of the world champion Uruguayans, “Perucho” Petrone, packed up and moved to Italy. The afternoon in 1931 when Petrone made his debut for Fiorentina, he scored eleven goals.
He did not last long there. He was the top scorer in the Italian championship and Fiorentina offered him everything, but Petrone tired quickly of the hurrahs of Fascism on the rise. Fed up and homesick, he went back to Montevideo where for a while he continued scoring his scorched-earth goals. He wasn’t yet thirty when he had to leave soccer for good. FIFA forced him out because he broke his contract with Fiorentina.
They say Petrone’s shot could knock down a wall. Who knows? One thing is for sure: it knocked out goalkeepers and broke through nets.
Meanwhile, on the other shore of the River Plate, the Argentine Bernabé Ferreyra was also shooting cannonballs with the fury of the possessed. Fans from every team went to see “The Wild Animal” start out deep, cut his way through the defense, and put the ball in the net and the keeper along with it.
Before and after each match and at halftime as well, they would play a tango over the loudspeakers composed in homage to Bernabé’s artillery barrages. In 1932 the newspaper Crítica offered a sizable prize to the goalkeeper who could stop him from scoring. One afternoon that year, Bernabé had to take off his shoes for a group of journalists to prove no iron bars were hidden in the toes.
Turning Pro
Even though recent scandals (“clean hands, clean feet”) have put the bosses of Italy’s biggest clubs on the spot, soccer is still among the country’s ten most important industries, and it remains a magnet for South American players.
Italy was already a Mecca way back in the time of Mussolini. Nowhere else in the world did they pay so well. Players would threaten the owners with “I’m going to Italy,” and those magic words would loosen the purse strings. Some really did go, traveling by ship from Buenos Aires, Montevideo, São Paulo, and Rio de Janeiro, and if they didn’t have Italian parents or grandparents somebody in Rome would invent a family on the spot for immediate citizenship.
The exodus of players was one factor that led to the birth of professional soccer in our countries. In 1931 Argentina turned pro, and Uruguay followed suit the next year. In Brazil a professional league was launched in 1934. That was when they legalized payments previously made under the table, and the player became a worker. The contract tied him to the club full-time and for life, and he could not change his workplace unless the team sold him. Like a factory worker, the player traded his labor for a wage and became as much a prisoner on the field as a serf on a manor. But in the early days the demands of professional soccer weren’t great: only two hours a week of obligatory training. In Argentina anyone missing a practice session without a doctor’s note paid a five-peso fine.
The 1934 World Cup
Johnny Weissmuller was doing his first Tarzan howl, the first mass-produced deodorant was hitting the market, and Louisiana police were shooting down Bonnie and Clyde. Bolivia and Paraguay, the two poorest countries in South America, were fighting in the name of Standard Oil and Shell and bleeding over oil in the Chaco. Sandino, having defeated the Marines in Nicaragua, was being shot dead in an ambush and Somoza, the murderer, was inaugurating his dynasty. In China, Mao was beginning his Long March. In Germany, Hitler was being crowned Führer of the Third Reich and was promulgating laws to defend the Aryan race, which forced sterilization on criminals and on anyone with a hereditary disease, while in Italy Mussolini was inaugurating the second World Cup.
Posters for the championship showed Hercules balancing a ball on his foot while doing the Fascist salute. For Il Duce the 1934 World Cup in Rome was an elaborate propaganda operation. Mussolini attended every match, sitting in the box of honor, his chin raised toward stands filled with black shirts. The eleven players of the Italian squad dedicated their victories to him, their right arms outstretched.
But the road to the title was not easy. The second-round match between Italy and Spain turned out to be the most grueling in the history of World Cup play. The battle lasted 210 minutes and did not end until the following day, by which time war wounds or sheer exhaustion had sidelined several players. Italy won but finished without four of its starting players, Spain without seven. Among the injured Spaniards were the two best players: the striker Lángara and the keeper Zamora, who hypnotized anyone who set foot in the box.
Italy waged the final against Czechoslovakia in National Fascist Party Stadium and won 2–1. Two Argentines recently nationalized as Italians did their part: Orsi scored the first goal, dribbling around the goalkeeper, and the other Argentine, Guaita, made a pass to Schiavio to set up the goal that gave Italy its first World Cup.
In 1934 sixteen countries participated: twelve from Europe and three from Latin America, plus Egypt, the lone representative of the rest of the world. The reigning champion, Uruguay, refused because Italy had not come to the first World Cup in Montevideo.
Germany and Austria came in third and fourth. The Czech Nejedly was the leading scorer with five goals, followed by Conen from Germany and Schiavio from Italy with four apiece.
God and the Devil in Rio de Janeiro
One very rainy night while the year 1937 was dying, an enemy fan buried a toad in Vasco da Gama’s playing field and called down a curse: “Vasco won’t win a championship for the next twelve years! They won’t, if there is a God in heaven!” He was a fan of a humble team that Vasco da Gama had beaten 12–0; Arubinha was his name.
For years, fans and players alike searched for that toad on and around the field. They never found it. The playing field was so pockmarked, it looked like a moonscape. Vasco da Gama hired the best players in Brazil, put together sides that were veritable powerhouses, but they kept on losing.
At last in 1945, the team won the Rio trophy and broke the curse. They had not been champions since 1934. Eleven years of drought. “God gave us a little discount,” the club president commented.
Much later, in 1953, the team with problems was Flamengo, the most popular club not only in Rio de Janeiro but in all Brazil, the only one that is the home team wherever it plays. Their fans, who are the most numerous and fervent in the world, were dying of hunger. Then a Catholic priest, one Father Goes, offered a guarantee of victory as long as the players attended his mass before each match and said the rosary kneeling before the altar.
Flamengo won the championship three years in a row. Their riv
als protested to Cardinal Jaime Câmara: Flamengo was using outlawed weapons. Father Goes defended himself claiming all he did was show them the way of the Lord. The players continued saying their rosaries of black and red beads, colors that are not only Flamengo’s but also those of an African deity who incarnates Jesus and Satan at the same time. The fourth year Flamengo lost the championship. The players stopped going to mass and never said the rosary again. Father Goes asked the Pope in Rome for help, but he never answered.
Father Romualdo, on the other hand, obtained the Pope’s permission to become a partner in Fluminense. The priest attended every practice session. The players did not like it one bit. Twelve years had passed since Fluminense had last won the Rio trophy, and it was bad luck to have that big black bird standing at the edge of the field. The players shouted insults at him, unaware that Father Romualdo had been deaf since birth.
One fine day, Fluminense started to win. They won one championship, then another and another. Now the players would only practice in the shadow of Father Romualdo. After every goal they kissed his cassock. On weekends the priest watched the matches from the box of honor and babbled who knows what against the referee and the opposing players.
The Sources of Misfortune
Everyone knows it is bad luck to step on a toad or on the shadow of a tree, to walk under a ladder, to sit or sleep backward, to open an umbrella indoors, to count your teeth, or break a mirror. But in soccer that barely scratches the surface.
Carlos Bilardo, coach of the Argentine team for the World Cups in 1986 and 1990, did not let his players eat chicken because it would give them bad luck. He made them eat beef, which gave them uric acid instead.