My father inhabited a world where winning was a form of discourtesy. He was an excellent billiards player. I remember his hands, the way he’d bite his tongue at the corner of his mouth, aiming with one eye closed. His shots were well-placed, never aggressive, and if he won a game, whether it was in a hotel game room on summer vacation or on the pool table he once bought for our house, he would make a point of politely losing the next one.
He never could stand people playing cards, he didn’t usually watch Formula One races, and I don’t think he’s ever seen a volleyball or basketball game in his life. He played tennis for a while—I remember his pair of white Le Coq Sportif shoes—but he thought it was horrible, the way opponents would cross paths at the net at the end of a set and not even exchange a glance. It was something he just couldn’t accept.
He had a similarly dispassionate attitude about soccer. He enjoyed watching matches on TV, with interest, but never truly cheered for anyone. He never took me to a stadium or gave me a team’s kit as a gift. He had a single story about playing the game that he used to tell, about a goal he’d scored in his youth, when the ball slid down his shin to his foot—a misplaced shot that panned out in the end. If asked, he would say he was a São Paulo fan, though for him it had nothing to do with identity, pride, or any real sense of belonging; he rooted for São Paulo because, as a teenager, he’d worked at a medical lab on Dom José de Barros, and one day the legendary Leônidas da Silva, the “Black Diamond,” credited with inventing the bicycle kick and a forward for the club, walked into the clinic.
By comparison, in my world, the childhood world that surrounded me in the early 90s, we were obsessed with winning. I’d play soccer with neighborhood kids on the asphalt streets, loose bits of pitch destroying our knees. We got into fights practically every day, coming home covered in scrapes and bruises, snotty-nosed and in tears. We inflicted the worst possible kinds of humiliation on each other; we were competitive, quick-tempered, and cruel.
On television we watched President Fernando Collor de Mello, Brazil’s first president elected by direct vote since the 1964 military coup, do judo with gelled-back hair. On weekends, he’d ride jet skis or break the sound barrier in a supersonic fighter jet, to remind us that Brazil, the modern Brazil of privatization and economic openness, was pointed toward triumph. As if the island of W, the utopic land from Georges Perec’s totalitarian allegory “where Sport is king,” was about to gain a theme park on the Maceió waterfront or in the parking lot of the Eldorado shopping mall. We didn’t know it yet, but things were going to get worse.
In terms of soccer, the decade was also off to a bad start. On June 24, 1990, Brazil, coached by Sebastião Lazaroni, took to the field against Argentina in the round of sixteen of the World Cup in Italy, at Turin’s Stadio delle Alpi. I was eight years old. It was the first World Cup I had ever watched, and a defeat for Brazil wasn’t exactly something I had factored into my plans. I hadn’t even considered it a possibility.
But in the thirty-sixth minute of the second half, Maradona dribbled past Brazil’s defense and passed to Claudio Caniggia, who rounded Taffarel to the left and scored, making it 1-0 to Argentina. I don’t remember ever crying that hard at any other time in my childhood, or perhaps even in my entire life. It was like something inside me had broken. My mother comforted me as best she could, and I spent the rest of the day drying my tears and furiously kicking a ball in the backyard with my dad and blocking his shots, while he, undoubtedly, let me win.
That same year, in December, São Paulo would compete in the final of Brazil’s national championship. It was the first time this had happened under my watchful eye as a fan. The game was against our cross-city rivals, Corinthians. Back then, all my friends were Corinthians fans. Losing would be a problem. During the games we watched together, I made sure my dad cheered. If our opponent scored a goal, it seemed directly tied to his lack of commitment to our team. We watched the second leg of the final at my uncle’s house, my mother’s brother, who is a Corinthians fan. São Paulo lost both matches by the same score, 1-0, with goals by Wilson Mano and Tupãzinho, the “talisman” of the Fiel (as Corinthians fans are affectionately known).
It was a terrible Christmas. I remember going out for a walk at night down the street where my friends and I would play soccer, thinking about life, maybe kicking a few rocks along the way. Was São Paulo really the best choice? Was it an undebatable paternal inheritance?
It would have been great if I’d liked the rival team, or any other team at all, really; I can’t think of a more efficient way to kill the father, wrote Alejandro Zambra in a short story about soccer. In my case, with a dad who was so indifferent, did that also hold true? How do you kill something that isn’t exactly there? Maybe it was just unfair, and I was definitely being dramatic. But, as Zambra says, especially after a certain age, we all know that changing teams is simply impossible.
At the time, São Paulo was coached by Telê Santana. He’d arrived just a few months before the 1990 final, and their defeat seemed to cement his reputation as a jinx. After losing the national championship with Palmeiras in 1979 and, most importantly, after managing the traumatic 1982 and 1986 World Cup eliminations, it seemed like Telê was now bringing his bad luck to São Paulo and misery upon my childhood.
Under Telê, Brazil played a beautiful but losing game, people said. Sócrates was the most iconic player on the 1982 team, widely regarded by many as the greatest Brazilian squad of all time. When I lived in Shanghai for a short time, I befriended an older Chinese gentleman, a tea collector, who, whenever he saw me, would grin and repeat “Socrates, Socrates.” The fact that he was this man’s reference for Brazilian players, and not Ronaldo or Pelé, somehow made me like both him and China even more.
I never saw Sócrates play, but beginning in 1991—this is one of those wild soccer stories—his younger brother Raí wore the number ten for São Paulo. How could two siblings both be such standout players, yet so different? Though more of an athlete than his brother, and perhaps less of a genius, he ended up changing the course of my soccer-obsessed youth. It was an era when the sport was becoming increasingly stream-lined and efficient, pointing to changes we would also see in the world and our own lives.
From 1991 to 1993, captained by Raí, São Paulo won it all. In the 1991 Campeonato Paulista state final, Raí scored three goals against Corinthians. São Paulo also won the Brazilian championship that same year. Raí scored three more goals in the next year’s state championship final, against Palmeiras. He scored the winning penalty that secured São Paulo the 1992 Copa Libertadores title against Newell’s Old Boys. Then in the 1993 Libertadores final against Universidad Católica, he scored again—an unforgettable chest goal—making them back-to-back champions. He also scored in the Ramón de Carranza trophy match against Iván Zamorano’s Real Madrid, a 4-0 massacre. And, in one of the greatest performances by a Brazilian player in a club match, he scored both goals in the World Club final on December 13, 1992, at the National Stadium in Tokyo, against Johan Cruyff’s Barcelona dream team, with Pep Guardiola and Hristo Stoichkov on the pitch.
As I write this, I start to think that maybe my dad is right, it feels a little empty stringing together victories like that. I tell him about what I’m writing.
“Don’t you think people will find me a little dull?” he asks.
I laugh, then take a few seconds to think.
“Why do you say that?” I reply. “You’re mysterious, eccentric! And there’s a generational aspect to it, too. Everything was changing. Do you remember the 1982 and 1986 World Cups?”
“No. I was probably preoccupied with other things. But I remember when the winning team arrived home, parading along São João in the bed of a truck.”
“That must have been 1958. Or 1962.”
Sitting beside me on the sofa at home, my dad suddenly seems small. I ask him how his thumb is doing; he had a fall a few weeks ago, and the thumb on his right hand, which was already bad due to osteoarthritis, has become completely crooked, like a branch. He tells me he doesn’t think it will get better. Of course it will, I say.
“The little importance I seemed to give to soccer was just for appearances.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“The thing is, I’ve always enjoyed playing more than watching.
“Mom told me that during the 1982 World Cup, when I was just a newborn, she would put cotton balls in my ears because of all the noise from the fireworks. Do you remember that?”
“No, I don’t remember that.”
The next day, we go see an occupational therapist. She’s a hand specialist, somewhere between thirty and thirty-five years old, with curly hair and big teeth. My dad sits down and places his hand on the table in front of him. She asks him how old he is. Ninety-two, he replies. She ventures a playful comment, adopting the condescending tone so often reserved for the elderly, but it doesn’t quite land; my dad just smiles. Gradually, they begin to get along. He squeezes a tennis ball, moving his thumb repeatedly. She talks about the number of nerves and ligaments we have in our hands. She also talks about bones. She says she enjoys being in the countryside and nature. My dad says he likes dancing and ancient philosophy. He leaves wearing a kind of blue glove, an orthopedic device meant to help correct his hand.
“There was this one time I was playing pool with my friend Cláudio, at a place near the office I used to rent, on Voluntários da Pátria,” he tells me later that night, when I call to check if he remembered to buy some medication. “I don’t know what happened that day, I must have been upset about something and decided I wasn’t going to lose.”
“How about that…”
“It was a personal, inexplicable decision. I decided I wouldn’t give him a single chance. We played three games, and I won all three. After that day, maybe it was just life’s circumstances, most likely that was it, but we never played again.”
“Did you feel bad afterward?”
“I felt terrible afterward.”
Because of the time difference, the 1992 Club World Cup final between São Paulo and Barcelona started around midnight. I remember being in my room, upstairs, lying on my bed in the dark, with the TV on. I don’t remember anyone watching with me. My mom may have peeked her head in from time to time. My dad definitely didn’t. On the screen, São Paulo’s white jerseys seemed to sparkle. We were so used to seeing matches played in the afternoon or evening. The Japanese midday sun was extremely bright. The pitch had a metallic hue, a liquid green. And it was cold. Windy, too. São Paulo took to the field in long-sleeved jerseys, with no sponsors, shirts that looked even whiter in the Tokyo sun.
I’m reminded of a text by art director Kenya Hara about the color white. He writes that, because it gets dirty easily and is hard to keep clean, its beauty is even more striking to those who see it, evoking a sense of sadness in knowing that its beauty is fleeting. He also talked about how the Chinese ideogram for the word “white” was formed from a human skull, which would represent the end of life. Twelve minutes in, Hristo Stoichkov—widely considered the greatest Bulgarian player of all time and the winner of the Ballon d’Or in 1994—opened the scoring with a sudden strike from outside the box.
Rewatching that play today, it doesn’t seem like much will come of it. He receives the ball from a distance and raises his head for a split second, just enough to notice São Paulo’s goalkeeper, Zetti, is off his line. After three light touches, he strikes with his left foot, hitting the top-right corner of the goal.
São Paulo tied the game in the first half. Müller advanced down the left, cut past his marker and crossed to Raí, who scored an awkward goal, half with his stomach, half with his groin. The pass comes in hard, and he actually tries to lean his body away slightly so the ball will glance off him and toward the goal, which is exactly what happens. The title-winning goal came thirty-four minutes into the second half, a rehearsed move on a free kick near the edge of the penalty box. Raí nudges the ball, leaving it hidden by the wall, to Cafu who traps it, before Raí curls it into the far corner, catching Andoni Zubizarreta, at the time considered the best goalkeeper in the world, off guard. The camera cuts to Raí running towards the bench. Another cut. Telê Santana appears, seated, then getting up, chewing gum and smiling.
After the match, Raí dedicated the title to the generation of 1982 and 1986, to his coach Telê, and to his brother Sócrates. Raí bid farewell to São Paulo in the middle of 1993, when he was transferred to Paris Saint-Germain, where he would also become a star.
At the 1994 World Cup in the United States, he arrived as Brazil’s captain, wearing the number ten jersey. But things didn’t go well. After the group stage, he was replaced by Mazinho, a more defensive midfielder, and never won back his spot, appearing only briefly in the matches that followed and not playing in the final against Italy.
I’ve always been fascinated by players who are idols at their clubs but struggle to find their place on the national team. There’s no shortage of examples. A club has a particularity, tied to a city, a region, an identity within a country, but there’s a rare purity to playing for the national team. What works in one situation doesn’t necessarily work in another. The environment, the tactics, the psychology, the roles are never the same. Besides that, nothing happens twice. In Raí’s case, it’s even more interesting because, ironically, he still became a world champion from the bench, with Carlos Alberto Parreira’s pragmatic team, achieving something his brother was never able to.
As I wrap up these last lines, I video-call my dad to ask what he remembers about the 1994 World Cup.
“I remember the penalty kick that Italian guy missed and Brazil becoming champion,” he says.
“Yeah, and the power went out right at the beginning of the game, remember? We went to watch the rest of the match at the house of one of your friends.”
“Huh, I don’t remember any of that…”
“A final without a single goal, decided on penalties, what a drag,” I say, growing a little irritated just thinking about that World Cup. My dad says something else. The connection drops, and I ask him to say it again. He gets up from the sofa, walks around the room to find better reception. I notice how put-together he is, freshly showered and clean-shaven.
“Last night I had a dream about this piece you’re writing. There was some linguistic issue. Something about the verb ‘to do’. Whether or not to use the imperative. How to use the verb.”
“That’s crazy. Was that all?”
“That’s all. I had a late dinner, I slept badly, and when I sleep badly, I dream a lot. Did you see the news about the Iranian team not going to the World Cup?”
“Yeah, I saw,” I reply, but then fall into thought. For a moment, I feel like saying how everything now is such a mess. War. Artificial intelligence. Big tech. Everyone trying to get ahead at any cost. The elections in Brazil are coming up, and we’re probably screwed. Soccer also feels increasingly stupid.
He breaks the silence.
“São Paulo is playing tonight, I just saw the ad on TV.”
He’s holding his phone very close to his face, his hand partially covering the camera.
“Maybe I could come over so we can watch it together,” I suggest.
“Yes. Let’s do that.”
Translated by Zoë Perry