Soccer : A Dangerous Game for the Boys of Brazil

Rob Hughes is on the Staff of the Times of London.

http://www.iht.com/articles/1996/10/02/rob.t.php

This is a message to Pele, the sports minister of Brazil and symbol of the beautiful game: S.O.S.S. — Save Our Samba Soccer.

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Pele knows countless romantics like me who, fully aware that roots are contaminated, refuse to concede that all is lost.

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Soccer will always be child's play, an outlet for expression among deprived kids. It costs nothing to practice with a tiny apple, an orange, a ball of rags. And Pele knows springs where imagination runs free, in Brazil and Africa . Africa sprouts talents out of poverty and squanders them through chaos. Brazil is in danger of crushing its own seed.

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It still, as the precocious Ronaldo shows, produces innocents. Rediscovering his game after knee surgery, Ronaldo scored twice for Barcelona on his 20th birthday, twice more in Sunday's subsequent game.

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He is big, but he glides. There is no part of his anatomy that cannot command obedience from the ball at a touch — head, chest, muscular thighs, either foot. His mom was among 100,000 Catalans in Barcelona 's Nou Camp Stadium, and watched her birthday boy skip with joy amid the flying boots.

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He is an escapee. At 16, men constantly kicked him in Brazil . At 17, he moved to Holland , at 19, Eindhoven traded him for $20 million to Barcelona 's "new" coach, 63-year-old Bobby Robson.

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Youth serves age, and I know Robson, a match for any youngster's enthusiasm, will try to protect Ronaldo.

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Meanwhile, back in Brazil , a Flamengo forward called Savio, two years Ronaldo's senior and his likely scoring partner in the national team, recently received alarming advice.

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Mario Zagalo, the national trainer, warned Savio: "Young man, take care. Cut down on the dribbling, or else they will cut you down at the shins."

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I paraphrase, but the gist is accurate. Savio ignored it at his peril when Flamengo met Corinthians.

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Savio is light and quick, a magnate to thugs. A Corinthian boot hacked him down, a deliberate kick apparently aimed at a known wound on Savio's ankle. The aggressor, Alexandre Lopes, got a slap on the wrist, a yellow card. Savio got doctor's orders to rest for 15 days. As a pressured species, he will be risked long before that time is granted.

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There is little hope for the boys who remain in Brazil . Those who come out of Rio and Sao Paulo illuminate the world game in faraway Japan, where they enthuse a new culture, or in Europe where if they sometimes conquer coaching systems and are then pursued by the ambitious — males with the money, females with the looks.

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For those who can do tricks with the ball, there is always a place to play. Carlos Eduardo Castro de Souza, known as Edu, last month found his haven in a town called Lushnja — in Albania . That has to be a first, a foreign mercenary paid $50,000 a year to kick a ball

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If the price is right, Brazilians will go anywhere. But who will protect the source? Can Pele impose a return to lost values in a land where nothing grows more exotic than its soccer sons?

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But if Brazil farms embryonic talents, the playing fields are blighted with craven boardroom tyrants and acquiescent coaches.

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I remember Tele Santana, the last true coach of Samba soccer, retreating from stones and rotting fruit because his 1982 World Cup team returned without a medal. I remember his pained withdrawal before he moved back into club coaching, and toward compromising his ideals.

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I recall, too, another free spirit and what he prophesied beneath a mountain in Leblon , Brazil , called "The Two Brothers." But wait, a little, for him. - CONSIDER first the lunatic asylum that, abetted by cowardly refereeing, is crippling the gifted in Brazil 's sport. Right across Europe at the moment we have professional players, ever a myopic flock, crying out loud because refs are brandishing red cards at their elbowing, their willingness to maim fellow professionals. The excuse, everywhere, is pressure. But in Brazil , which still fields the world champion team, the extremes are worse. Brazil has a ritual sacking season known as the Dance of the Coaches. This season's Brazilian championship is almost two months old, and nine of the 24 clubs have fired their coaches. Guarani got the ball moving, dismissing its coach after two games. Botafogo reached the depths of conspiracies when its coach, Marinho Perez, who must have done something right by qualifying his squad for the Libertadores Cup, received his notice with his wake-up call after the first game of the tournament in Santiago . He awoke to find that players and directors had conspired in the night and all agreed he should fly back to Brazil , solo. This mentality demeans the trainers who brutalize the game, for it is quicker to destroy than to create. Sitting beneath the mountain in 1977, the late Joao Saldanha — a one-time war correspondent, former Communist Party activist, TV commentator and briefly the 1970 national coach — said: ''Our championship has become worse than Italy. Why? It's the character of these guys who coach. They are defensive, the trainers are afraid to lose their jobs, like two fighters defending every round. The record for one club is nine coaches in one season, America of Minas Gerais in 1967. They just pay up contracts, these bandits in the boardrooms.'' Saldanha, to his dying day six years ago, railed against the repression of skill. ''It goes against the sway of our crowds and the character of our players,'' he insisted. ''Football is like a short blanket in winter. If you protect your neck, your feet get cold. The art is to live within the blanket.'' If Saldanha were not gone he would be protesting still. It is for the living, led by Pele, to teach their countrymen what was good about what used to be.