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.