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.