Juan Delgado, also a great-grandson of slaves, was born in the town of Florida, in the Uruguayan countryside. Delgado liked to show off by dancing with a broom at Carnival and with the ball on the field. He talked while he played, and he liked to tease his opponents: “Pick me that bunch of grapes,” he’d say as he sent the ball high. And as he shot he’d say to the keeper, “Jump for it, the sand is soft.”
Back then Uruguay was the only country in the world with black players on its national team.
Zamora
He made his first-division debut when he was sixteen, still wearing short pants. Before taking the field with Espanyol in Barcelona, he put on a high-necked English jersey, gloves, and a hard cap like a helmet to protect himself from the sun and other blows. The year was 1917 and the attacks were like cavalry charges. Ricardo Zamora had chosen a perilous career. The only one in greater danger than the goalkeeper was the referee, known at that time as “The Nazarene,” because the fields had no dugouts or fences to protect him from the vengeance of the fans. Each goal gave rise to a long hiatus while people ran onto the field either to embrace or to throw punches.
Over the years the image of Zamora in those clothes became famous. He sowed panic among strikers. If they looked his way they were lost: with Zamora in the goal, the net would shrink and the posts would lose themselves in the distance.
They called him “The Divine One.” For twenty years, he was the best goalkeeper in the world. He liked cognac and smoked three packs a day, plus the occasional cigar.
Illustrations from a soccer manual published in Barcelona at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Samitier
Like Zamora, Josep Samitier made his debut in the first division when he was sixteen. In 1918 he signed with Barcelona in exchange for a watch with a dial that glowed in the dark, something he had never seen, and a suit with a waistcoat.
It wasn’t long before he was the team’s ace and his life story was in kiosks all over the city. His name was on the lips of cabaret singers, bandied about on the stage, and revered in sports columns where they praised the “Mediterranean style” invented by Zamora and Samitier.
Samitier, a striker with a devastating shot, stood out for his cleverness, his domination of the ball, his utter lack of respect for the rules of logic, and his Olympian scorn for the boundaries of space and time.
Death on the Field
Abdón Porte, who wore the shirt of the Uruguayan club Nacional for more than two hundred matches over four years, always drew applause and sometimes cheers, until his lucky star fell.
They took him out of the starting lineup. He waited, asked to return, and did. But it was no use; the slump continued, the crowd whistled. On defense even tortoises got past him, on the attack he could not score a single goal.
At the end of the summer of 1918, in the Nacional stadium, Abdón Porte took his own life. He shot himself at midnight at the center of the field where he had been loved. All the lights were out. No one heard the gunshot.
They found him at dawn. In one hand he held a revolver, in the other a letter.
Friedenreich
In 1919 Brazil defeated Uruguay 1–0 and crowned itself champion of South America. People flooded the streets of Rio de Janeiro. Leading the celebration, raised aloft like a standard, was a muddy soccer boot with a little sign that proclaimed: “The glorious foot of Friedenreich.” The next day that shoe, which had scored the winning goal, ended up in the display window of a downtown jewelry shop.
Artur Friedenreich, son of a German immigrant and a black washerwoman, played in the first division for twenty-six years and never earned a cent. No one scored more goals than he in the history of soccer, not even that other great Brazilian artilleryman, Pelé, who remains professional soccer’s leading scorer. Friedenreich converted 1,329, Pelé 1,279.
This green-eyed mulatto founded the Brazilian style of play. He, or the devil who got into him through the soles of his feet, broke all the rules in the English manuals: to the solemn stadium of the whites Friedenreich brought the irreverence of brown boys who entertained themselves fighting over a rag ball in the slums. Thus was born a style open to fantasy, one which prefers pleasure to results. From Friedenreich onward, there have been no right angles in Brazilian soccer, just as there are none in the mountains of Rio de Janeiro or the buildings of Oscar Niemeyer.
From Mutilation to Splendor
In 1921 the South American Cup was played in Buenos Aires. The president of Brazil, Epitácio Pessoa, issued a decree: for reasons of patriotic prestige there would be no brown skin on Brazil’s national team. Of the three matches they played, the white team lost two.
Friedenreich did not play in that championship. Back then, to be black in Brazilian soccer was simply impossible, and being mulatto was a trial. Friedenreich always started late because it took him half an hour to iron his hair in the dressing room. The only mulatto player on Fluminense, Carlos Alberto, used to whiten his face with rice powder.
Later on, despite the owners of power, things began to change. With the passage of time, the old soccer mutilated by racism gave way to a soccer of multicolored splendor. After so many years it is obvious that Brazil’s best players, from Friedenreich to Romário, by way of Domingos da Guia, Leônidas, Zizinho, Garrincha, Didi and Pelé, have been blacks and mulattos. All of them came up from poverty, and some of them returned to it. By contrast, there have never been blacks or mulattos among Brazil’s car-racing champions, which like tennis requires money.
In the global social pyramid, blacks are at the bottom and whites are at the top. In Brazil this is called “racial democracy,” but soccer is one of very few democratic venues where people of color can compete on an equal footing — up to a point. Even in soccer some are more equal than others. They all have the same rights, but the player who grew up hungry and the athlete who never missed a meal do not really compete on a level playing field. At least soccer offers a shot at social mobility for a poor child, usually black or mulatto, who had no other toy but a ball. The ball is the only fairy godmother he can believe in. Maybe she will feed him, maybe she will make him a hero, maybe even a god.
Misery trains him for soccer or for crime. From the moment of birth, that child is forced to turn his disadvantage into a weapon, and before long he learns to dribble around the rules of order that deny him a place. He learns the tricks of every trade and he becomes an expert in the art of pretending, surprising, breaking through where least expected, and throwing off an enemy with a hip feint or some other tune from the rascal’s songbook.
The Second Discovery of America
For Pedro Arispe, homeland meant nothing. It was the place where he was born, which meant nothing to him because he had no choice in the matter. It was where he broke his back working as a peon in a packinghouse, and for him one boss was the same as any other no matter the country. But when Uruguay won the 1924 Olympics in France, Arispe was one of the winning players. While he watched the flag with the sun and four pale blue stripes rising slowly up the pole of honor, at the center of all the flags and higher than any other, Arispe felt his heart burst.