Four years later, Uruguay won gold again at the Olympics in the Netherlands. A prominent Uruguayan, Atilio Narancio, who in 1924 had mortgaged his house to pay for the players’ passage, commented: “We are no longer just a tiny spot on the map of the world.” The sky-blue shirt was proof of the existence of the nation: Uruguay was not a mistake. Soccer had pulled this tiny country out of the shadows of universal anonymity.
The authors of the miracles of ’24 and ’28 were workers and wanderers who got nothing from soccer but the pleasure of playing. Pedro Arispe was a meatpacker. José Nasazzi cut marble. “Perucho” Petrone was a grocer. Pedro Cea sold ice. José Leandro Andrade was a carnival musician and bootblack. They were all twenty years old or a little older, though in the pictures they look like old men. They cured their wounds with salt water, vinegar plasters, and a few glasses of wine.
In 1924 they arrived in Europe in third-class steerage and then traveled on borrowed money in second-class carriages, sleeping on wooden benches and playing match after match in exchange for room and board. Before the Paris Olympics, they played nine matches in Spain and won all nine of them.
It was the first time that a Latin American team had played in Europe. Their first Olympic match was against Yugoslavia. The Yugoslavs sent spies to the practice session. The Uruguayans caught on and practiced by kicking the ground and sending the ball up into the clouds, tripping at every step and crashing into each other. The spies reported: “It makes you feel sorry, these poor boys came from so far away.”
Barely two thousand fans showed up. The Uruguayan flag was flown upside down, the sun on its head, and instead of the national anthem they played a Brazilian march. That afternoon, Uruguay defeated Yugoslavia 7–0.
And then something like the second discovery of America occurred. Match after match, crowds lined up to see those men, slippery like squirrels, who played chess with the ball. The English squad had perfected the long pass and the high ball, but these disinherited children, begotten in far-off America, did not walk in their fathers’ footsteps. They chose to invent a game of close passes directly to the foot, with lightning changes in rhythm and high-speed dribbling. Henri de Montherlant, an aristocratic writer, published his enthusiasm: “A revelation! Here we have real soccer. Compared with this, what we knew before, what we played, was no more than a schoolboy’s hobby.”
Uruguay’s success at the ’24 and ’28 Olympics and its subsequent World Cup victories in 1930 and 1950, owed a large debt to the government’s policy of building sports fields around the country to promote physical education. Now, years later, all that remains of the state’s social calling, and of that great soccer, is nostalgia. Several players, like the very subtle Enzo Francescoli, have managed to inherit and renovate the old arts, but in general Uruguayan soccer is a far cry from what it used to be. Ever fewer children play it and ever fewer men play it gracefully. Nevertheless, there is no Uruguayan who does not consider himself a Ph.D. in tactics and strategy, and a scholar of soccer history. Uruguayans’ passion for soccer comes from those days long ago, and its deep roots are still visible. Every time the national team plays, no matter against whom, the country holds its breath. Politicians, singers, and carnival barkers shut their mouths, lovers suspend their caresses, and flies refuse to budge.
Andrade
Europe had never seen a black man play soccer.
In the 1924 Olympics, the Uruguayan José Leandro Andrade dazzled everyone with his exquisite moves. A midfielder, this rubber-bodied giant would sweep the ball downfield without ever touching an adversary, and when he launched the attack he would brandish his body and send them all scattering. In one match he crossed half the field with the ball sitting on his head. The crowds cheered him, the French press called him “The Black Marvel.”
When the tournament was over, Andrade spent some time hanging around Paris as errant Bohemian and king of the cabarets. Patent leather shoes replaced his whiskery hemp sandals from Montevideo and a top hat took the place of his worn cap. Newspaper columns of the time praised the figure of that monarch of the Pigalle night: gay jaunty step, oversized grin, half-closed eyes always staring into the distance. And dressed to kilclass="underline" silk handkerchief, striped jacket, bright yellow gloves, and a cane with a silver handle.
Andrade died in Montevideo many years later. His friends had planned several benefits for him, but none of them ever came off. He died of tuberculosis, in utter poverty.
He was black, South American, and poor, the first international idol of soccer.
Ringlets
They called the successive figure eights Uruguayan players drew on the field moñas, ringlets. French journalists wanted the secret of that witchcraft that cast the rival players in stone. Through an interpreter, José Leandro Andrade revealed the formula: the players trained by chasing chickens that fled making S’s on the ground. Journalists believed it and published the story.
Decades later, good ringlets were still cheered as loudly as goals in South American soccer. My childhood memory is filled with them. I close my eyes and I see, for example, Walter Gómez, that dizzying bushwhacker who would dive into the swamp of enemy legs with ringlet after ringlet and leave a wake of fallen bodies. The stands would confess:
We’d all rather fast
than miss a Walter Gómez pass.
He liked to knead the ball, retain it and caress it, and if it got away from him, he would feel insulted. No coach would dare tell him, as they say now: “If you want to knead, go work in a bakery.”
The ringlet was not just a bit of tolerated mischief, it was a joy the crowd demanded. Today such works of art are outlawed, or at least viewed with grave suspicion, and are considered selfish exhibitionism, a betrayal of team spirit, and utterly useless against the iron defensive systems of modern soccer.
The Olympic Goal
When the Uruguayan team returned from the 1924 Olympics, the Argentines challenged them to a friendly. The match was played in Buenos Aires. Uruguay lost by one goal.
Left wing Cesáreo Onzari was the author of the winning goal. He took a corner and the ball went directly into the net without anyone else touching it. He was the first in soccer history to score a goal that way. The Uruguayans were left speechless. When they found their tongues, they protested. They claimed the goalkeeper, Mazali, was pushed when the ball was in the air. The referee wouldn’t listen. Then they howled that Onzari hadn’t intended to shoot at the net and that the goal had been scored by the wind.
In homage or in irony, that rarity became known in South America as the “Olympic goal.” It is still called that, on the rare occasions it occurs. Onzari spent the rest of his life swearing it wasn’t by chance. And though years have gone by, the mistrust continues: every time a corner kick shakes the net without intermediaries, the crowd celebrates the goal with an ovation, but doesn’t quite believe it.
Goal by Piendibene