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Travelling extensively from Uruguay to the north eastern backlands, and from the coastal cities of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo to the Amazon jungle, Alex Bellos shows how Brazil changed football and how football shaped Brazil. He tells the stories behind the great players, such as Pele and Garrincha, the great teams, and the great matches, as well as from people and pitches all over this vast country. With a keen eye for telling detail and a finely tuned ear for local legends, Alex Bellos uncovers what Ronaldo called the ‘true truth’ about Brazilian football.
The following extract is from Chapter Eight of Alex’s original and unedited manuscript.
Walter Lacet, Flamingo’s Number 4, takes possession in his own half. The car dominates the ball with its front left wheel. It accelerates towards the oncoming goal. Nought to 30 in 60 metres. As Lacet approaches the area the angle is tight. He attempts a sharp left. Too late. The car crashes into the side of the post.
‘Mmm. It was a wonderful time. God, how I miss it,’ yearns Mário Bucich. We are watching a video of automobile football, or autoball, a radical sporting crossbreed from the 1970s played by two teams of cars and a 1.2m-diameter leather ball. Mário talks of his autoball days with the dreamy nostalgia of a cricketer reminiscing about Sunday afternoons on the village green.
‘The referee was always on foot,’ he points out softly, proudly. ‘And never once did he get run over.’
‘Yes he did,’ interrupts Ivan Sant’Anna, sitting next to him.
‘Sometimes we knocked the ref over,’ Ivan adds brusquely, ‘but there was never a serious accident in autoball, because the pitch was small. If the pitch was four times the size of what it was, full of free space, then it would be dangerous. But the size of the pitch limited the speed of the cars.’
We are in the living room of Ivan’s eleventh-floor flat in Rio de Janeiro’s noveau-riche suburb Barra da Tijuca. From the window, the view beyond nearby malls and tower blocks is of miles of flat land until a lagoon meets a ridge of green mountains. It is a triumph of dramatic landscape over the immediate urban banality. ‘I think autoball has something to do with what you are seeing here,’ says Mário, pointing to the horizon. ‘With being free. In Rio you feel free.’
The video continues. Ivan serves us coconut water, adding that it is from a very efficient coconut home-delivery service. Autoball is an entertaining spectacle. It is It’s a Knockout meets Demolition Derby, a mixture of childish fun with adult danger, of absolute simplicity with noisy, dirty, mechanical aggression. Since the ball is so big — twice the height of a car bonnet — the drivers and their machines look exaggeratedly small and childlike, no matter how fast or recklessly they drive. The ball is made of buffalo leather, and like a big, heavy balloon it bounces lethargically as if obeying lunar laws of gravity. The referee runs up and down the touchline, blowing whistles that no one pays attention to and occasionally dislodging the ball from a mass of twisted iron. The job is a glorified traffic warden, made worthwhile only by the surreal thrill of showing the car a yellow card.
Ivan, sixty, and Mário, fifty-seven, have kept in touch since they hung up their driving shoes. Mário who now works in the solar energy business, is a soft-spoken, well-mannered man whose serene air is accentuated by a professional white moustache and goatee. He tries to remember what was the worst accident that happened.
‘Was it the guy whose car exploded?’ asks Ivan.
Mário shakes his head: ‘A spectator was in a place where he shouldn’t have been. This area was just behind the touchline, about half a metre lower than the pitch. A driver lost control, spun in a circle and landed on this guy’s chest. But I think he only broke an arm, isn’t that right?’
Ivan agrees: ‘An arm, a collarbone. That’s right. The driver was prosecuted. There was a court case. Running someone over is a criminal offence — even if it happens as part of a sporting event. It took five years to be judged’
‘Autoball was exciting,’ reminisces Ivan. ‘Cars were often upturned, there were lots of fires. But we were prepared for these things. It wasn’t dangerous in the sense that someone could have died, like in a race of Formula Indy. It was only dangerous to break an arm or a leg, that sort of thing.’ For Mário it was good clean fun: ‘There was no danger at all. It was a sport. It wasn’t a circus show.’
For more than five years autoball was the sport of Rio de Janeiro’s young elite, who would buy and trash cars like they were pairs of boots. Autoball established itself with rules, a federation and teams endorsed by the major football clubs, Flamengo, Fluminense, Botafogo, Vasco and América.
It produced its own stars. Ivan scored on his first appearance in 1970 and was subsequently autoball’s most prolific striker. ‘The other day I was in the fish market, and a man comes up to me and asks me for an autograph,’ says Ivan, slightly mystified that anyone could still remember him. ‘He said “because you were the best autoball player there was”.’
Ivan is tall and has a small round head with closely cropped white hair. He is wearing shorts with socks up to his knees. Whereas Mário is reserved, Ivan is loud, direct, domineering and distinctly cavalier. For him, of course autoball wasn’t dangerous. When the sport was banned he starting flying acrobats planes.
His pilot’s licence had already come in handy. Once 300 miles away in Belo Horizonte for an exhibition match, the pair realised that their cars were held up in a freight wagon somewhere along the line from Rio. Ivan decided to fix the problem. He rented a plane. He flew above the track tracing it back to Rio.
‘He found the train, and then dived three times to the level of the driver, shouting for the guy to hurry up,’ says Mário, still in awe of his colleague. ‘You ask me what was exciting in autoball — it’s these memories.’
Ivan shrugs: ‘I was a pilot. We needed the cars.’
Autoball emerged as the solution for what to do with a 1.2 metre, 12kg ball that had been made by the São Paulo ball factory Dribble to commemorate a match of the Brazilian national team. The giant leather orb had stayed in the factory until, in 1970, it was lent out for an attempt to create horse football. One might have thought polo already fulfilled this need. Not so. In the town of Taubate the horses were expected to, most unbrazilianly, hoof the ball. ‘The game would have been a success — the stadium was full,’ wrote O Globo, ‘if it were not for the incredible fear that the ball struck in the animals, and an accident, one of the horses who dared to kick the ball broke its leg.’
The buffalo-skinned supersphere ended up in the hands of Mário Tourinho, former member of the Competitive Drivers association and for two decades team medic of América Football Club. Mário had dreamt up autoball by accident. He was driving along Copacabana and a ball came flying towards his windscreen. Instead of averting the collision he charged into it. Thack! The ball bounced back like a ‘perfect kick.’ It was a Eureka moment. He realised that his two passions could be merged into a unique new sport.
Mário was a traumatology doctor who behaved as if he was looking for new clients. But he believed that autoball, despite its violence, could relax the tension of the participants: ‘It is a necessary therapy in today’s age, when stress is creating a grand human mass of neuroses,’ he once said.
The first match happened on 19 September, 1970 — three months after Brazil won the World Cup in Mexico — during the half time period of a game between Flamengo and Madureira. Luiz Mendes, the radio commentator, remembers that about ten cars drove on to a side pitch and started driving into each other. A more bizarre happening was yet to occur. Twenty-six minutes into the second half Ubirajara Alcântara, Flamengo’s goalkeeper, booted the ball up field. In the air it was carried by a gust of wind and bounced into the opposing net. Never before or since has a keeper in Brazil scored from his area. Autoball was the most crackpot development of the year, yet its launch was overshadowed by a goal kick.
Over the following year the sport evolved its practical procedures. Depending on the size of the pitch, autoball could be three, four, five or even six-a-side. The cars were old Fords, Chevrolets, Volkswagens and Renaults. Rules were kept simple. They followed the spirit of football, with the modifications that reversing was only allowed off the ball, goalkeeper cars were not permitted to save using the side of their vehicles and there were no throw-ins or corner kicks.
The first matches were between a team in yellow shirts and a team in red. But there were teething problems; the cars were old and broke down, technique was poor and the crowds were low. The following year, in 1971, Mário Tourinho organised an exhibition game on Copacabana’s Atlantic Avenue, the most glamorous stage for a sporting event after the Maracanã.
The road was closed down. Crowds formed. Ivan turned up in a brand new Alfa Romeo. He asked his colleagues not to bump into him. Another player had the same request. He had rented a car to take part. ‘We all took a lot of care not to squash his car,’ says Mário Bucich. ‘The rental shop should have loved it — the car hardly drove anywhere and returned scratchless.’
‘It was in the middle of the road, it was crazy. But seriously, no one ran in to each other,’ swears Ivan.
To increase the sport’s profile its enthusiasts approached Rio’s football clubs for permission to have teams play under their colours. In 1973 the first Carioca Championship was inaugurated with fortnightly games between Fluminense, Vasco, Flamengo and América. It lasted six months. The following year América made way for Botafogo.
The cars were painted in team colours and featured, like team shirts, a number and the club emblem. They were fitted inside with a pole from the roof to the ceiling to make sure the roof would no cave in if they overturned. Different cars had different uses and different techniques. If a Volkswagen Beetle hit the ball, the curved bonnet would lob the ball into the air — enabling other cars to ‘head’ the ball with their windscreens or roofs. Cars with square bonnets could be used for penalties and for passes along the ground. Specialist repairmen were on hand. In case of a breakdown ‘the mechanics, nicknamed “masseurs”, rush on to the field with levers, wrenches, and hammers to see if the car can be kept running,’ wrote one newspaper in 1975. ‘Doctor’ Castro, a masseur, surpassed himself when he managed to fix a car that twenty minutes beforehand had caught fire.
Autoball required skill, courage and deep pockets. Ivan, then a partner in a financial brokers, bankrolled his hobby personally. ‘It was a very expensive sport. I spent lots of money, say, US$3,000 a time,’ he estimates. ‘You needed to buy a car almost every game. We bought taxis. You had to customise the car. Some people liked even to have two or three cars per game. It really wrecked the clutch, so you had to swap the car a lot.’
There is perhaps an inevitability about the existence of autoball since is suited the Brazilian traits of playfulness, reckless driving and wanton destruction. It also combines the two sports of which Brazil boasts the best international record: football and motor racing. Brazil is the only country to have won the football World Cup four times. Brazilian drivers have one the Formula One championship eight times — more than the drivers of any other nationality. Autoball coincided both with Brazil’s post-1970 World Cup honeymoon and with the rise of Brazil’s first Formula One champion, Émerson Fittipaldi, in 1972 and 1974. Brazil was the best in racing cars and kicking balls. Why not capitalise?
As the mechanics got better, the cars became stronger and with practice the players learnt new tricks. (There were hardly any training sessions. It was too expensive.) Some players preferred less subtle touches. ‘Scorning the required crash helmet, his black flight suit unzippered to show his chest hair, [Walter] Lacet gunned around the field with the kind of revved up machismo that seems a prerequisite for autoball. When the ball got pinned between two cars, he would wheel off to the far end of the field and then come roaring back at full speed until the opposing driver backed off the ball. If he did not retreat, mechanics armed with sledgehammers were called in to disentangle the wreckage and, if necessary, provide substitute cars,’ wrote US magazine Time.
Booking a good pitch was always tricky, since a game of autoball decimated the grass. Fluminense allowed the sport at its Laranjeiras stadium during returfing. Crowds were anything from 4,000 to 15,000. It is with deep irony that autoball was played at Fluminense’s antique ground. Seventy years before Laranjeiras was the birthplace of football in Rio, where the young sportsmen were white members of the city’s elite. Autoball was also a hobby for the young rich. Almost all the players were stockbrokers flush with cash. (Apart from one cab driver ‘obviously venting pent-up aggressions.’)
Like Marcos de Mendonça, the Fluminense goalkeeper who became an eminent historian, the autoball class also became public figures of some distinction. Walter Lacet is one of the top executives at Brazil’s second largest channel, SBT. Ronaldo Cezar Coelho was one of the founders of the Brazilian Social Democratic Party, together with President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and he has been elected a congressman three times.
Ivan Sant’Anna is a character as colourful as the sports he played. He lived life large and he knows how to spin a yarn. After thirty-seven years in financial markets he became a successful storyteller, first with a financial thriller, Rapine, and then Black Box, an account of three real-life air crashes. During the early 1970s, when he seemingly had more money than he knew what to do with, he spent a fortune travelling to sports events. Between 1970 and 1977, he saw every game that Fluminense played. ‘I saw maybe a hundred games a year. I can remember sometimes I left on Sunday to go to Manaus, I would come back and work, then on Wednesday I would go to Bahia, and at the end of the week I would be in Buenos Aires.
‘The furthest I went south was Sarajevo. I went to almost all the countries in Africa.’ He pauses to list the countries the Fluminense caravan passes through: ‘Botswana, Malawi, Burundi, Lesotho, Tanzania. I travelled with them, I stayed in the same hotels. By the end I was almost part of the team. Then in 1977, I lost all my money and stopped. But for the period 1970—77 I have the impression that I was the biggest football fan that there has ever been in this country.’ His feat is probably unequalled in the world due to the large number of matches, the distances involved in the national league and the unpredictability of what might happen. Once, when he was living in Belo Horizonte he came to Rio to see Fluminense play Vasco. The game was abandoned after ten minutes in the second half when the perimeter fencing caved in. The following day, back in Belo Horizonte, he read that the remaining half hour would be played in the evening. He went to the airport but there were no seats left. So he chartered his own plane. He just made it to the game. His team lost 2-1.
Autoball’s image of conspicuous consumption and innate sense of waste and destruction reflected the economic confidence of the era. Between 1969 and 1973 — the darkest years of military rule — the country lived its ‘economic miracle’. GDP rose almost 12 per cent a year. The state borrowed huge sums for grandiose projects like the Trans-Amazon Highway, an ill-fated plan that opened up huge parts of the virgin rainforest to colonisation. ‘The country felt rich but it was an illusion,’ says Mário with bittersweet nostalgia. ‘We were getting further and further into debt. In that day to be rich was wonderful. Now things are a lot more difficult.’ Autoball can be seen as one of the last extravagances of Rio de Janeiro before it started to lose its power as a financial centre. It was almost the private sport of the Rio bourse. One by one the banks and big companies moved to São Paulo until, in 2000, trading on Rio’s stock market shut down completely.
Autoball came to an end not because of the danger or the expense, but because the government banned all motor sports in the light of the world energy crisis. The phenomenon reflected an era of accelerated Brazilian excess that spluttered and ran out of gas. ‘The four or five years in which there was autoball was an interesting time. It got good publicity,’ says Ivan. ‘If it hadn’t been banned, and it had managed to be played on a big pitch, then maybe it would be known now all over the world. It would be a very exciting sport, much more than car racing. But it needed a fatal accident. This was my premonition — the sport would only be a success if people died.’
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