Garrincha - The Triumph and Tragedy of Brazil's Forgotten Footballing Hero

"Like a curupira, the demon of rural folklore whose feet were back to front, he was crafty, mischievous and impossible to catch"

Sean O'Conor

If ‘Brazilian' is synonymous with skilful football then the name of Pel-é soon crops up, along with perhaps Rivelino, Carlos Alberto and more recently Zico, Ronaldo and Ronaldinho. That we maybe don't automatically think of Garrincha is an odd quirk of football history as the diminutive winger was prodigiously skilled as well as successful and considered by many in his homeland to have been a greater talent than Pelé.

That the two-time World Cup winner has become ‘Brazil's Forgotten Footballing Hero' is probably due to the fact he was playing in his prime just before the age of television. Ruy Castro therefore has written an important book about a great player whose reputation deserves rehabilitating.

For the record, Garrincha scored a whopping 232 league goals from the wing and as well as being perhaps the greatest dribbler in soccer history is credited with being the first practitioner of the banana kick. But this book, despite its meticulous research of all his games, stands out because of its charting of a truly extraordinary life. Off the field the little bird led a whirlwind existence of girls, drink, car-crashes, ecstasy and tragedy that makes George Best's life seem positively mundane in comparison.

In the opening chapters, Castro paints a Cézanne-esque picture of Garrincha's idyllic origins. Of native American and African slave stock, the ‘wren', whose given name was Manuel Dos Santos, lived an almost semi-feral childhood: barefoot, on the edge of the vast European-owned plantations, where men fathered multiple children with multiple partners and sex with animals was as common as with humans.

That his legs were amazingly deformed made his success all the more remarkable. In Castro's words, “a peasant small as a bird, cock-eyed and with ridiculously crooked legs, Garrincha was a perfect example of anti-science”. The football world he inhabited was needless to say a world away from today's. When he first signed with Rio's Botafogo aged 19 his journey home each day entailed a 2 and a half-hour train ride and then a three-mile walk in darkness to his house.

Garrincha was famous because he was skilful as hell and entertaining in equal measure; allegedly the first repeated ‘OLE's ever uttered by a football crowd were a response to Garrincha's roasting of the River Plate full-back Nair in a friendly match for his beloved Botafogo in 1958. The cry was inspired by the traditional acclaim for an expert matador's stylish humiliation of a maddened bull. As the unfair contest on the wing went on, Garrincha even deliberately left the ball behind and hared up the line, his marker doggedly in pursuit and the crowd in hysterics. When the beleaguered Nair received his absolution in the form of a substitution he wailed to his coach, “There is nothing you can do. It's impossible.”

Garrincha had little knowledge or interest in his opponents or his team's tactics. He was a naturally gifted artist who had no time for preparation or reflection but when given a brush and a canvas just did the rest.

Come the 1958 World Cup Finals in Sweden, the forest boy was ready to be unleashed on the world stage alongside another prodigy, Pelé. Their game against the much-fancied Soviet Union began in explosive fashion with Garrrincha beating about five defenders in the first minute alone. A French journalist called it ‘the greatest three minutes in the history of football' whilst Brazilian Ney Bianchi described it thus: “The pace is mind-boggling as is Garrincha's rhythm. Yashin's shirt is soaked in sweat as if he has already been on the field for hours. The wave of attacks continues.

Time after time Garrincha decimates the Russians. There is hysteria in the stadium.” In their previous game against England, which finished 0-0, Brazil had dropped Garrincha from the seleçao because they feared he would get kicked and injured, because, according to Castro, “England were still playing football the same way they had done since the days of Charles Dickens.”

Like all tortured geniuses Garrincha was unstable and his off-the-wall lifestyle matched his on-field fireworks. He sired around a dozen children from a handful of women, had high profile affairs with leading singers and showgirls (plus ça change with footballers…) and drank heroically.

With every bar of a samba or bossa nova tune, Garrincha would sleep with another girl it seemed. There appeared no bar to his libido and he even fathered a child with a Swedish girl on an overseas tour. Garrincha was not alone in this hedonism by any means and compared to Castro's tales of Rio in the ‘50s and ‘60s we are living in a puritan age today. When the Brazilian team arrived in Chile for the 1962 World Cup the first thing their team doctor Hilton Gosling did was visit a “government approved” brothel and arrange for his players to visit on a daily basis.

A life lived at more than the recommended speed had its natural consequences however and Castro paints a moving yet life-affirming picture of the star's final years: The crash was metaphorical and literal: Garrincha's long-abandoned wife and their eight children reclaimed much of his money, he and his singer partner Elza Soares were pursued by witch-doctors and kidnappers and he became an incurable alcoholic.

He also ran over his father in a car, killed his mother-in-law in another crash and tried to take his own life if nature was not going to do it for him. And yet something of grace remained untouched by such tragedy, a star that shone for half as long but twice as brightly.

The tales of Garrincha's Catherine Wheel private life are poignantly mirrored by the harrowing descriptions of the degrading poverty he and his milieu grew up in, poverty his inevitable Greek tragedy of a life returned him to. He ended up a decrepit wino, penniless, violent, sleeping on a towel and getting up at 6am desperate for more self-abuse. The George Best comparison ends however, when Garrincha's body gave out at the age of 49 and he was buried, amidst a riotous scrum of thousands of worshippers, in a grave appropriately too small for his coffin.

The implication was clear: This little bird who thrilled, entertained and enchanted the people again and again was larger than life even in death. A wonderful book about a quite remarkable human being.

Sean O'Conor

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