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Joy to the World
No one else plays soccer with the infectious glee of Ronaldo, the nonpareil
striker who aims to lead Brazil to its unprecedented fifth World Cup title
by Steve Rushin
Posted: Tues June 9th
 Brazil is
famous for large steaks and small bikinis and the national motto,
Never put off until tomorrow what can be put off until next
week. Call the Brazilian soccer federation in May, and you
are put on hold to jaunty Christmas carols before being
disconnected. If
it seems that Brazilians are having more fun than the rest of
us, there's a simple explanation: They
are.
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Brazil will rely on Ronaldo's blazing speed and nose for the goal in its bid for the World Cup.
(Shaun Botterill/Allsport)
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So it is only natural that the word
alegria would be ubiquitous in Brazilians' vocabulary. "It
is," says an interpreter for Ronaldo,
the 21-year-old Brazilian who is the finest soccer player on
earth, "a kind of 'exuberant
joy.'"
"When I'm on the field, training or playing, it is
alegria, pure
alegria," says Ronaldo, resplendent in a blazer and tie in
his agent's office in Milan, where he plays professionally
for the Italian club Inter.
Alegria exhibits itself on the practice pitch when Ronaldo
declines to head the ball during header drills, preferring
instead to stop it with his chest, then juggle it with his
feet. "Brazilians don't like to head the ball,"
explains an observer at the Inter
training ground, "because you can't hog the ball with
your
head."
But then Inter didn't commit as much as
$110 million to Ronaldo over 10 years, through 2007, so that he
might pass the ball. "The only thing the coach expects
of me is to score," says Ronaldo. "The way I
score doesn't matter. As long as I keep my scoring numbers
high, they let me do what I like to
do."
So he scores, serially and spectacularly, for his club and
for his country. In Italy teammates fall to their knees
when Ronaldo gets a goal and buff his right boot with
imaginary shoeshine rags. It's an act that he notices only
later, while basking in
the glow of televised highlights. "That particular
moment is difficult to describe," Ronaldo says of the
instant following a goal. "Because you are
... you are out of this world. You can't hear anyone. You
don't see anyone. You are blind, you are deaf, you just
want to run and
scream."
You have achieved, in a word,
alegria. Arjen Tamsma, a Dutch employee of Nike who has moved to
Milan to be Ronaldo's
minder in Italy, sums up his charge in a single sentence.
"He is happy," says Tamsma, "like a kid with
a
ball."
Ronaldo luiz nazário de
lima is, in every sense, the biggest name in his sport. Twice
in the last two years a panel
of more than 100 national-team managers, polled by FIFA,
soccer's world governing body, has named him World Player
of the Year. It's a title with few rivals in the
international arena: pope, for sure; president of the U.S.,
perhaps.
Ronaldo replica shirts are sold on Las Ramblas in Barcelona
and on Copacabana Beach in Rio. He grins bucktoothed from
the covers of three Chinese magazines on newsstands in
Beijing. When former England star Sir Bobby Charlton
recently said of Ronaldo,
"He's the best player in the world without question, and I
think he'll prove it in the World Cup," he did so on a
talk show
in Tokyo. Before an exhibition match in Saudi Arabia last
December, every member of the Brazilian team shaved his head,
hoping
to throw Middle Eastern media and fans off Ronaldo's
scent.
No man can aspire to live a normal life under such
circumstances. "And in Italy this is more difficult
because of the pressure, the way the entire country feels
soccer, lives soccer—much more than anywhere
else," says Ronaldo, whose navy-blue blazer
bears the Inter crest, as does his club tie, which is now
unknotted. Seated at a burnished conference table in the
offices of Branchini Associati, he looks like a prep
schooler at the end of a long
day.
When Ronaldo appeared in cyberspace in January to promote a
Rome-based United Nations food bank, the server took six
million hits in 30 minutes, then crashed. Ronaldo does
something similar, taking six million hits in 90 minutes of
play, whenever he
takes the field in Italy's Serie A, the most diabolically
defensive-minded league in soccer. The difference: He
seldom
crashes.
Ronaldo attributes his talents to a higher power.
(Simon Bruty)
| | On the night of Oct. 12, 1996, Ronaldo, who had recently
turned 20, was playing for Spanish giant Barcelona in a
match at Santiago de Compostela. He had just retrieved the
ball in his own half, 55 yards from the opposition goal,
when he was tripped from
behind by a Compostela defender, who then grabbed the back
of Ronaldo's jersey and hung on for several yards, as if
water-skiing on grass. Shaking himself free with the vigor
of a wet dog, Ronaldo slalomed through four other defenders
before finally
losing the ball behind him in the penalty area. Whereupon he
wheeled around and blasted the ball past the keeper in one
unfathomable motion. By the time the ball was in the net
Ronaldo was on his can, the shot having forced him backward
like the recoil on a
rifle.
In those 12 seconds all his goods were on
display:
Ronaldo is faster with a
ball at his feet than most defenders are sprinting
after him. At
6 feet and 175 pounds, he's large by soccer standards,
well-muscled and nearly impossible to knock off the ball. Most
strikingly, he throws out electricity like a downed power
line.
Of the manifold double takes captured that evening on
Spanish television, the best belonged to Ronaldo's coach at
the time, white-haired Bobby Robson. When Ronaldo scored,
Robson, the two-time World Cup manager of
alegria-impaired England, shot off his own bench as if an ejection seat had
been detonated beneath him. He first turned to the
Compostela crowd, enlisting them as witnesses. (The
opposing fans were giving Ronaldo a raucous standing
ovation.) He then turned
back to the field. "Oh, my god!" the cameras caught
him muttering to nobody. He looked shocked in the clinical
sense, a victim of trauma.
"Un-believable." His mouth was a circle, a rictus of
disbelief.
Further analysis of such skills is superfluous. "A
divine gift," Ronaldo's father, Nélio, has
called his son's rare abilities, and Ronaldo is content to
leave it at that. Asked the source of his outrageous
talents, he says, "Mainly, it is
God."
The son of
god, his arms extended from his sides, stands rigid watch over
Rio from His place atop Corcovado, the statue's pose
mimicked by Ronaldo in Rio-wide billboards for Pirelli
tires. The youngest of three siblings, he was raised in
Bento Ribeiro, a Rio suburb
that is very poor by U.S. standards, modestly so by
Brazilian. His house was without windows or doors. Which is
not to say it was without an
exit.
Nélio receives poor reviews, having been variously
described as "a Rio drug addict"
(The Times
of London), "an alcoholic" (the
Washington
Times) and "a cartographer with the state telephone
company" who separated from his family (Ronaldo's
official bio in press kits put out by Nike, which he
represents). Ronaldo still sees his father and
doesn't care to pile on. The son wishes to stress that
his childhood was a happy one. "I was never a child of
the streets," he says, "but my family was very
poor."
At 13, around the time of his mother Sonia's divorce from
Nélio, he wanted to play for Rio's most popular
club, Flamengo, but the team refused to pay the fare for
his 45-minute crosstown bus ride to practices. Whoops! By
15, Ronaldo was playing for
Cruzeiro, a first-division professional team in the city of Belo
Horizonte, for which he scored 58 goals in 60
games.
Before his 17th birthday he moved to Europe and the Dutch
club PSV Eindhoven. In the Netherlands, Ronaldo would score
55 goals in 56 games over two seasons, learn Dutch in
twice-weekly lessons from a minister and, in 1996, be sold
to F.C. Barcelona for
a then world-record transfer fee of
$20 million. He led the Spanish league with 34 goals in his
single spectacular season in Catalonia, and last summer he
was sold to Inter for a world-record
$30 million. He finished the 1997-98 season as the
second-leading scorer in
Serie A, with 25 goals in 32 matches, even though he was
sometimes
sextuple-teamed.
The rewards of all this are handsome. In addition to having
received a reported
$14 million signing bonus from Inter, Ronaldo gets
$5 million a year from the club and has a contract with Nike
worth another
$15 million over 10 years. When he became engaged to Brazilian
model Susana Werner—the marriage was rumored to be on
for this August and is now rumored to be off—he could
reasonably speculate that the pope might say his wedding
Mass.
Ronaldo drives a silver Ferrari. In Barcelona he had a
house overlooking the Bay of Casteldefells, which reminded
him of Rio's Guanabara Bay. In Milan only one thing reminds
him
of Rio. "The traffic," he says. Italy has no traffic
laws, or none that are observed, which is just as well,
because Ronaldo has no place he can
reasonably go in Milan. He spends a lot of time at home,
playing on the computer and reading his notices each
week in the Dutch, Spanish and Brazilian
press.
A cell phone bleats, and Ronaldo is summoned from the room.
His agent, Giovanni Branchini, is asked if his client is
always so relaxed. "If you don't do like that, you get
overwhelmed by everything," says Branchini. "It
is sad sometimes. You have a bad
day—yesterday was a bad day, nothing went right with
his club, with himself, with the other results—but if
you are a sportsman, you know that this is your life. You
have to go on and think of the next game, the next
possibility to forget such a day. I
think football stars learn this quite early, and by
themselves. Otherwise, they could not survive such
pressure."
The previous day's match—second-place Inter at
sixth-place Parma—had been among the worst of
Ronaldo's professional career. Late in the second half
Ronaldo took a penalty shot. The goalkeeper, Gian Luigi
Buffon, deflected the ball and, though it was
still in play, left the goal and leaped onto the cyclone fence
separating Parma's rabid supporters from the field. He hung
there like Spiderman, shaking the fence and stirring the
crowd as the ball moved to the other end of the pitch,
where Parma scored.
Minutes later, the final whistle sounded on Inter's 1-0 loss,
and Buffon ripped off his jersey, revealing a red Superman
S on his
T-shirt.
Parma's Argentine forward, Hernán
Crespo, was invited afterward to disparage Ronaldo, but he
responded by enunciating very clearly while eyeing
reporters' notebooks: "He is still the best player in
the world." Nevertheless, Ronaldo was lampooned on
national television that evening. A Milan cabbie passed a
cemetery, pointed to the gravestones and said,
"Ronaldo!"
So it goes. When Ronaldo was enduring a six-match goal
drought with Inter in December and January, team owner
Massimo
Moratti said, "Do I think Ronaldo is in crisis? It
definitely seems so to me, and perhaps it would be a good
idea if he understood
this and got it into his
head."
A few weeks later Ronaldo scored all four Inter goals in
key back-to-back victories, and Inter manager Gigi Simoni
said unequivocally, "Ronaldo has proved he's the best
player in the
world."
"I love
America," says Ronaldo, and for one simple reason: America doesn't
love him. Little more than a year ago he walked the streets
of New York City unrecognized, shedding fame as if it were
a feckless defender. "Then," he sighs and says,
"I made a
mistake."
Ronaldo turned at random down a midtown Manhattan street.
"The one street," he says, "with all
Brazilians." All
alegria broke loose on that block of West 46th Street known as
Little Brazil. "The Brazilians, they were all going
crazy," he says, a smile curling at the corner flags
of his mouth. "The Americans, they
didn't understand
what was going
on."
It's ever thus with Americans and soccer. Last October,
when the Chicago Bulls played exhibition games in Paris, a
Spanish journalist asked Michael Jordan if he knew who
Ronaldo was. "I don't know," Jordan said
dismissively.
"He's the best soccer player in the world," the
man replied, his face falling like a flesh
soufflé.
"Sorry," sniffed Jordan. "I
do know
Pelé."
The exchange drew
horse laughter from some 500 members of the European press and
amused Ronaldo in Italy, where he told interviewers that he
was a fan of Jordan's and even owned a Jordan highlights
video. "Sometimes when I watch and I see what he
does," said Ronaldo, "I
cry."
Brazilians don't do nuance. They have the ugliest slums,
loveliest beaches, slowest switchboards and fastest
Formula I drivers in the world.
Carnaval
is the wildest party of all time,
caipirinha
the strongest drink in Christendom,
tanga the skimpiest swimwear that the law—of nations, of
gravity—allows. Brazilians are exhibitionists with
their emotions as well. So Jordan makes them sob, and
soccer is "the beautiful game," and national
squad manager, Mario Zagallo, simply could not help
himself when he said last December, "The team will
realize my dreams and win the World Cup in
France."
You can't stop
alegria, nor even hope to contain it. This makes Brazilians the
worst diplomats in international sport. When asked to
handicap the World Cup, the president of Brazil, Fernando
Henrique Cardoso, said, "Obviously, we're going to
win."
Obviously? "We have the best players," Ronaldo says
flatly. "But to have the best players and to win is
not the same thing. We have
to
prove. It's like when the Dream Team played in the Olympics.
Everybody knew that they were a lot better than everybody
else. But they had to
prove."
This sense of mission makes an
omni-talented team, even one diminished by star striker Romário's
injury, all the more formidable. Ronaldo has never won a
major league title in the top leagues he's played
in—not in five first-division club seasons nor,
really, at the 1994 World Cup, where, at 17,
he didn't play a minute—so he really
does have something to prove this summer. Another man who
performs part-time in Milan knows the doom that this
forecasts for the rest of the world. "I would like to
see Italy in the final," says tenor Luciano Pavarotti.
"It's a hubristic dream, of course.
Brazil is
around."
Indeed, Brazil's tallest challenge at the World Cup may be
this: loosing
alegria on the jaded host nation, which gave the world the words
ennui and
malaise and
blasé. It is a hubristic dream—foreign tourists winning
over the French. But Brazil is around. And the Brazilians
are bringing with them Ronaldo, a confetti cannon of a
young man, belching out a kind of exuberant
joy.
Issue date: June 15, 1998
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