Ten years ago, I was fourteen and sat in a dull, grey class learning about computers. Nothing useful — like how to bypass parental controls that still loomed in my house like watchmen, or how to write a fucking invoice — just how to generally do computers.
Who wanted to be there? Stuck in that classroom, looking out at our school’s football pitches, at other kids having fun. It was like tortue — slow, dull, and deliberate, like strangulation or Mad Men. It was painful. We all prayed for it to end.
I remember the first time I saw it: that bloke with the teeth, sat in a lumo Barça vest on his club’s stunning baize, trying on some white and gold boots. The guy who brought them over to Ronaldinho was faceless. I was stuck in awe, staring at a tiny Quicktime window on a boxy desktop screen. Fourteen is the perfect age for your favourite player to turn into a superhero before your very eyes.
Besides the fact that he had hair like a pound-shop wig and teeth as big as saucers, the first thing you noticed about Ronaldinho was those thighs. They were huge. Two huge slabs that tapered down into slim shins, down into feet in white boots that really did the business.
Watching it now, one decade on, the video seems stark and weird. It’s practically a bloody mumblecore movie with Around The Worlds. It’s totally wordless and without music, without anything that might detract from the echoing thk, thk, thk, thup… ping! that was to come.
So Ronny, right, is on his feet and doing kick-ups. Just throwing the ball around, making it bend to his will — thk, thk, thk. He’s just playing with it. Batting it around, whatever, and then he moves over to the goal. The cameraman lingers and widens out to reveal the goal —empty — and the intent. He pops it up for the half-volley and the first hit left me numb.
“It’s fuckin’ fake, mate” said someone behind me, someone from my class. I could’ve hit them.
Fourteen is probably the last year of innocence; it is where I’m from, anyway. I knew this video had to be fake but I either didn’t care or wouldn’t let myself believe it: Ronaldinho had done so many things in his prime on the pitch that beggared comprehension that he deserved the benefit of the doubt on this one. So we gave it to him.
The ball cannoned off the woodwork at speed, under control, four more times, returning back to the loving chest of Ronaldinho — ‘R-10’ or whatever they had christened him at the time, back before time became Ronaldinho’s greatest enemy — and back under his spell.
In retrospect, yeah, sure, of course it’s fake. It’s obviously the work of nerds and computers and all that. That doesn’t matter, not even in the slightest. The fact that he was the only player on Earth at that time or any other, that could possibly make you believe — for one tiny, half a nanosecond — that it was real was not fake.
Ronaldinho did things that inspired everyone. He transcended football, and practically created his own game at times: something that couldn’t exist today — it’d be high-pressed into oblivion by teams without an ounce of the wit that dripped from Ronaldinho’s flopping mane — despite the player’s best efforts in Brazil’s Serie A.
Ten years ago, fans the world over idolised him in the word’s truest sense: something deep and wondrous and rapturous and iconic. I’ve never seen anything like him, and neither have you.
