World Cup Stories, 1962: Garrincha - the angel with bent legs
When Brazil won the 1958 World Cup to scenes of jubilation on the pitch and at home, there was one man who didn’t celebrate.
His name was Garrincha: the bow-legged master of dribbling, who watched on bemused as his teammates rejoiced — he wasn’t familiar with the tournament’s knock-out format and thought Brazil would have to play each team twice.
It’s doubtful whether he would have celebrated even if he had known. Garrincha played football solely for fun. He went fishing rather than listen to the World Cup final on the radio in 1950 and, if he failed to turn up for training at his club Botafago, could often be found playing football with his friends in Pau Grande — the small town close to Rio where he grew up.
He was born with crooked legs — his left curved outward and his right curved inward, so it looked “as if a gust of wind had blown his legs sideways”, according to Alex Bellos in Brazil Futebol. It was a genetic trait — passed down from the Fulnio, the Indian tribe of his grandparents — and it allowed him to move in mysterious ways. He delighted in toying with defenders — dribbling round them and then waiting for them to catch up so he could do it all again. He referred to them all as ‘Joao’ because it didn’t matter who was marking him.
Despite his talent, it took Garrincha three trials to get a contract. He was sent home from the first — at Vasco — because he hadn’t brought boots, and left the second — at Fluminense — early because he wanted to catch the last train home.
His shenanigans off the pitch put George Best to shame. He supposedly lost his virginity to a goat at the age of 12 (although we’re not sure that really counts), and he was a serial womaniser. He fathered 14 children with five different women, including one with a Swedish woman on a national team tour (his name is Ulf Lindberg, and he sells sausages from a trailer in Halmstad). His biographer was sued for libel by Garrincha’s family for reporting the player had a 25cm penis.
The 1962 World Cup was Garrincha’s crowning glory. At 25, the ‘little wren’ was at the height of his powers and, when Pele limped off in Brazil’s second game of the tournament, he stepped up to fire his country to victory. Garrincha scored four and was named the tournament’s best player. A lot of Brazilians consider him the country’s greatest ever — not only for the way he almost single-handedly won that tournament, but also for the way he played. While Pele is nicknamed ‘The King’, Garrincha is ‘The Joy of the People’ — more loved than respected.
Like Best, he was fond of a drink and, combined with his devil-may-care attitude to life, it ultimately led to his downfall. He didn’t earn what he deserved — his clubs took advantage by making him sign blank contracts and filling in the amounts later. When two bank officials visited his home in Pau Grande, they found stacks of cash rotting away in cupboards, in fruit bowls and behind furniture.
He married samba singer Elza Soares — another Brazilian icon who had risen up from poverty — and they became, for a while, Brazil’s most famous couple. They stayed together for 15 years, even after Soares’ mother died in a car Garrincha was driving (he had previously run over his own father).
The fans turned on him, however, as he finally tried to earn what he was worth, and he found playing time limited through injury — the cartilage in his unique knees shredded from years of twisting past defenders. Sadly, he turned to drink — it’s said that he could put away a bottle of cachaca a day. When he died in 1983 at the age of 49 from cirrhosis of the liver, he was reportedly so bloated from a life of excess that the paramedics didn’t recognise him.
This is the seventh in a series of World Cup Stories that were first published in Sport magazine in the run-up to the 2014 tournament in Brazil.
I’ll be re-posting one a week until the tournament — there’s also an ebook if you just can’t wait.
