My First Taste Of The Feral Passion Of Soccer
Haresh Shah
We are in Rio de Janeiro for Playboy International Publishing’s conference, being hosted by our Brazilian publishers, Editora Abril. Other then sweating all day long in the windowless conference room of Rio Sheraton, which is also where we are staying, this is also an opportunity for the local hosts to showcase their country and the culture. Introduce us to the best of everything Brazil and Rio have to offer. Combined with organized and free social outings, we get to eat in various restaurants about town. Among them, Chalet, Churrascaria Carreta, Hippopotamus. But time and time again we end up at the Sheraton’s in-house churrascaria for their cornucopia of grilled meat and fish.
You can’t be in a city like Rio and not hit some night spots. The one we are most impressed by is their world famous Samba House, Oba Oba. Doused in the blinding flash and sparkle, the show mainly features the most beautiful, built-solid-like-a-brick-shit-house bronze skinned mulatas. An exotic mixture of the African and the Portuguese stocks. Young and pretty with their quivering tight bundas, doing Samba costumed in narrow strips of bling to the Afro drum rhythms is the sight to be in awe of and behold. The speed and the motion glaze their shiny skins with oily slipperiness. To watch the sweat dripping like the rain drops running down the smooth surface of ebony illuminated by swirling spots is spellbinding. And they certainly can dance and move their booties in a way that leave you breathless.
When you see a whole bunch of them lined up next to each other– all looking so beautiful and in possession of near perfectly sculpted anatomies, which one do you pay attention to? I normally end up fixated on one or the two of them. This evening they are the dancer Elizabeth and the lead singer Stella. The show is spectacular to say the least and though mostly performed to the crowd of tourists, and if somewhat glamorized, what you see is as authentic as the way they do them at the Samba Schools of the favelas in preparation for the carnival. Something I’ve had an opportunity to experience earlier in the year. If devoid of all that glamour and the glitter, I could certainly feel the heat and the raw vibrations of the partners I got to dance with.
The next day, after we have a nice dinner at Chalet, some of us are on the prowl. I go disco hopping with Germany’s Wolfgang Robert and Wolf Thieme. We first check out Regine, one of the upscale discos, but seeing there wasn’t much action, we end at Assidius. Turns out it’s a hustle joint in the disguise of a discotheque. The place is large with what sounds like good music and is populated with hoards of hustling women, some attractive, others not so. It is dimly lit and the girls are dressed so provocatively that after a while they all look desirable. I hang around for a while, but nothing turns me off faster than the whores hustling and poking at you. So I make my exit before anyone else does, and head back to the hotel.
A couple of days later, we walk into a place called New Munich. A halfway decent looking dancer is performing topless on a tiny stage while four or five not so attractive women parade in front of us, asking us for light, trying to make conversation. It’s a small dark, dingy and dirty looking dive. We soon decide it wasn’t our kind of a place and depart promptly even without finishing our drinks.
The whole world knows Brazilian cuisine by now from its chain of churrascarias that have sprung up in almost all of the major cities around the globe. Many of them also offer sumptuous buffets of fish and vegetables, it’s the grilled meat they specialize in. The waiters called passadores file past every table with a long sword like skewer studded with variety of meats that include beef, pork, lamb, chicken, delicious sausages and some grilled fish. But none of that compares with a down home meal of feijoada.
Feijoada is the ultimate Brazilian national dish. Traditionally it’s served only on Saturday afternoons, the reason being, it’s so heavy that once you have had a feijoada meal, it’s impossible to even think of going back to work. Cooked at a very low heat in a thick clay pot similar to that used for the tandoori dishes in India, it’s cooked together with black beans and a variety of meats, served with rice, spinach and raw flour. A must when you’re in Brazil, unless of course you happen to be in the country only during the weekdays. Too bad. Even though at the end of my first time around tasting it, I wrote in my journal: nothing to write home about, over a period of time, I have developed a definite liking for it, so much so that I often crave for it. Like right now. Alas, Brazil is thousands of miles south of from where I sit at my computer here in Chicago. And today is Tuesday! And then to be able to wash it down with the local beer Brahma interspersed with another Brazilian must, kaipirinha. The cocktail made of sugarcane liquor cachaça, sugar and lime. Served over rocks of ice and with a twist of lime and the wedge thrown into the mix. This refreshing translucent green elixir goes down your palate ever so smoothly. An afternoon filled with feijoada and kaipirinha, what can be better? Though a snooze would be nice.
To be in Rio and not be seduced and lead by Tom Jobim’s tender crooning of Garota de Ipanema would be impossible. One free evening, from our hotel on Copacabana, Don and I hop a bus and shoot out to Ipanema beach, hoping certainly of spotting multitude of the alluring Ipanema garotas. Instead we are met with shoe shine boys harassing us every few minutes, little girls shoving chiclets in our hands and sub-teenagers pandering all sorts of little junk. Even when we sit at a beach front café, they brush by. A little boy goes from table to table, placing two unshelled peanuts on every table, comes back after a few minutes to retrieve them, or if lucky someone would buy a paper cone full. A clever sales strategy. The whole scene is reminiscent of Chowpati beach in Mumbai.
So we submerge ourselves in things Brazil. But what spells Brazil better than its unbridled passion for the Football? By then in 1979, already three World Cup championships under their belts, they would go on to win two more championships to the date. Have had our fill of feijoada and several kaipirinhas on Saturday, organized for us on Sunday is the football game. Playing today are the two arch rivals Botafogo and Flamengo, both of Rio de Janeiro. This isn’t an ordinary cross-town game. It’s the final game of the annual regional championship Campeonato Carrioca. The stadium is swarming like tidal waves of red and black and black and white colors representing the rival teams. The atmosphere is vibrant and the roar and the noise are sky splitting – a carnival incarnate of kicking the ball.
The general atmosphere is tenser than Chicago’s White Sox playing the deciding game against the Cubs in their annual six games series, Crosstown Classic. So we are in for some buoyant soccer treat. Our hosts have us delivered at the stadium and then unencumbered, disappear to spend the evening with their family and friends, watching the game on the TV in the comfort of their homes. A smart move!
This is my very first live football game to watch. What can be a better place to be initiated in than Rio de Janeiro in Brazil? I am teamed up with Don (Stewart), Lee (Hall), Regis (Pagniez) and Laurent (Grumbach). We’ve got seats up front closer to the field with a perfect view. As we arrive, we hear a few hoots from up above, but none of us suspects as them being pointed towards us. We take it as no more than a part of the overall exuberance inherent to such games. But the assault begins in earnest at the half time when we stand up to stretch our legs. First come down the big blobs of fresh spits hitting us like targeted bird droppings. Then we are showered with the yellow gobs of phlegm and snot that smear my pants and the shirt. And then a plastic bag filled with piss hits Don’s shoulder and bounces off to the edge of a stair and splashes all over like the bursting of a punctured water balloon. We are confused and scared. Could it be because we looked foreign? Gringos? We look around and wonder, don’t notice anyone in particular, and the people sitting around us just shrug at us, and they are not being sympathetic at all. What the fuck? Don, Lee and Regis split immediately. Laurent and I dare stick around in the defiance to the attack. For whatever reason, the assault stops. We watch the game to the end and experience the jubilant spirit of bright and wide red and black strips of Flamengo floating in the bleachers – mostly across the arena on the other side, whereas the fans around where we sit with their black and white banners, hats and jerseys depart long faced and defeated. The scene reminds me of the two sides of a river story told frequently in India. The left bank is jubilant with music and laughs and dancing leading the bridegroom atop his prancing white horse while the mood on the right bank is somber with the funeral procession, the pall bearers carrying up above their heads the deceased body wrapped in white kafan, only the face showing. Laurent and I return to the hotel, with a feeling of humiliation still weighing heavy on our hearts. Not to mention how exhausted we are. But we still have the whole evening ahead of us.
I shower, change and feeling a bit better, go out on the town with Laurent and Patrick (Rousselle). Have dinner at Churrascaria Carreta where we run into Patrick’s acquaintance Arturo Falk and his girlfriend Amelia. Feeling much better now, we decide to go to Regine’s. Today it’s in full swing. I ask Amelia to dance. She does, but not before asking Arturo’s permission. Didn’t know such a thing still existed. But we’re in Brazil. Anyway, we have a good time. What’s more, Arturo seems some kind of a rich man and picks up the tab for the whole evening.
The cherry on the top comes when the winning team of the day, Flamengo walks in to the roar of applause. They are there to celebrate their win. We watch the largest golden trophy being passed from hand to hand and being kissed over and over again and the bottles of champagne popping open, and the gushing fountains of foam hitting the ceiling. The music picking up the tempo. Everyone is dancing, hugging and kissing strangers – just like in a carnival. Such happiness!
We couldn’t help but tell our horror story of the earlier in the day. Arturo asks, which part of the stadium we sat at. We tell him. What colors were your clothes? Why? Because you were on the Botafogo side of the bleachers, and if any of you wore red or the combination of red and black – that’s why. I guess one of us did – not Laurent or I. At least the one who did had erred on the side of the winners. To see Flamengos mingling with us makes up for some of the humiliation we had felt earlier.
© Haresh Shah
Illustration: Celia Rose Marks
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