SPORT / Dave Zirin and Zach Zill : The Death of Socrates

Brazilian soccer legend Socrates before a World Cup match in Guadalajara, Mexico, June 16, 1986. Photo by Wolfgang Ratta / Reuters.
The death of Socrates:
Celebrating the Brazilian soccer legend

Socrates was one of those rare athletes whose outsized personality and effervescent humanity transcended the game.

By Dave Zirin and Zach Zill / The Rag Blog / December 12, 2011

International soccer lost a hero last weekend when Socrates, the masterful Brazilian midfielder who captained Brazil’s famed 1982 World Cup squad, died from an intestinal infection at age 57.

The death of the lanky, bearded, 6-foot 4-inch field general with a philosopher’s name will be felt far beyond the sports world. Socrates -- full name Socrates Brasileiro Sampaio de Souza Vieira de Oliveira -- was one of those rare athletes whose outsized personality and effervescent humanity transcended the game.

Socrates’ interests, talents, and achievements were staggering. He was a medical doctor, a musician, an author and news columnist, a political activist, and a TV pundit. Somewhere in all of this, he managed not only to lead what may have been the most artful team to ever grace the pitch, but also to fearlessly challenge the decades-long military dictatorship that ruled Brazil.

Alongside the 1982 Brazilian midfield of Zico, Falcao, Cerezo, and Eder, Socrates brought a combination of technical prowess, deadly goal-scoring ability, and blissful creativity that has never been matched. If ever the uninhibited joy of children playing merged with raw competitive dominance, it was in the squad that Socrates led to the World Cup in Spain.

They embodied Eduardo Galeano’s description of Brazilian soccer as “the most beautiful soccer in the world, made of hip feints, undulations of the torso and legs in flight, all of which came from capoeira, the warrior dance of black slaves, and from the joyful dances of big city slums...There are no right angles in Brazilian soccer just as there are none in the Rio Mountains.”

Socrates approached soccer with the intensity and lack of restraint that he brought to every aspect of his life. He drank, he smoked, and he played without shin guards. His impetuosity as a player and a person was embodied in his signature move on the field: the blind heel pass.

Socrates became a professional player almost as an afterthought, not becoming a full-time professional until he signed with Corinthians at age 24. And unlike most professional athletes then and now, he refused to check his politics at the door.

Unlike the great Pele, Socrates never made financial or political peace with Brazil’s dictatorship. In fact, with his medical expertise, his flowing hair and full beard, and his resistance politics, he shared less in common with Pele than Che Guevara.

That’s not hyperbole. Socrates may be the only professional athlete to ever organize a socialist cell among his fellow players. He helped assemble Corinthians, a club team from Sao Paolo built on a radical political foundation. Corinthians proceeded to become a focal point for national discontent with Brazil’s military dictatorship.

The military had ruled Brazil since 1964, when it overthrew left-wing president João Goulart who promised land redistribution and nationalization of industry. By the early 1980s, as the dictatorship was beginning to strain under the weight of mass repression and economic stagnation, Socrates and his teammate Wladimir organized and played for Corinthians, known as the "Time do Povo" or "Team for the People," to demonstrate the power of democracy.

With the consent of club president Waldemar Pires, the players established a democratic process to govern all team decisions. As Socrates explained, “Everyone at the club had the same right to vote -- the person who looked after the kit and the club president, all their votes had the same weight.”

The players decided what time they would eat lunch, they challenged strict rules that locked players in their hotel rooms for up to 48 hours before a match, and they printed political slogans on their uniforms.

In this way, one of South America’s most popular teams became a beacon of hope, not just to Brazilians, but across a continent largely shackled by U.S.-backed dictators. Socrates, on his way to 297 appearances and 172 goals for Corinthians, was one of the most popular figures in the country, and thus nearly unassailable by the military rulers.

The tragedy of Socrates' death lies both in his age, just 57, and the timing. As the World Cup and Olympics are thundering toward Brazil, his would have been a critical voice against the way these international sporting carnivals run roughshod over local communities, all for the benefit of a nation’s elite.

When asked earlier this year by the Guardian if the coming World Cup would help the poor of Brazil, Socrates said, “There will be lots of public money disappearing into people's pockets. Stadiums will be built and they will stay there for the rest of their lives without anyone using them. It's all about money. What we need to do is keep up public pressure for improvements in infrastructure, transport, sewerage, but I reckon it will be difficult.”

Speaking out against the World Cup in Brazil? Now that is true political courage. But Socrates, true to form in this interview, didn’t confine his commentary to soccer. He said, “What needs to change here is the focus on development. We need to prioritize the human being. Sadly, in the globalized world, people don't think about individuals as much as they think about money, the economy, etc.”

Let’s hope that a new generation of young Brazilians will see fit to pick up where Socrates left off. As the World Cup and Olympics come to the new Brazil, expect the spirit of Socrates to echo in the streets.

[Dave Zirin is the author of The John Carlos Story (Haymarket) and just made the new documentary Not Just a Game. Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com. Read more articles by Dave Zirin on The Rag Blog. Zach Zill is a freelance writer living in Washington DC. He can be reached at zach.zill@gmail.com. This article was also posted to The Nation.]

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Dave Zirin : Why I Root for Argentina

No one can predict his devilish tricks: Argentina coach Diego Maradona. Photo by Ammar / AP.
The beautiful game:
Why I root for Argentina

By Dave Zirin / June 28, 2010

Before the start of the World Cup, I broadcast my rooting interest with the obnoxious insistence of a nuclear-powered vuvuzela: Argentina all the way.

I wanted Argentina to win because their style of soccer speaks to the full potential of the beautiful game. I wanted Argentina to win because few people in the U.S. could pick Lionel Messi out of a lineup, and he might be the most electrifying athlete on earth. I wanted Argentina to win because their coach, the walking, talking telenovela, Diego Maradona, is just too entertaining to see pushed off the stage

As Dan Wetzel of Yahoo Sports described Coach Maradona,

He screams and cheers. He complains and cajoles. He smiles. He prays. He blesses himself. He hugs. Actually, he hugs a lot. He even kisses his players. Pushing 50 yet wearing earrings and a salt-and-pepper goatee, he remains the biggest presence in the building -- and that includes his megastar players such as Lionel Messi and Tevez.

In his playing days, Maradona made people reconsider the sacred idea that Pele was surely the greatest player to ever patrol the pitch. He went from soccer superstar to Argentine folk hero during the 1986 World Cup, when he “avenged” the 1982 British defeat of Argentina in the Falklands War by defeating England in the quarterfinals, with a little help from the "Hand of God."

Maradona's brilliance inspired Eduardo Galeano to write

No one can predict the devilish tricks this inventor of surprises will dream up for the simple joy of throwing the computers off track, tricks he never repeats. He’s not quick, more like a short-legged bull, but he carries the ball sewn to his foot and he’s got eyes all over his body. His acrobatics light up the field... In the frigid soccer of the end of the century, which detests defeat and forbids all fun, that man was one of the few who proved that fantasy can be efficient.

Efficient fantasy is the best way to describe Argentina’s current run to the quarterfinals. In a modern world of robotic soccer strategems, they play with the wicked grace of decades past. Given that success breeds imitators, I would argue that it is in the best interests of international soccer to see Argentina take it all the way.

For those experiencing this World Cup in the throes of neutrality, there are political reasons to support Argentina as well. This has received next to no media coverage either in their native Argentina or around the world, but the team has fully embraced the courageous group of grandmothers known as Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo. This organization is devoted to finding out the truth about the fate of Argentina’s desaparecidos -- the people forever imprisoned or disappeared by the military dictarorship of Jorge Rafael Videla -- during Argentina’s Dirty War of 1976-1983.

Diego Maradona hugs Abuelas president Estela de Carlotto.Photo from as.com.
At a training session in South Africa, the entire Argentine team unfurled a banner that read, "We Support the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo for the Nobel Peace Prize." The group has in fact been officially nominated for the prize and Abuelas president Estela de Carlotto, is in South Africa, meeting with Nelson Mandela and other world leaders. She has also been publicly -- and literally -- embraced by Maradona.

The critical work that Abuelas has done will only receive a greater spotlight if Argentina continues to advance. This makes all those connected with Argentina’s dirty war, who still hold tremendous power in the country, increasingly, and deliciously, apprehensive.

I can certainly understand, and have heard from numerous people, that these kinds of political concerns shouldn’t play into our rooting interests when it comes to the World Cup. It should just be about the game.

But this is like wishing a double cheeseburger didn’t have cholesterol. There is simply no sporting event on earth more entangled in politics than this brilliantly bombastic tournament. Anytime you have half the earth tuned in -- as colonies play their former colonizers and dictatorships challenge democracies -- politics follows like rainbows after rain. As long as politics is part of the mix, we might as well support a team that in addition to epitomizing “the beautiful game” stands with a beautiful cause.

Viva Argentina!

[Dave Zirin is the author of the forthcoming Bad Sports: How Owners are Ruining the Games we Love (Scribner). Receive his column every week by emailing dave@edgeofsports.com. Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com. This article also appears in The Nation.]

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SPORT / John Ross : World Cup as Bread and Circus

Bread and Circus: Circus Maximus in Rome, which seated 200,000, was the site for massive spectacle designed to keep the masses distracted. Image from Santa Barbara County Education.
Copa del Mundo de 2010:
The world's cup runneth over

Ever since the bad old days of ancient Rome, bread and circuses have been a powerful formula for social control. In South Africa, as in Mexico, the World Cup is designed to make the discontented forget their discontent.

By John Ross / The Rag Blog / June 11, 2010

MEXICO CITY -- The Caliente Sports Book down the street is buzzing with betters studying dog and horse races, Major League Baseball, even golf, on the multiple screens. Of particular interest are those channels running wrap-ups of the afternoon match between Mexico and 2006 World Cup champion Italy from which the national team emerged victorious in a final prelim before this year's edition of the Copa del Mundo gets underway later this week.

Italy, it may be remembered, won the much-coveted cup four years ago on penalty kicks after France was reduced to playing with 10 men on the field when super-star Zenedine Zidane was disqualified for ferociously head-butting a rival who purportedly called his mother and sister "whores." Beating Italy was a decided plus for Mexico's downtrodden spirits as the Mundiales approach.

But one group of aficionados was not much interested in Mexico's fortunes in the upcoming fandango in South Africa. Instead, they gathered around a big screen in one corner of the betting parlor cheering on the Los Angeles Lakers in a National Basketball Association finals match-up with the Boston Celtics. "Forget about football," sneered "El Guerro" Gonzalez, a regular, "this is where the real money gets made."

Because pro basketball games routinely rack up hundred point scores, betters have multiple opportunities to wager on winners and losers, over and under point spreads, total points in a quarter, and whether Kobe Bryant will hit the next three-pointer.

But with a maximum of four play-off games left on the NBA calendar, the basketball euphoria will dissipate post haste as the World Cup takes center stage. Although the NBA's despotic commissioner David Stern promotes his product as the world game, basketball hardly holds a candle to what the U.S. provincially terms "soccer" and the rest of the Planet Earth, football.

Indeed, the "Copa del Mundo" ("Cup of the World") will soon sweep every other sporting event from the screens, let alone political scandal of which there is plenty in this distant neighbor nation, the upcoming Super Sunday gubernatorial elections July 4th, and even droughts, floods, and other natural disasters.

The interminable drug war that has taken 23,000 lives in the past three years will move to the backburner. Ditto an economy that is tail spinning out of control -- a million workers lost their jobs in the first three months of this year alone despite President Felipe Calderon's rosy claims of "recovery." Speculation about the disappearance of one of the nation's most powerful politicians will fade from the prime time news and the first year anniversary of the incineration of 49 babies in a government-run day care center owned in part by the first lady's cousin, will not even be noticed.

The military takeover of the great Cananea copper mine and the dissolution of the miners union, is not news. New revolutions -- this is, after all, the hundredth year anniversary of our landmark revolution -- could rock the land but for the next month, but Mexico will live and die on what happens to the national team in South Africa.

"In football, we find our revenge against the adversaries of our lives," philosophizes sociologist Jose Maria Candia in a recent Contralinea magazine interview, "if it goes badly at work, in the economy, politics, the project of the nation, when 11 boys put on the green jersey and do well in an international tournament, we feel vindicated by life."

With 32 national teams from all five continents in the competition for the World Cup, the fate of the "seleccion" will have palpable impact on domestic tranquility. The political outfall of the Mundiales is unpredictable. Pumped up on toxic nationalism and xenophobia, football is a blood sport in southern climes. Honduras and El Salvador once fought a full-fledged war over soccer.

If the national team wins or acquits itself well, success will strengthen the government in charge no matter how poorly it has served the country. Likewise, a shoddy performance can topple rulers. In Mexico, increasingly unpopular president Felipe Calderon who won high office in fraud-marred elections three years ago is banking on the national selection's triumphs in the opening round to invigorate his deteriorating image. Calderon's bet is hardly a sure thing.

Mexico, Number 17 on the Federation of World Football Federation's rankings (now the Coca Cola FIFA rankings), plays host South Africa in the inaugural match of the tournament June 11th and "His Excellency" Felipe Calderon (dixit South African president Jacob Zuma) will be a guest of honor. The "Bafana Bafana" ("Boys Boys") as the locals are worshipped, have won their last four prelim matches and in the 2009 Confederation Cup took Spain, which some football gurus fix as the best team in the world, into overtime. Their fanatics' incessantly droning "vuvazelas" or plastic trumpets are said to drive opponents mad.

On the other hand, should Mexico beat sentimental favorite South Africa, it will make Calderon few friends on the African continent -- five other African teams are in the draw with war-torn Cote d'Ivoire the cream of the crop.

Aside from the Bafana Bafana, France and Uruguay are the real class of Mexico's four-team group -- while the French have appeared lackadaisical of late, whipping the South Americans is improbable. Anything less than reaching the quarterfinals will not rehabilitate Calderon's popularity.

Mexico has a young team that fluctuates between indifference and playing out of control. It is anchored by seven Mexican players from the European and Turkish leagues, and the wily but slow-footed veteran Cuauhtemoc Blanco. Burned repeatedly by the national team's poor performances in the Mundiales, many fans such as Manuel Garcia, a waiter at the old quarter Mexico City eatery Café La Blanca, consider that only divine intervention can save Mexico -- and Calderon -- from ignominious elimination.

When and if Mexico wins its matches though, wild celebrations are guaranteed to erupt around the gilded Angel of Independence on the bustling Paseo de Reforma -- drunkenness, fisticuffs, and hooliganism are de rigor. Flag-draped caravans of honking cars will jam the boulevards of this conflictive megalopolis.

On game days, half the population of Mexico, led by its president, will don green jerseys and play hooky from work and school. Saloons will fill to the brim with fans spilling out into the streets, jostling for a peek at the plasma screens. Masses to insure that God is on Mexico's side, will be pronounced from the altars and saints will be dressed up in the national colors.

Although football is tantamount to religion in this country where 70% of the population lives in and around the poverty line, only the super rich will have the wherewithal to jet off to Africa. Instead, the underclass will monitor the Mundiales at the "FIFA Fan Fest" on giant screens erected in the great Zocalo plaza from which nearly a hundred hunger-striking members of the Mexican Electricity Workers Union (SME), near death after a month of voluntary starvation, will no doubt be evicted so as not to dampen the fiesta.

Televisa and TV Azteca, Mexico's two-headed television monopoly, which will transmit the games (the premium package includes 3-D) will have the nation eating out of its hands (and guzzling Corona beer.) The TV monoliths have leased rights to broadcast the Mundiales from the Swiss-based FIFA, the absolute dictator of the sport for the past 106 years that counts 204 out of 208 football federations worldwide on its roster. FIFA TV revenues are expected to top $167,000,000 USD for the 2010 World Cup.

This year's Copa del Mundo is awash with drama. Will the Argentine selection, a perennial favorite, graced by the world's best player, Leonel "the Flea" Messi, blow up under their sometimes psychotic coach Diego Maradona, himself a Mundiales immortal? Will the first round match between England and the U.S. (14th on the FIFA listings with a world-class star, Landon Donovan, to prove it) invoke the star-crossed Yanqui upset of the Brits 60 years ago in 1950 in Brazil, the only time these two teams have ever met in the World Cup?

If the U.S. gets by England, a match between Mexico and its hated gringo rival would up the drama quotient here considerably. A face-off between South Korea and North Korea, both of which are in the draw albeit in separate groups, could lead to nuclear confrontation.

How will tiny, bruised Honduras, which played through a coup d'etat to qualify, fare against the big guns? What kind of karmic reward is in store for France which slimed its way into the World Cup with mega-star Thierry Henry's illegal hand-slap goal against the Irish? Will Germany be dispirited by the suicide of its troubled veteran goalie (is this a Wim Wenders' film?) Will five-time champ Brazil, which is hosting both the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics, be so overloaded with hubris that the selection will forget to play football?

But unquestionably the drama of dramas is focused on host South Africa, the land of blood and gold, Nelson Mandela, Steve Biko, Joe Slovo, and the last great struggle for liberation from colonialism.

South Africa, an unlikely site for the World Cup, was promised the games by Swiss football impresario Joseph Batter during his 1998 campaign to become the czar of the FIFA -- Blatter, who was said to have been backed by Middle East oil money, needed African votes to put him over the top. Although Nigeria and Morocco were also proposed to host the 2010 Cup, South Africa, the continent's fastest-growing economy, was chosen both as a tribute to African football and to Nelson Mandela. Blatter even flew the frail, aging apostle of African liberation, to London to ballyhoo the designation.

Whether the beloved Mandiba will be well enough to attend the inauguration is the drama within the drama.

In his youth, Nelson Mandela was a keen amateur boxer and enthusiasm for sports has colored his life. Football is indeed the national sport of black South Africans, 75% of the population. During Mandela's 28 years of imprisonment on Robbin Island for the crime of defying apartheid, his fellow prisoners and comrades in the African National Congress (ANC), played football incessantly, taping up rags into balls, and booting them up and down the narrow prison corridors. But Mandiba was held in isolation and could never participate.

Nelson Mandela's vision for the new South Africa encompassed sports as a path to racial reconciliation. If football was a black sport in South Africa, rugby is an Afrikaner obsession -- the Springboks were the maximum icon of the apartheid regime. As president, Mandela brought the 1995 World Rugby Cup to Johannesburg, a story fictionalized in the film Invictus, and won the hearts and minds of his former persecutors. Now the World Cup 2010 is slated to project South Africa before the world as a dynamic, multi-racial powerhouse.

The truth is always more diffuse. Jacob Zuma, the country's very corruptible third president, and his predecessors have sunk between $3.7 and $6 billion USD in infrastructure to burnish their images in a nation where 43% of South Africa's 45.000.000 peoples live on $2 or less a day.

The gleaming $300,000,000 Soccer City Stadium where the July 11th finals will be staged, abuts Soweto, the festering high-crime enclave of 3,000,000 mostly threadbare citizens, 30% of whom suffer from AIDS, according to the World Health Organization. Gangs of orphaned children rule the street.

Similarly, the stadium at Port Elizabeth on Nelson Mandela Bay, which came in at $287,000,000, was built over a slum from which hundreds were evicted. A school complex was demolished to make way for the Neusprot venue (only $140,000,000) -- 13 such stadiums have risen from the dust amidst a storm of charges of kickbacks, bribery, and favoritism. Some who have spoken up have been brutalized.

If recent history is any hint, the new stadiums will quickly become certifiable white elephants. Even Beijing's much-praised "Birds' Nest" coliseum designed for the 2008 Olympics, is reportedly tenantless, and the Greek economy just collapsed under the burden of debt incurred for infrastructure for its Olympic Games.

With a population scuffling just to feed itself, filling all this dazzling stadia with paying customers is problematic. Even the $18 cheap seats -- a week's wages in the cities and a month's income in some rural areas -- are mostly out of reach in a country where 50% of the work force is out of work. To deflect a grave social crisis in the making, the FIFA is offering 120,000 free admissions, about 2,200 seats for each of the World Cup's 62 contests. Riots have already occurred at "friendly" preliminary games.

Ever since the bad old days of ancient Rome, bread and circuses have been a powerful formula for social control. In South Africa, as in Mexico, the World Cup is designed to make the discontented forget their discontent. For the next month, the violence, corruption, and class and race hatreds that dominate daily life in Mexico, South Africa, and the rest of what used to be called the third world will disappear beneath the social surface.

Although conflict is my bread and butter, I'm not going to miss the 2010 Mundiales for the world.

[John Ross is at home in the maw of the Monstruo watching the World Cup. You can complain to him at johnross@igc.org.]

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