Some popular myths are attributed to it. But the thesis that Brazilian superiority is due to miscegenation — or, more precisely, “mulatism” — is not among them. It probably should be. In an article entitled “Foot-ball mulato”, in its original spelling, denoting the English origins that are still very present, Freyre wrote: “One of the conditions of our triumphs this year seemed to me to be the courage that we finally had to send a strongly Afro-Brazilian team to Europe. Some of them were white, it’s true; but a large number of very Brazilian pretillions and even more Brazilian mulattos”.
The context was, when the country came in third place and Leônidas was elected the best player. It was also the beginning of what would come to persecute him and confiscate his correspondence.
Freyre, who would come to be recognized as the father of the myth of racial democracy, harshly criticizes the racism of the Brazilian State: “the choice of Brazilian players for international matches was for a long time obeying the same criteria as the Baron of Rio Branco when all-powerful lord of the Itamaraty. No blacks or stoned mulattos, only whites or mulattos so light that they looked white. Or, at most, caboclos, mulattos of the type should be sent abroad. illustrious Domício da Gama, whom Eça de Queiroz used to call privately a pink mulatto”.
Following the path opened by Freyre, Mário Filho produced, almost ten years later, a masterpiece, “O Negro no Futebol Brasileiro” (1947). In the preface to the work, Freyre adds a new argument: football allowed the sublimation —yes, it was a pioneer in mobilizing Freudian concepts among us— of irrational and primitive elements of our culture, domesticating them. And he speculates about what would have happened to samba, capoeiragem and malandragem. His prediction regarding cangaceirismo is prophetic, but in the opposite direction to what he imagined: “cangaceirismo would probably have evolved into urban gangsterism, with São Paulo degraded into a sub-Chicago of Italian-Brazilian Al Capones”.
Mário Filho describes the transformation that occurred. Football didn’t change the order of things. On the contrary. “Football idols, all white. At best, dark-skinned. Black people only entered the team once in life and once in death. And when a white person who was supposed to play was out, sick or something. Then the black person could play.”
And, showing that he was much more than a sports columnist, he concluded: “The mulatto and the black were, in the eyes of the top clubs, a kind of prohibited weapon. Not a revolver, a razor. If no big club pulled out the knife, the others could continue fighting with a foil.”
Freyre argues that football created the conditions for, finally, the emergence of black national heroes, such as the Dionysian Leonidas. His antipode, Domingos, who played without flourish, was “a kind of Englishman lost in the tropics, like” —but, even so, “he had something concentratedly Brazilian”, of “mulatism”. Freyre wrote these lines in 1947, before Pelé and Garrincha appeared.
LINK PRESENT: Did you like this text? Subscribers can access seven free accesses from any link per day. Just click the blue F below.
