When I was growing up, my old man used to watch Santos matches, banging an old armchair in the living room.
My father and uncles were Santos fans and Pelé fans not just because Pelé was Pelé, but because King Pelé was also black. The King’s blackness is a complex topic and the representations produced in relation to Brazilian football in its connection with themes such as race and nationality are even more so.
Paul Gilroy, one of the main thinkers of British cultural studies, states in the preface to the Brazilian edition of his book “The Black Atlantic” that he was a young “post-colonial dissident who without any shame, enthusiastically, chose to support Brazil in the 1970 World Cup, when they took from an English team made up only of whites what we believed to be a completely undeserved position: the title of world champions”.
England had won the previous World Cup and had a great team, including goalkeeper Gordon Banks, who would become known for his “impossible defense” when he deflected a ball headed by Pelé. Brazil would win the match with a meager one to zero, but with a great goal from Jairzinho, with a ball coming from Tostão and Pelé.
Son of a black mother of Jamaican origin and a white English father, Gilroy saw the Brazilian team as a place of racial affirmation beyond national borders, since our team was made up of black players, a clear contrast to the English team.
In this sense, the 1970 selection contributed to the dissemination of varied subliminal messages about Brazil and its racial imaginary that were led by the dictatorship. The main one was that we would be a nation with a mixed-race majority without racial problems: the so-called racial democracy. We were the nation of miscegenation, of the non-existence of racism, of Carnival and football.
The 1970s are a kind of watershed in the representations of black populations around the world. It was the decade of the explosion of soul and funk, American rhythms reminiscent of the secularization of black gospel music, as well as Jamaican reggae, which would become known worldwide with the songs of Bob Marley. In the same preface, Paul Gilroy mentions Bob Marley’s affection for Brazilian football.
The king of reggae was a fan of Santos and an admirer of Paulo Cézar Caju, to the point of asking to meet the player on his visit to Brazil in 1980. For a week, the three-time world champion coached the Jamaican on random tours in Rio de Janeiro that involved a fight in which Chico Buarque, Moraes Moreira and Toquinho, as well as Marley and Caju, participated.
The latter said that at the time he was not a reggae aficionado, being much more into soul and funk music, which was popular with black youth at dances that would become known as “Black Rio” and brought a pride in being black that also went beyond national borders.
Brazilian football and black music have parallels as expressions that go beyond the national dimension in their identification, but they also represent expressions that were deliberately reinvented by black players and musicians based on cultural hybridity and creativity.
Football and music are examples of black and popular excellence. Pelé, Bob Marley, Paulo César Caju, Paul Gilroy, Vinicius Junior, it’s all “Cosa Nostra”.
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