I don’t write about football a lot on this blog, though following it is a big part of my life. But I wanted to write something to mark the premature death of Brazilian footballer Sócrates, whose ‘work’ was as influential on me in its time as that of any artist I’ve come across since. A version of this piece will also be the first post on a new blog on art and sport (mainly the latter) called Kid Weil (you can follow the Twitter feed @KidWeil here ). But for reasons that I hope will become obvious in the text I think it has a place on this blog too.
Brazilian footballer Sócrates Brasileiro Sampaio de Souza Vieira de Oliveira died today, aged 57. He was better known as Sócrates, or sometimes, ‘The Doctor’.
29 years ago, the team he captained changed my life.
In 1982 I watched the World Cup in Spain on TV – perhaps the first major soccer tournament where I was old enough to really follow the teams and have a sense that perhaps there were different ways to play this game. As a dutiful young student of the sport, I knew that I was supposed to admire Liverpool domestically and that the 1970 Brazil team of Pele et al were the greatest team ever, but if I was honest I was still repeating orthodoxies heard from others. I had yet to find a feeling for soccer that was my own.
Enter Brazil and Sócrates.
They played an attacking soccer that was perhaps the last true expression of an ideology of play that Brazil sides ever produced. Subsequent Brazil teams would be accompanied by exponentially ambitious ad campaigns featuring montages of Joga Bonito as practiced by the 1970 team and their supposed spiritual heirs, whilst their actual playing style devolved to more defence-minded pragmatism (arguably haunted by the ‘failure’ of the 1982 swashbucklers). The dourer they got, the more intense the media invocation of samba soccer became – a cynical and alienating marketing smokescreen. But at that moment, in the early days of the 1982 tournament, when Sócrates was waltzing around sprawling Scottish and Russian defenders and Zico and Falcao were nonchalantly lofting passes and shots into tiny windows of space no one else seemed to have noticed, this boy was transfixed by their movement, their cool and by the fact that they always believed in their ability to outscore the opposition (as Steve McClaren later said of the turn of the century Man United team, they were never beaten, they just ran out of time).
I wanted them to win. Actually, no, I wanted Northern Ireland to win and willed them through a torturous siege against Spain in that tournament with what I now recognize as the traditional religious agonies of the long term fan. But I wanted to keep watching Brazil – I wanted to see what they were going to do next. When they were surprisingly eliminated by Italy and a resurgent Paulo Rossi, it felt more traumatic than Northern Ireland’s eventual, inevitable defeat because it was like a line of thought being suppressed – a teacher’s command to settle down now.
Yet once you’d known it, it couldn’t be unknown. I kept watching the tournament – I remember Tardelli’s operatic bliss at scoring the winning goal in the final, I remember gasping at Harold Schumacher’s assault on Battiston in the France v Germany semi-final, but my abiding memory of that World Cup is a feeling, synaesthesic in its combination of color, film grain, audio compression and a sense of sustained anticipation. It’s a memory that starts not with goal highlights but with a transition: either the moment when Brazil would pick up the ball at the edge of their own area and suddenly their whole formation would transform into one of fluid potential, or a later moment when that wave is just about to break on shore – when an attacking midfielder (usually Sócrates himself) would be poised with the ball 30 yards out as players swarmed in front of him and across each others’ paths and I’d find myself leaning in to the TV waiting for his creative decision.
I didn’t know at the time that Sócrates said of soccer:
“To win is not the most important thing. Football is an art and should be showing creativity. If Vincent van Gogh and Edgar Degas had known when they were doing their work the level of recognition they were going to have, they would not have done them the same. You have to enjoy doing the art and not think, ‘Will I win?’ ”
I doubt I’d have been happier then if I had known he’d said that. Even now, I don’t need the appealing post-rationalising that might reference his life as a medical student, a polemicist, an advocate for Brazilian democracy, an admirer of Guevara, Castro and John Lennon – rich biographical texture though that might be. I knew then what I know now, that seeing him play was the moment I first trusted my own taste in the game. I didn’t need anybody to tell me that this was beautiful and the fact that Brazil didn’t win the cup was ultimately irrelevant. Because in those moments it felt like anything could happen and having happened once I thereafter had to believe such moments could happen again. I watch for them in soccer of course, perhaps more in hope than expectation, but I treasure them when they appear in other aspects of my life.
Recently I was in Zucotti Park on the night before Bloomberg’s first threatened eviction of Occupy Wall Street. A mass clean up was in progress, intended to thwart his claims that the protest needed to be broken up for reasons of public hygiene. The mood alternated between conviviality and tension at the thought of possible violence the next day. It had been raining intermittently but around midnight the skies suddenly opened and there was a palpable moment of uncertainty, as if everyone might scatter – a moment broken by a belly laugh that swept across the whole square and dissolved into cheers and chants of defiance.
I heard the news of Sócrates’ death this morning. And when I summoned that affective memory of his 1982 team in perpetual brimming potential I ended up thinking of that much more recent, absurd, fantastic moment in the park. This is not a facile equation of the two phenomena, but an admission that my own limited ability to appreciate the latter started not with my political education, but with a foundational moment of recognition granted to me by Sócrates’ particular generous genius. It was from his team that I first learned that no matter what the results on paper say, what happens next might be beautiful. Now more than ever, I am grateful for the lesson.
Filed under: Uncategorized , 1982 World Cup, Batiston, Brazil, Castro, Degas, Football, Guevara, Harold Schumacher, Italy, John Lennon, Occupy Wall Street, OWS, Paulo Rossi, Russia, Scotland, Soccer, Socrates, Tardelli, Van Gogh, Zucotti Park
