The Rio World

For love of the game

by Michelle Chihara

photos by Geoffrey Kula

Taki American hoop dreams and Super Bowl mania. Throw in a little baseball patriotism. Focus them all on one sport. Now you're approximating -- approximating -- Brazilian feelings about soccer. Ask almost any Brazilian why he loves what everyone else in the world calls "football," and he'll tell you it's in his blood. He'll tell you the first thing his father put in his hands was a soccer ball. And that's just the guy who plays for fun on the weekends.

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Every Sunday -- at Danehy Field in Cambridge in the summer and at Arlington High School in the winter -- soccer matches get under way at eight in the morning and run all day. The games pit 11 or 12 Brazilian teams against one another in a series of matches that culminate in two championships a year. The winter finals can draw anywhere from 500 to 2000 fans. And still, organized Brazilian soccer is invisible to most city residents. The games are listed only in the Brazilian papers.

In the league games, the level of play can approach the professional. The star player for Armazem -- last year's winter champions and, at least by their account, the hottest team in the league -- has been approached by the New England Revolution's farm club. In true soccer style, he goes by his first name: Helinho.

"Yeah, the Bulldogs have called me twice," says Helinho during a brief break from preseason practice in a school gym in Cambridge. But he didn't return their calls, sticking instead to his day job refinishing floors. Watching Helinho dribble, fake, grin, and then whip the ball past two opponents into the net, team owner Valdeci Oliveira laughs and says, "He's lethal."

Armazem won last winter's championship and might have won the summer title, too, but the team got suspended for most of the summer because of a melee at a game. The suspension caused much hand-wringing from fans worried about negative publicity and violence in the community, and even more hand-wringing from fans worried about the drop in the level of soccer.

Now the team is ramping up for the winter season, with Helinho still aboard. "I just got married," says the star. "A career in soccer isn't a sure thing."

Helinho's teammate Eurico, on the other hand, says he would go if the Revolution called. Smoothly coifed, with a cell phone in the pocket of his navy trench coat, Eurico went pro in Brazil, but dropped it all to follow a girl to the States. Now he sells water filters for his uncle's company and hopes to play for the American league. His kicks, which land like missiles against the walls of the gym, are terrifying but erratic. Still, since humility is not a value in the world of Brazilian soccer, Eurico has no problem saying that "American players have force, but Brazilians have technique. We were born on the field, like Pelé."

Pelé, the world-famous Brazilian forward of the '60s and '70s, is something of a demigod in a country where soccer can seem like the only path to a better life. Even in this local amateur league, rumor has it that teams will pay as much as $100 per game for good players. Valdeci Oliveira, who says he never pays players, still says he spent $10,000 on his team last summer: the money went for uniforms, league fees, and, of course, kegs for the win-or-lose post-game barbecues.

It's an investment of love for Oliveira, but it's also good PR. The team is named after Oliveira's convenience store in Somerville. "We went from doing 700 money transfers a month to 1600," he says.