The Truly Great

Soccer in Sun and Shadow: by Eduardo Galeano, translated by Mark Fried, © Verso 1998, 1999


The best sports books have a remarkable number of similar qualities. They are concise masterpieces marked by lovely, musical prose and a novel-like air of wonder and magic. They are defiantly untechnical: this is because the best sports books aren’t written by sportsmen or even by professional sportswriters.

There are great sports books that are not defined by these qualities, to be sure. But the kind of book I’m talking about here is not merely great; the list of “great” sports books is an impossibly long one of which I am only aware of a small fraction at best. There are an extremely rare brand of sports books that are truly special. They intertwine history, music, literature, psychology and politics with a profound love of the game to create works of art that while inspired by and deeply rooted in a particular sport, are truly more general works of brilliant non-fiction.

This is why sporting outsiders end up making the finest contributions to the literature of sport. CLR James, the West Indian Marxist who wrote perhaps the greatest sports book of all time, Beyond a Boundary, made his name and career as a historian and social theorist. John McPhee (author of the tennis masterpiece Levels of the Game) and David Remnick (who wrote a seminal biography of Muhammad Ali) never distinguished themselves as players or experts in tennis or boxing. And the Uruguayan Eduardo Galeano, the particular focus of this article, describes himself as “the worst wooden leg ever to set foot on the playing fields of my country”. None of the four ever wrote more than the odd book or piece about the sport they loved, or ever attempted making a career of sportswriting. James’ timeless question, “What do they know of cricket who only cricket know?” is painfully over-quoted, but it serves as the perfect evidence of the belief of these writers that their sportswriting fit within the line of their usual non-fiction work, and the two were inextricable.

Eduardo Galeano is a Uruguayan novelist, essayist, journalist and historian. His works are known for melding fiction and nonfiction and in the process wonderfully capturing the essence of South American life. On the strength of Soccer in Sun and Shadow, read in an English translation, I can readily describe him as a writer of the highest quality, capable of passages containing both lines of heartbreaking sadness and a wry humour that is impossibly enticing. The book could be described as a South American history of football in the form of short pieces in a sort of vague chronological order. It makes no attempt to be comprehensive or even purely factual; indeed its vivid description of several events that the author surely could not have witnessed means that it follows Galeano’s famous trend of writing “faction”.

Galeano uses the medium of football to explore the history of postcolonial Latin America, providing insights on race relations (through the lives and goals of brilliant and underappreciated black and mulatto footballers) as well as lamenting the dominance of richer countries; as he notes, although Europe and Latin America have won an almost identical number of World Cups, almost all referees have been European. Some of his loveliest passages show us the extent of football passion in South America: the piece about “the stadium” tells us that “Montevideo’s Centenario Stadium sighs for the glory days of Uruguayan soccer. Maracana is still crying over Brazil’s 1950 World Cup defeat. At Bombonera in Buenos Aires, drums boom from a century ago”. The inherent wonder of the sport is enriched by Galeano’s prose, which is often as exciting and evocative as that of even better known Latin American writers like Garcia Marquez and Vargas Llosa.

While dominated by South American football, Galeano’s book is an inclusive one, containing snippets of the great Europeans, tales of wonderful goals and pieces on the globalization of football, which Galeano sees as a good thing (he takes justifiable pride in the achievements of non-white players the world over). Yet Galeano the polemicist is just as effective as the usual, celebratory Galeano. His passionate and sarcastic denunciation of Joao Havelange (the man who announced, “I have come to sell a product named soccer), Sepp Blatter and the likes of IMG and Adidas reveal once more to us Galeano’s profound love for the game and the hatred he feels for the grim, corporate forces that in his view are trying to tear the beautiful game apart.

And thus it is Galeano’s love for football, a love that is shared by over a billion individuals on this planet, that leaves the most powerful mark on the reader. Soccer in Sun and Shadow is in many ways a light book, easy to read and dip into at random occasions, since it is not truly sequential or structured. For new fans (such as Americans) it offers the chance to read a beautifully written introduction to the game, its players and history, with a concise and thrilling summary of the events of every world cup from Uruguay 1930 to France ’98. For more knowledgable devotees it is an informed, entertaining treatise. And for the more middle of the road fan like myself, neither novice nor expert, it is richly rewarding both as a book about football as well as a deeply engaging work of non-fiction about Latin America. I end with the closing lines of the first edition of the book, as there are few better testaments to the intensity of Galeano’s passion and the power of his writing:

"For years I have felt challenged by the memory and reality of soccer, and I’ve tried to write something that was worthy of this great pagan mass able to speak such different languages and unleash such universal passion. By writing, I was going to do with my hands what I could never accomplish with my feet: irredeemable klutz, disgrace of the playing fields, I had no choice but to ask of words what the ball I so desired denied me.

From that challenge, and from that need for expiation, this book was born. Homage to soccer, celebration of its lights, denunciation of its shadows. I don’t know if it has turned out the way soccer would have liked, but I know it grew within me and has reached the final page and now that it is born it is yours. And I feel that irreparable melancholy we all feel after making love and at the end of the game."