SPEAKER_02: This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars.
SPEAKER_02: When a Brazilian soccer player scores a goal, the announcer starts slow. And it builds. Until it reaches a glorious crescendo.
SPEAKER_01: They do this all over the world now, but it started in Brazil. And there's something particularly triumphant about it there. That's producer Joe Sykes. That's because soccer means so much to Brazil.
SPEAKER_01: How can I explain what soccer means to Brazilians without sounding corny,
SPEAKER_05: but I think I'm going to have to sound corny, OK? That's Fernando Duarte, a BBC journalist who wrote a book about Brazilian soccer.
SPEAKER_01: Soccer, or football as I call it, being British, arrived in Brazil in the late 19th century. At first it was a game played in elite circles and in cities, but poor and working-class Brazilians struggled to make the game their own. The only time the elites were robbed or they were deprived of something by the poor people
SPEAKER_06: or by the common folk is when football ceased to be a game for the elites and it became a mass sport. Soccer eventually became so popular and beloved in Brazil that their national team's soccer jersey
SPEAKER_02: has become as much a national symbol as the country's flag. You're going to see many more people in Brazil wearing their shirts than waving the flag.
SPEAKER_06: There's a sense of belonging. No matter if you're, you know, peanuts picking up old soda cans on the street or if you're a millionaire, when you wear that shirt you're just like one of us. Those shirts are extraordinary.
SPEAKER_00: They are scintillating. In fact, I think the word is coruscating. That's the soccer writer and historian David Gobler.
SPEAKER_01: There are flashes of diamond light coming off of those shirts.
SPEAKER_00: The Brazilian soccer shirts are so iconic that non-soccer fans all over the world can often picture them.
SPEAKER_02: But for those of you who can't, the shirt is a bright canary yellow with green trim around the collar and sleeves. They're worn with blue shorts, a pure primary blue. Compared with other soccer jerseys, the uniform is joyful and bold. It seems to capture something essential about Brazil. But it wasn't always this way. In fact, Brazil used to play in plain, unremarkable white shirts.
SPEAKER_01: The story of how the uniform changed goes back 70 years to an epic soccer game that Brazilians will never forget.
SPEAKER_02: After years of lobbying, the World Cup arrived in Brazil in 1950. At the time, the country was culturally and internationally kind of unknown. This was Brazil's big moment to show the world what it was made of. The 1950 World Cup was understood by the Brazilian population as an opportunity to say to the world,
SPEAKER_00: Brazil has arrived. They knew this World Cup was their chance to tell everyone.
SPEAKER_01: We have modernised, we have been transformed, we've moved from being an agricultural plantation economy
SPEAKER_00: to a new urban industrialised economy and this is our way of showing it. The main symbol of that coming out, apart from what was happening on the soccer field,
SPEAKER_01: was the stadium named the Maracanar in Rio de Janeiro. It looks like the stadium from outer space.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it is this fabulous, flat, white concrete oval with amazing flying buttresses. Just like this huge flying saucer that had dropped down in the centre of the city.
SPEAKER_01: But done with this sort of incredible sort of modernist elegance.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it was the greatest stadium built since the Colosseum.
SPEAKER_01: So they had the stadium, the people were behind them, the government was pushing the tournament whenever possible. Now all they needed was a successful team.
SPEAKER_06: The expectations were high because of this whole climate, this whole atmosphere of optimism.
SPEAKER_01: In one of their earlier games, Brazil strode confidently onto the field in their white uniforms and proceeded to demolish Sweden 7-1. Brazil were absolutely fantastic in the opening rounds.
SPEAKER_00: They were slaughtering everybody, they were scoring goals all over the place. They beat Spain 6-1.
SPEAKER_01: They also beat Mexico and Yugoslavia. The tournament was going exactly to plan. It was this whole atmosphere of like, sporting bliss.
SPEAKER_06: And all they had to do is get a draw of Uruguay in the last match.
SPEAKER_01: Because of a quirk in the tournament structure, all Brazil had to do to win the World Cup was tie against Uruguay in their final game.
SPEAKER_02: Uruguay historically had been a really strong team, even though they're a tiny country almost 50 times smaller than Brazil. But by the time this 1950 World Cup came along, Uruguay was a waning power in soccer. So beating them, or at least tying them, seemed totally doable. Not a problem.
SPEAKER_01: Still, Uruguay was no pushover, especially when they were playing against Brazil. Uruguay actually used to be a Brazilian province, so they had this chip on their shoulder about their older, bigger next-door neighbour.
SPEAKER_06: The whole thing of being Uruguayan, going against the odds, fighting against an old colonial power. It spurred them on. Meanwhile, the whole of Rio is now thinking about just one thing.
SPEAKER_02: The World Cup final. There really is mass hysteria about it.
SPEAKER_00: Everybody knows about it. Everyone's engaged with it. Everyone wants to go. No one can talk or think about anything else. In Brazil, people like to say that if everybody who claimed to have been in the stadium that
SPEAKER_01: afternoon was actually there, the stadium would have needed to be the size of the moon. And it was a big crowd.
SPEAKER_02: Some estimate that there were 250,000 screaming fans packed into this flying saucer stadium, which is something like 80,000 people over capacity. And the players, when they walked out, were just hit with this wall of noise.
SPEAKER_00: The place is noisy. It is raucous.
SPEAKER_02: But in the first half, neither team scores. So the crowd was getting nervous.
SPEAKER_06: Everybody was getting tense. Then finally, Brazil scores a goal.
SPEAKER_02: Just after halftime, a low shot across the goalkeeper into the bottom corner of the net.
SPEAKER_01: And there's just this relief that surges all around the crowd. Even the journalists run on and embrace the players. Because basically everyone there thinks the game is all over, that Brazil has won the
SPEAKER_02: World Cup. But then...
SPEAKER_01: Uruguay scores. About halfway through the second half. The description by whoever was there is that the stadium felt very, very nervous.
SPEAKER_06: And this nervousness went to the players, almost like they were losing the game. And then comes the moment that everybody will always narrate. Alcides Chija, one of the Uruguayan wingers, gets the ball and dribbles down the right
SPEAKER_01: side toward the goal. And just as he's looking up to pass the ball, he notices... That the goalkeeper Barbosa was actually walking to try to anticipate a cross.
SPEAKER_06: Which meant Barbosa was out of position.
SPEAKER_02: So instead of passing the ball, Chija shoots. And scores.
SPEAKER_00: All of the reports talk about the most extraordinary silence in the stadium. Alcides Chija once said in his book, only three people in the history of the American
SPEAKER_06: are silenced that crowd. Frank Sinatra, Pope John Paul II, and me. It's almost like a graveyard. Some of the players don't even remember what happened. It was a state of catatonia or something like that. As you have probably guessed by now, Brazil does not manage to get another goal to tie the game. And Uruguay scores.
SPEAKER_02: And the goal is to get another goal. Brazil does not manage to get another goal to tie the game. And Uruguay wins. As the game ends, the fans stream out of the stadium and back onto the streets of Rio.
SPEAKER_06: It's almost like some kind of apocalypse happened and people just went somewhere else. There was this feeling of solitude, this feeling of numbness. And Rio de Janeiro wasn't a party city on that night, on the night of July 16, 1950.
SPEAKER_00: There was a lot of public crying. There's a lot of hyperbole.
SPEAKER_01: One Brazilian playwright calls the defeat Brazil's Hiroshima.
SPEAKER_00: All right, well that's just ridiculous. Which I think is both in bad taste and an exaggeration. But people were really blown away.
SPEAKER_01: The recriminations came thick and fast. And soon racist accusations started to fly. Barbosa, the guy who played goalkeeper for the Brazilians, was black. He and two other black players on the team were scapegoated in the popular press. And Barbosa was even hassled on the street.
SPEAKER_00: His life was made difficult. There's a tragic story he tells later in life of hearing a woman whispering to a child, this is the man who made all of Brazil cry.
SPEAKER_01: After that, the Brazilian team didn't pick another black goalkeeper to start in the World Cup for over 50 years. And this wasn't a coincidence. After that game, black goalkeepers were regarded as less reliable than white ones in Brazil. Which is disgusting.
SPEAKER_02: But Barbosa wasn't the only focus of Brazilian blame. In fact, everything about Brazilian soccer was scrutinized, down to the uniforms the players were wearing.
SPEAKER_06: The authorities thought that the white shirt was cursed. And I think everybody else in Brazil did. And above all, there was a determination never to play in white shirts again.
SPEAKER_00: It was pretty unusual for a team to completely transform their uniform.
SPEAKER_02: Most countries have played in the same colors since the first World Cup back in the early 20th century. But the Brazilians decided their uniform was a problem. So in 1953, the Brazilian soccer authorities set up a competition and advertised it in a national newspaper that's distributed all over Brazil. They wanted people to write in with their designs for a new uniform.
SPEAKER_01: The contest had only one stipulation. The color of the uniform had to include all the colors of the Brazilian flag.
SPEAKER_02: Green, blue, white and yellow. A design that would truly represent Brazil.
SPEAKER_01: Hundreds of people entered the contest, including this guy.
SPEAKER_04: My name is Aldir Garcia-Slez and I'm from Jaguarão on the board with Uruguay.
SPEAKER_01: Aldir Garcia-Slez. He was just 19 when he entered the competition. A young man who had grown up in a little town right on the border between Brazil and Uruguay. Slez wasn't a designer. He was working at a local newspaper as an illustrator. He says when he first heard about the competition, he thought it'd be too difficult.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, the first impression I had was that this was foolish.
SPEAKER_03: That was ridiculous. Because it's rare to have a team with four colors.
SPEAKER_02: Working four colors into just the shirt would have been hard. But eventually, Slez realized he could use the whole uniform to spread out the colors. He tried blue shorts with a green shirt.
SPEAKER_01: A yellow and green striped shirt with white shorts. A green and yellow striped shirt with blue shorts. He came up with over 200 different designs. Until eventually, he had it. Blue shorts, white socks, and a yellow shirt with green trim around the neck and the sleeves.
SPEAKER_02: He sent the design off and a few weeks later, he looked down at the newspaper and saw his design staring back at him. He had won.
SPEAKER_04: After that was just a party.
SPEAKER_03: My feet didn't touch the ground and I was celebrating in the newsroom where I worked. It was like something impossible had just happened. After he won, Slez got to bask in the glory of it all for a while.
SPEAKER_01: He went to Rio, did an internship with the newspaper that had sponsored the contest. He even lived with the Brazilian players for a few months. But eventually, he returned to his small town and kind of forgot about the shirt for a while. But pretty soon, the shirt was Brazil. In 1962, the Brazilians won the World Cup in Chile. And they were wearing Slez uniform. Players like Pele wore the yellow shirt and dazzled the world with their extraordinary skill and beauty.
SPEAKER_02: Then color TV comes along and the whole world can watch Brazil in brand new technicolor, like in the 1970 World Cup in Mexico. I was five when the 1970 World Cup was played and I saw Brazil win the 70 World Cup in shimmering yellow shirts.
SPEAKER_00: Here's soccer historian David Goldblatt again.
SPEAKER_01: For me, there's a memory there that I think lots of people have, even if they didn't see it,
SPEAKER_00: of dazzle, of brilliance, of amazing sort of global south sunshine, of flair.
SPEAKER_01: Where Brazil had failed in 1950, the following years saw success after success. They won World Cup after World Cup, their yellow shirts becoming as much a hallmark as their intricate footwork and dazzling play. Slez's design became iconic, a symbol of Brazil, full of sun and life.
SPEAKER_02: But for Slez, life wasn't quite living up to the image of Brazil he had created. He started working as a writer and academic. And in 1964, a brutal US-backed military dictatorship took power in a coup.
SPEAKER_04: Anti-Gulart demonstrations that greeted the now-deposed Brazilian president at Miami airport…
SPEAKER_01: The new military government cracked down on people it considered to be subversive, including academics. Like a lot of other professors and students, Slez was arrested for basically being on the political left. When he got out of jail, he was expelled from his teaching job and was banned from leaving the country. Yeah, I was traumatized.
SPEAKER_03: My wife and my children, we suffered a lot.
SPEAKER_02: The dictatorship lasted for about 20 years. But despite the difficulties of living under the watchful eye of the military police, Slez became a successful writer and he developed an academic specialty. Slez spent his life writing about the border between Brazil and Uruguay.
SPEAKER_03: I am a citizen who has a heart and a body divided between Brazil and Uruguay.
SPEAKER_01: Slez was technically born in Brazil, but less than a mile from the border with Uruguay. In fact, when he was a kid, his father helped build a bridge across the river that separates Uruguay from Brazil. I am from the area where the bridge was built.
SPEAKER_03: My father went to help build the bridge. So I always been very connected to Uruguay.
SPEAKER_04: Slez's experience growing up between two countries and his experiences under military rule
SPEAKER_01: have helped shape his feelings about Brazilian nationalism. Even though he designed a shirt that could be considered more patriotic than the Brazilian flag, he's actually very wary of patriotism. It is an idea that competes with the ones that I have to live without limits, live without borders.
SPEAKER_03: Slez may not be a Brazilian patriot, but the soccer fan in him can't help but be proud of the Brazilian team.
SPEAKER_02: Brazil won the championship five times. This is a source of pride. It's an honor for all of us.
SPEAKER_03: But Slez has a secret, or at least something he never used to share with people who knew he was the designer of the famous yellow shirt.
SPEAKER_02: Slez roots for Uruguay. For many in Brazil, this is blasphemy, but not for him.
SPEAKER_01: We are one people, one border community.
SPEAKER_04: Even if you have two languages, the people have only one cultural identity.
SPEAKER_03: Slez feels culturally connected to both Brazil and Uruguay, but he ultimately had to pick one country's team to root for.
SPEAKER_02: Soccer divides me too.
SPEAKER_04: So these days, when Brazil plays Uruguay, Slez, like a lot of other soccer fans, suits up in his favorite jersey.
SPEAKER_01: But not the yellow shirt he designed, a sky blue one, the color of Uruguay. Then he crosses the border from Brazil to Uruguay and finds some quiet bar to walk. And then he crosses the border from Brazil to Uruguay and finds some quiet bar to watch the game.
SPEAKER_02: The English voiceover for the story was done by Nae Araujo. Katie Mingle is our senior editor, Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director, and Taron Mazza is the office manager. We'd like to thank Alex Bellos for his help. Alex was the first English journalist to write about this story and helped point us in the right direction. Junior Mazza and Fabio Aranalde also fixed everything up in Brazil and translated our interview with Slez. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99PI.org. We're on Instagram, Tumblr, and have a nice subreddit too. This week we have two articles by Kurt about the naming, numbering, and categorization of colors on our website. It's 99PI.org.
