While Pel? is the football player Brazilians admire, Garrincha is the one they love. Ruy Castro wrote a successful biography about him that led to a courtcase and a one year prohibition of the book because he portrayed the star of the 1962 World Cup as a drunk. The writer joked that his next biography would be about an orphan, only son, widow, infertile and impotent.

A joke indeed because the Rio de Janeiro based journalist seems to relish the fatal weaknesses of Garrincha’s character: women and alcohol. At every possible opportunity he makes remarks about the attackers ferocious appetite for both. Aged 12 Garrincha played at least two or three games of football a day, in the future he would continue this rhythm, just in an other sport (page 38). This weakens Castro’s defense that that he didn’t write a book about football, but about alcoholism. It’s exactly because Garrincha was a famous football player that his alcoholism makes for an interesting story. Without his football skills he would have been just one more village drunkard. Without his self destructing side the result would be a boring rags-to-riches story. It’s the combination that makes for a thrilling read.

Castro has managed to turn Gatrincha’s life into a page turner of almost 500 pages. Garrincha’s carreer also serves to tell the story of Brazilian football in the late fifties and early sixties when it achieved the dominant position in world football it has kept ever since. A time when the biggest stars still played in Brazil, although European clubs started to show an interest, and television coverage was almost inexistent. Of all the women in the book, there is only one that has a real influence on the soccer star: samba singer Elza Soares. Probably the only woman Garrincha loved. But she did’t manage to get Garrincha to stop drinking. By the time their marriage ended the former sportsman had already turned into a drunk who wetted himself on the street.