Pelada films football in places with no name

16 march 2010 | arts, media, usa

In January 2003 I started a website of world soccer and called it The Global
Game. The idea hardly seemed original. I was aware of similar online soc-
cer resourcesfor example, the Football Culture site the British Council
once maintained. In discovering world football and its power to connect
people I was a bit like a child who realizes she can skip a flat rock across a
pond. Ill congratulate her, but I dont want to tell her that it has been done
before.
Still, I remember working at my dining-room table in suburban At-
lanta in earnest. Through this small gesture I was desperate to respond to
the isolation and fear that come from living in a country on perpetual war
footingwhere we call external disorder terrorism but often fail to name
manifold terrors inside.
More than seven years later, a sense of separation from the world
remains. I still exist on the outskirts of beloved community, but my desire
for connection in football is stronger than ever.
No one in this period has embraced the goal of cultural communion
through sport more completely than the makers of Pelada, the documen-
tary that premieres this week at the South by Southwest Film Festival in
Austin, Texas. Luke Boughen, Rebekah Fergusson, Gwendolyn Oxenham,
and Ryan White visited twenty-five countries over two years. They played

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 The Global Game Collection

pickup soccer in all of them, filmed the result, andwhile not explicitly
pose vital questions: What keeps usAmericansfrom seeing the world
as it is? Why are we so mean?
I would regard Boughen and Oxenham, the couple featured in the
film, with soul-debilitating envy were they not so disarming about their
work and abilities.
To finance production they took no money from corporate donors.
As a result, the message is unfiltered. They avoid the dilemma faced by
one soccer blogger I know. Partly funded by Nike, he feels free to write
about whatever and whomever he wantsas long as his subjects are not
sponsored by adidas. Increasingly rare in football media projects, makers
of Pelada took no fifa subsidy, which likely would have lent a pollyannaish
my game is fair play hue to the result.
In contrast, one big bullshit is how a Jerusalem Jew in Pelada de-
scribes the capacity of football to bring world harmony. But maybe he is
just grouchy after losing to a side of Arabs.
The inspiration for Pelada came, in part, from a 1966 surfing film
about Californians Mike Hynson and Robert August following summer
across the world in search of the perfect wave. I saw The Endless Summer
once. Over the winter, for the first time in at least thirty years, I watched it
again. I discovered that it is one of the most racially insensitive films about
sport ever made. I have not seen Leni Riefenstahls Olympia, but a compar-
ison might be interesting.
With a cringeworthy sequence beginning in West Africa, Endless
Summer narrator and director Bruce Brown speaks of bringing surfing
to the natives. In South Africa, traveling with newfound white friends,
Hynson and August find the object of their searchnever-ending surf that
enables them to stay upright on their boards almost as long as they desire.
They fail to mention that the beach, in accordance with apartheid policy, is
for whites only. Only whites have access to such surf dreams. The crown-
ing arrogance is that throughout the project Brown ignores that surfing is
an ancient Polynesian sport with antecedents dating at least to the fourth

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 Pelada films football in places with no name

century. The surfer dudes ride on the shoulders of giants while maintaining
their delusions as pioneers.
Channeling similar wanderlust and white mans zeal, starting in the
nineteenth century, missionaries and tradesmen and other colonial emis-
saries spread football in South America, Africa, and Asia. In a refreshing
modern twist, Oxenham and crew do the opposite. Like earlier travelers,
they take a ball with them. But they travel to learn and to share, not to con-
vert or to steal. They reenact multiple versions of the World Wari Christ-
mas truce, venturing into no-mans land to play football against the enemy.
Playing in a Bolivian prison, they find that hostility fades once they
pay proper homage to the sport that brightens inmates days. They pay to
enter the gameLonely Planet tells itinerants that drugs can be had using
similar methods. But San Pedro overseers in La Paz, who are prisoners
themselves, know that paying for pickup soccer would be gauche. They
give Boughen and Oxenham fruitcakes.
Pelada is un-American in the most positive sense of the word. I am
proud of the directors for giving the film a Portuguese title, one that focus
groups would have rejected. Pelada is the idiom for kickabouts in Brazil. It
also means naked. Boughen and Oxenham both found new dimensions
of the game in Brazil after competitive college careers at Notre Dame and
Duke. They are elite footballers with a common touch. White and Fergus-
son, who supply the gorgeous camera work, knew Oxenham from Dukes
Center for Documentary Studies, one of the films backers. Fergusson also
played on the soccer team.
Appropriate for two narrators who know that potential employers
probably wont value their soccer skills, the film broadly concerns how
work intersects with play. In the course of traveling and debating their own
futureslaw school for Luke? the Womens Professional Soccer league for
Gwendolyn?they encounter perspectives on play that jar with the Amer-
ican idea. Play in the United States comes laden with guilt and suspicion.
As college and professional athletes and games on tv fill our fantasies,

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 The Global Game Collection

we lose touch with the way unsupervised play, like other arts, leads to
transcendence.
You have to keep playing, playing, playing, Nene, Oxenhams for-
mer teammate at Santos, says of continued life on futsal courts. In her fac-
tory job she colors the hair of Princess Fiona dolls. Fiona is Shreks ogress.
Oxenham comments, [Nene] is happy with the game right where it is.
Changaa (moonshine) brewers in Mathare Valley, Nairobi, fight the
assumption that footballers are drunkards. I have to play, says James, a
brewer, even for low stakes on a former garbage dump. Once one looks
beyond televised games involving soccer gods, historical and modern-day
associations between football and depravity are surprisingly common.
Maybe Mesoamerican cultures knew this better than we do. At the inter-
section between mortal and immortal worlds is the ball game. To play is to
live, at the risk of social death. When favela-based players in Pelada claim
their street for futeboland rename it the Street of Leisurethey are
giving Lulas neoliberalism the metaphorical finger. In Japan, businessmen
seek stress release by playing on rooftops after twelve-hour days.
Few football poets, even Eduardo Galeano, have captured the resil-
ient beauty of the game better than Cristiano Cavina. Pelada finds him in
Casola Valsenio, an Italian commune near Bologna and Ravenna. In 2006
Cavina won the Tondelli Prize honoring new Italian writers, although he
lives with his mother and works in a pizzeria. His writinghe has pub-
lished four books with Marcos y Marcos of Milanoffers an antidote to big
soccer. One of his books, Unultima stagione da esordienti (A final season
for debutants, 2006), concerns ac Casola, a side competing within a re-
gional league in the fading days of leftist resistance in the 1980s. In Pelada
he reads near the end of the book:

This is what Im going to think when Im old. So

then, seated on the traces of this circular life I no-
tice a young boy who is alone. He is seated next to
me, and I, finally old, would tell him of a fantastic

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 Pelada films football in places with no name

championship and speak of the ball that can trans-

form the weakest into Gibraltar. I would talk to him
of the football god and the magic he confers. And
the boy would be courageous enough to believe me
and follow me into the dusty corners forgotten by
the earth. Because there is a god for those football
fields. Not for the big famous ones, but for the small
ones in the provinces. And if you have the courage
to believe in it football will give you much more than
you can give it.

Cavina in the film plays in a pickup game wearing a homemade

t-shirt reading meno di zero (less than zero). His shirt captures how I
sometimes feel when playing park football Saturday mornings in Atlanta,
especially after engaging in moot-court disputations with a fellow who sev-
eral times has reported us to city authorities. Within the American imagi-
nation, if I play I do not produce. I spoil someone elses idea of tranquillity.
The suburban counterpoint to productivity is silence.
In Pelada and in the films blog, freestyle players in Shanghai speak
about their hassles with police. The best freestyler, AK, also fights paren-
tal constraints. Hes at that age where things start funneling in directions
youre not even sure you want to go, Oxenham writes, and maybe thats
part of what led him to tell a disbelieving father that his grown-up son
wanted to become a street-soccer player. Id rather choose a happier way
to live, AK says.
Ill stick with AK. At the end may we all feel as Boughen does after
Sunday football in Brazil. He tells a group of men, some of whom persist
with Speedos past their prime: We loved this game, we loved this place.
It should be fifas new motto, and Boughen and friends should collect
millions for it.

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