A young champion writes a letter to his four-year-old brother and explains life to him: theirs, that of their very poor family, but also the other, older one, the life of those who seek a sign, a dream and a meaning. The life that appeases the hunger of the stomach and the soul. The letter published by “The Players Tribune” that the Brazilian Endrick, the phenomenal 17-year-old who has just scored at Wembley with the Seleçao and who will go to Real Madrid, wrote for his brother Noah who still can’t read, seems like a coming-of-age novel. Endrick tells him about when they were poor, with nothing in the fridge, “without the yoghurts you love so much”, about when their father Douglas cried about it, and about when he managed to get hired as a street cleaner at the Palmeiras stadium and then in the locker room of the first team, where he repeated “one day my son will play here, together with you”.
Endrick, the goal against Brazil and the letter to his little brother: “I’m going to Real Madrid, we won’t miss food anymore. Mom slept on the floor, dad dreamed of biting an apple” March 25, 2024
Endrick’s “Vila Guaìra” looks a lot like Maradona’s “Villa Fiorito”. No running water, electricity or TV. Nothing on the plate. “Go to bed, so the hunger will go away” his mother told him, also in tears waiting to have two reais to buy a piece of stale bread “with a heavenly taste”. The mother who slept on the floor, the sick and toothless father who had a dream, “to bite into an apple”, until the Palmeiras players took up a collection and gave him dentures.
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“But, Noah, it was also a wonderful childhood, thanks to God and thanks to football.” There is nothing pathetic in the letter to his little brother, but a neorealist sweetness full of memories and poetry. “Noah, you were born one evening when I scored a goal, and as a gift I brought you the golden ball from the tournament, because I didn’t have money to buy you a toy.” Endrick says that he played football on a sort of hill above the favela, and whoever made a mistake had to go and recover the ball at the bottom of the slope. “You’re wrong? You run!»: it seems like just an anecdote, but it’s life.
The young champion writes that football was the goal and the tool “to have at least two meals a day, sometimes three”, and that the days of now did not arrive by chance. But nothing tragic, if anything a feeling of cheerful destiny, something that contains a lot of faith in the impossible. A story that seems from another era, and perhaps it is, because the true poor of the world always remain something ancient and contemporary especially when we don’t see them: this, perhaps, is what the champion wants to say to his little brother. It is the memory of someone who had nothing and yet he had a lot, but it is also the awareness that a lot comes from that nothing so proud and, ultimately, almost happy.
The father who slept under the ticket office of the stadium, the mother on the floor, when she only owned a mat, a chair and the Bible, and with those three things she accompanied Endrick to another city to become a footballer, cooking sausages when there was money , otherwise old bread or nothing. The mother crying in the bathroom so as not to be heard, the father on the sofa. “But the moment we forget where we come from, we risk losing our way.” Thus ends this beautiful letter, a love letter.
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2024-03-26 06:00:00
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