The phrase is difficult to translate directly into English. Generally, it has to do with gambling and a man’s soul. It has to do with being brash and bold and brave. It has to do with fortitude and, perhaps more than anything else, an abiding belief in a singular path.
Sitting in a hotel lounge 25 stories above Columbus Circle in Manhattan last month, the star’s father, Neymar Sr., looked out over Central Park and tried his best to explain it. Across the Hudson River, his son was with the Brazilian national team, preparing for a sold-out exhibition match against Argentina and, beyond that, for the Olympics, where he will be the most dynamic player in the competition. At the London Games, with the world’s spotlight squarely on him, Neymar Jr. will seek to earn his country a gold medal, the one major soccer trophy it has never won.
“He is living it right now,” Neymar Sr. said. “That saying we talk about — he is doing it.”
But that was not enough. So Neymar Sr. tried again, through a translator, to summarize the essence of the phrase. His son’s success, he continued, has always been based on risk. On finding the right mix of fast and slow, of possibility and caution.
At 20 years old, Neymar is already the highest-paid soccer player in Brazil. He is the face (and future) of soccer’s South American mecca. He is, in the words of no less than perhaps the greatest player in history, a technical marvel, a wizard with magical feet. But through it all, his father said, this one Brazilian saying has guided him, especially now as the latest question — when will Neymar go to Europe for good? — is asked over and over.
Finally, Neymar Sr. laughed as he settled on the best way to present the idiom. He sat up straight and explained that in life there are, really, only two choices: “A man can either go through life wearing velvet pants,” he said grinning, “or he can go through life with his bare rear end hanging out in the open air.”
A Magician With the Ball
For the better part of 100 years, Brazilian custom has allowed many, if not most, people to go by a single nickname. This convention knows no boundaries (a former president was known simply as Lula), and in some cities even the phone books list residents by a lone name.
In soccer, the nicknames are prevalent. Edson Arantes do Nascimento is Pelé. Ricardo Izecson dos Santos Leite is Kaká. Robinho, who was Neymar Jr.’s favorite player growing up, is Robson de Souza. And so, before Neymar — Neymar da Silva Santos Jr., actually — there was Neymar Sr.
But Neymar Sr.’s risks did not come on the soccer field. Yes, he was a professional player, he said, but by his own admission “not a player of high quality.” In 1992 he was playing in Mogi das Cruzes, a factory city about 25 miles east of São Paulo, when his son was born. Initially, Neymar Sr. remained in Mogi, but after several years, as it became clear his playing career was ending, he moved his family — his wife, Nadine, as well as an infant daughter and Neymar Jr. — back to his hometown, São Vicente.
There, in the coastal city where he grew up, Neymar Sr. moved in with his parents. “We weren’t starting at zero — we were starting at minus-five,” Neymar Sr. said, acknowledging it would have been easy simply to stay put. Live in that modest house, raise his children with his parents around, aspire to little more than he had. “We could have done that,” he said.
Instead, he started his chase for the velvet pants. Neymar Sr. began working three jobs simultaneously. He was a car mechanic. He was a bricklayer. He was an employee for the city. His wife worked too, as a cook at a child-care center.
The early mornings and late nights lasted about four years, Neymar Sr. said, and in the middle of that span — when Neymar Jr. was 7 — a recruiter for a local indoor soccer team came to see them.
The family did not know it, but that was the beginning. Neymar Sr. did not get to see his son play much because he was always working, but he had heard the talk. Even at 5 and 6, Neymar was pushing to play with older boys in street games. It did not matter that the goals were sandals and the ball was sometimes little more than a rock. “I just wanted to play,” Neymar said during a recent interview at a New Jersey restaurant.
Grabbing a tiny salt shaker from the table, he held it up against a water glass at least three times as large. “They were this size, I was that size,” he said, laughing at the memory. “They were very dismissive, the other boys. ‘Who is this little kid?’ But I managed to convince them to let me play that first time, and I scored a goal. That changed their attitude. That changed everything.”
Between street games and salon football, or futsal, as it is sometimes known, Neymar quickly developed a preternatural touch with the ball. Style is prized among South American players, and controlling the ball artistically is such a desired skill that there is a television show — known as “Street Style” — dedicated to identifying the best juggler.
Neymar was a celebrity judge on that show last year (he even gave a standing ovation to one contestant, who popped the ball up and hid it under his shirt as Neymar looked for it in confusion) and, as a boy, he honed his feel for the ball by rarely being without one, as if willing it to become an extension of his feet.
He can flick it, roll it, slide it and cradle it. He can make it disappear. In an exhibition against the United States this year, Neymar took the ball to the near side and danced with it toward the endline. As the crowd at FedEx Field in Landover, Md., exhaled a collective “oooh,” he slipped toward the goal and slid a perfect pass at the feet of a teammate, Pato.
That Pato’s shot rebounded off the post almost did not matter. For that moment, Neymar was a boy again, juggling in the streets with his friends shouting at him to keep the ball in the air longer and kick it over his head once more.
“I just like playing with the ball,” he said. “I always have. I play on the street even now. When we’re on vacation — it doesn’t matter where — I will go and look for a game.”
There were never enough games to satisfy Neymar, and by the time he was 11, teams throughout Brazil coveted him. His father took over full-time care of Neymar’s career at that point, handling the crush of scouts and club representatives who came to try and sign him. One of them was the Brazilian legend Zito, who scored 57 goals with Santos F.C. and won two World Cups with the national team. That Neymar rooted for Santos made the connection even sweeter.
Neymar ultimately joined Santos’s youth team, but at 14 he was offered the chance to play for Real Madrid, a Spanish power and one of Europe’s most famous clubs. Brazilian stars like Ronaldo and Robinho played for Madrid, and Neymar traveled there with his family.
The allure of Europe was powerful. “I have always dreamed of playing there,” Neymar said, and he could have stayed, could have made his life there. No one in Brazil would have begrudged him using that opening as the start to a long career playing in a more visible league like those in Spain or England or Italy. But Neymar Sr. said the family ignored the popular sentiment.
“We’re from a humble family, and in a humble family there is always the question of cultural values,” he said. “We thought he had to grow up in Brazil. That was the first serious choice we had to make.”
So Neymar did not rise up through the ranks at Madrid. And he did not receive the exposure guaranteed to South American prodigies who opt to play in Europe like, say, the Argentine Lionel Messi, to whom Neymar is so often compared. Instead, he returned home. He rejoined Santos and re-entered a life that quickly developed into something he never could have imagined.
A Life Closely Examined
One afternoon, before a Santos game in 2010, Neymar and his friend Andres decided to give themselves new hairstyles. Neymar had previously kept a simple, basic look, but after toying with a razor for a while the pair settled on something akin to a Mohawk.
“It was just messing around,” Neymar said recently, in the way mischievous children do.
At the game later, Neymar Sr. had just settled into his seat when he saw his son — and his son’s hair — on the field. While he managed to restrain himself from running out there and wringing Neymar’s neck (a thought, he acknowledged, that crossed his mind), there was a conversation — the father’s word — afterward about Neymar’s impulsiveness.
Still, little could be done. After all, Neymar had scored two goals with his new haircut, so it was not going anywhere, and the haircut quickly became a national phenomenon. Children got the Mohawk. Adults got the Mohawk. “In Brazil, only the president doesn’t have a Mohawk,” Neymar Sr. said, sighing. Even now — with Neymar back to a more standard appearance — fans still pay homage. A teenage fan with a spiky Mohawk approached Neymar at the New Jersey restaurant recently, and Neymar rubbed the bristles as they took a picture together.
Neymar’s fame, particularly at home, is difficult to quantify. He returned to Santos at 14 and made a first-team impact at 17, scoring 14 goals that season. At 18, he scored 42 goals in 60 games and led Santos to the championship of the Campeonato Paulista, the top league in the country.
It was not long before he could barely go out of the house. Neymar likes food — Italian, Japanese and, of course, rice and beans, he said — but going to restaurants became troublesome. “And I only know how to make scrambled eggs myself,” he said a bit sheepishly.
There are safety issues as well. While hooliganism is not as prevalent in Brazil as in some European countries, the public scrutiny of Neymar and his teammates seemingly knows no bounds. Once, after Santos lost a match, 6-2, the fans were so angry that they threw eggs at the players.
The public examination of Neymar may never have been higher than in 2011, when he became a father at 19. His father had cautioned him against the dangers of what he called the “chemical and the physical,” but while Neymar had avoided issues with alcohol or drugs, the uproar over his baby out of wedlock was brutal.
Journalists pried. Fans speculated. Television shows and news reports inspected all aspects of the situation. Eduardo Musa, one of the 14 members of Neymar’s team of advisers, said: “It was overwhelming, and what we did not want people to forget was that it was not a money issue or anything else. It was a baby. That was the important thing.”
The baby, a boy named Davi, was born last August, and Neymar said the ugliness surrounding the news of the pregnancy had been far overshadowed by the joys of fatherhood. Davi lives with his mother, but Neymar said he saw him often; in New York, he and his sister both shopped constantly for presents for Davi, Neymar Sr. said.
“Everything in my life has happened very early, personally and professionally,” Neymar said. “I’m always learning. I have to.”
Lately, the focus on Neymar has become almost exclusively about where he plays. On his 20th birthday, Feb. 5, 2012, he scored his 100th professional goal, and Santos has turned down advances from several English clubs, including Chelsea, attempting to take Neymar to Europe.
This is not new. Neymar Sr. recalled a stranger confronting him at a grocery store when Neymar was 16 and haranguing him about how he owed it to everyone — his son, his family and Brazilians as a people — to send Neymar to Europe to play.
But Neymar Sr. said the family was sticking to its plan. “It was hard to stay in Brazil,” he said. “But we are achieving, we are doing this, at least until he matures. Then we will go out and show the world.”
A Sense of Purpose and Place
At times, Neymar Sr. sounds a bit like Tiger Woods’s father, Earl, when he talks about his son. Earl Woods was known for his (often bombastic) pronouncements of Tiger’s importance and impact, perhaps most notably when he suggested Tiger would have more influence on the world than Jesus Christ. Neymar Sr. is more measured — he at least says his son is still developing — but preaches, all the same, about how Neymar will help change the style of soccer around the world.
Initially, it seems overwrought, a reaction to the increase in rugged play (both in Brazil and elsewhere) and the deterioration of the so-called beautiful game, which features artistic dribbling and, at its best, stunning sequences of ball movement around the field.
And yet, then, one must consider this: There is a video on YouTube titled, in part, “Neymar Super Drible,” which contains footage from a match last year between Brazil and Argentina. In it, Neymar takes a pass on the left sideline, coolly drags the ball downfield and proceeds to do a series of feints, fakes and what looks like a sort of rudimentary samba before slyly pushing the ball past the defender.
There is no amazing goal scored on the video. There is not even a shot on goal. There is just dribbling and running and the most graceful kind of movement, and to date the video has been viewed more than nine million times.
Neymar Sr. believes that sort of reach is proof that the risks the family has taken for Neymar have been worthwhile. “If my son were not a soccer player today, he would be unemployed,” the father said, but it is more than that. He would have no purpose, Neymar Sr. went on. No place.
Now, Neymar is compared to Messi. Some, like Messi’s former teammate Thierry Henry, see no comparison. “I think Neymar is amazing; I think Messi is more than amazing,” Henry said. But there are people like Pelé, perhaps the greatest ever to play, who said he believed Neymar was more technically advanced than Messi.
Neymar is diplomatic, saying, “I have a long way to go to be compared to him for real.” If he and his father are to be believed, Neymar will leave London after the Olympics and return to Brazil, as he intends to honor his contract with Santos, which runs through 2014.
It is a risk, of course. Neymar could get hurt, could lose his form. He could be surpassed by another wunderkind who can do even more with the ball. And, as the man in the grocery store said years ago, how will the family feel if Neymar never plays on his sport’s biggest stages?
Father and son say they do not care. These are the chances they have taken, and these are the choices they have made. This is their path.
“Everyone thinks money is everything, but it isn’t,” Neymar Sr. said, sipping his coffee. “We’ve lived on very little.”
He gestured out the window. “Maybe the boldness, the daring of having said ‘no,’ signifies something to people everywhere. Maybe it says something important. Doesn’t it?”
Neymar Sr. laughed then, because he knew. Of course it did. The chase for velvet pants never ends.
source:http://www.nytimes.com
