Opinion: Love in Dynamite: Roberto personified the winning Vasco

It rains in Rio de Janeiro. This Monday morning, parents and children, dressed in Vasco’s colors, walked up a hill in the neighborhood of São Cristóvão, in the north of the city. At the top of it, fans form a long line, all sheltered under umbrellas. One by one, they enter the São Januário stadium. Roberto Dinamite dies, and one of the biggest fans in the country says goodbye to its superhero.

The TV shows the empty stands; the vivacious color of the lawn, soccer players crying: Edmundo, Pedrinho, Felipe. The images I have of São Januário are different: the wind hitting the face, as I ran alongside the players entering the field. The scent of the wet grass, the crowded bleachers, our horizon line, a victorious utopia.

Now, the children say goodbye to an athlete they never saw play. Football is mysterious. Soon, two classes of fans opened up: on the one hand, those who saw the athlete in action. On the other, those who only heard about the character.

It’s a discrete and crooked hierarchy. The history of football would be nothing without orality. I didn’t see Dinamite play, but my father taught me to respect him as the greatest player in the club’s history, a notion more valuable than testimony.

And, unlike what happens in other teams, no athlete has ever overshadowed Dinamite’s primacy among Vasco’s idols. It is incredible that he is still the top scorer in the history of the Brazilian Championship and Carioca, with 190 and 284 goals scored, respectively.

These are the numbers of an obsessive man. Dynamite was above all a record holder. He entered the field determined to fulfill the objective of the sport of football: to score goals. Center forward, he wasn’t almost like Zico, his friend and Flamengo idol. It was Dinamite, which gave Vasco its first Brazilian title, in 1974, and triumphed over its opponents in five state championships.

Of Vasco, the most important images, in fact, I did not witness. In most of them, Dinamite was the protagonist. Especially in that home goal against Botafogo, in 1976. Zanata crosses the ball to Dinamite, who takes a hat-trick at the defender and sinks the opponent’s net. In the eyes of Maracanã, the attacker runs smitten, celebrating yet another goal.

Dinamite personified the winning Vasco, the opposite face to the present time, of economic crisis and four relegations. In two of them, in the campaigns of 2008 and 2013, the former athlete held the presidency of the club. Ironically, the failures attributed greater biographical weight to the character.

In defeat, he achieved the club’s identity in its totalizing dimension. After all, Basque life does not take place in Maracanã, but in São Januário. It is a particular Rio experience, gauche, to always be the difference.

By forging the happiest chapter in the history of Vasco, Dinamite attributed beauty to the melancholy of each day. It’s ugly to win, win, win — and to empty life of meaning.