”I learnt a lot of things in 1998,” Ronaldo Luiz Nazario de Lima said six months after his career had so spectacularly come off the rails in the Stade de France, ”and most of all I learnt how to suffer.” He was 22 years old and had fallen from grace so fast and so hard that eventually few were left believing he would ever recover.
Last Monday the goofy smile that lit up Kobe’s Wing stadium spoke of a young life to which health and meaning have finally been restored. Ronaldo’s fifth goal in four games had sealed Belgium’s fate and confirmed the belief that his, above all, is the talent England’s players will somehow have to neutralise if they are to defeat Brazil and go through to the semifinals of the 2002 World Cup.
”Beating England will be another step towards my recovery,” he said. ”It will give me the motivation to keep going.” This was just the news that Sven-Goran Eriksson needed. As if 11 men in Brazil shirts were not enough for his team to cope with, they will be confronting one of the world’s great players on a mission of personal redemption.
For Ronaldo this is a destiny deferred. Having been left on the sidelines during the 1994 World Cup by a coach who thought that 17 was too young, he was supposed to find his time and his place at France 98.
As Fifa’s world player of the year in 1997 and 1998, the buck-toothed boy was set up to be installed in Paris as the incarnation of football’s global appeal. Everything was ready: the posters, the TV ads, the custom- designed boots available at a sporting goods store near you, whether you lived in Twickenham or Timbuktu. Yet only a few months later he had become eloquent in the language of pain and disillusionment.
The story of what happened to him on that July day in 1998 has never been satisfactorily revealed, partly because he refuses to discuss it. Did he really experience a severe convulsion on the afternoon of the match, as his room-mate Roberto Carlos said? And if so, what caused it? Was it the effect of an injection of Xilocaine, prescribed to dull the pain in knees which had already, at the age of 21, been subjected to terrible abuse? Or was it a psychosomatic phenomenon, a valve blowing to release the hideous pressure created by celebrity and commercial interests?
Either way the story of his next few years constituted an indictment of the demands of modern professional football, in which players are encouraged to accept lavish rewards on the understanding that their bodies become the temporary property of their paymasters. As he lurched from a hospital in Rio de Janeiro to a clinic in Biarritz and back again, forever relaying optimistic news from the surgeons and announcing imminent comebacks, a boy who had once symbolised the survival of joy and intui-tion within the game started to cut a pathetic figure.
The last we saw of Ronaldo in Europe this year suggested nothing had changed. Sitting in tears on the bench as Internazionale lost the Italian championship in an away defeat at Lazio on the last weekend of the season, he had been pulled off after a performance in which his shooting endangered only the spectators.
Once again Inter had nothing to show for the £50-million invested in buying him on a six-year contract. Rumours of a cut-price move to Spain, to another Italian club or even back to Brazil started to circulate.
But the following week he had joined Brazil’s pre-tournament camp in Portugal and on June 3 he celebrated his return to the World Cup by scoring Brazil’s first goal in their opening match against Turkey. The way he hurled his body forward to meet Rivaldo’s cross suggested that at last the physical and mental restraints had been overcome, and the three subsequent matches have each contained a moment reminiscent of the brilliance he showed throughout his first four years in Europe.
Back then, between the ages of 17 and 21, he scored 113 goals for PSV Eindhoven, Barcelona and Inter and looked unstoppable. Another boy-man in the mould of the teenaged Pele and Maradona, he specialised in beating the last line of a defence with a repertoire of feints, shuffles and sprints that seemed to have been learnt from a conjuror’s manual.
No man-marker alive could hope to read Ronaldo’s intentions. He had six different ways of beating you, which put the odds strongly in his favour. He also had astonishing power in his thighs and hips, allowing him to use his strength to turn and burn away from an opponent in a single movement. And, if a covering defender got across to obstruct his path, he would do the same to him.
Defenders tend to resent this sort of treatment and by the time he reached Serie A in 1997 the effect of their attention was beginning to show in outbreaks of tendinitis in both knees. And in Italy, of course, it got worse. Desperate defenders from Parma to Perugia hacked him down as a matter of course.
But there was no sense of impending calamity as he cruised through the early rounds of the World Cup in France, scoring goals while still in third gear. And, when he changed up and subjected Jaap Stam, Frank de Boer and Philip Cocu to an afternoon of embarrassment in the semifinal, the brilliant goal with which he removed them and their Dutch team-mates from the competition seemed like an appetiser for the banquet being prepared in Paris.
His inability to resemble even a poor impersonation of himself on that strange evening affected the whole of his team, allowing France an easy ride to the title. The toxic fallout included months of the wrong sort of media attention and, when he returned to Milan, the injuries started to come with increasing frequency.
Since then his story has been a sort of one-man ER. In Lecce in November 1998 and in Rome in April 2000 his right leg gave way during matches, sending him back for a further round of x-rays and surgery. His knees are now covered with scar tissue.
”Coming back from this injury is something I’ve had to do alone,” he said this week while the Brazilians prepared to meet England, ”and even though I’m playing for 90 minutes it isn’t behind me. I’m still fighting against it but I’m coming back for sure. Only I can know how hard it has been.”
His performances during the past three weeks certainly suggest that this renaissance is for real. At 25 he looks a little more muscle-heavy than he did at 21 but the Ronaldo watermark could be seen in a muscular shimmy against China and a burst between four Costa Rican defenders. His five goals put him in line to emulate the feat 32 years ago of Jairzinho, his great compatriot, of scoring in every round of the World Cup finals, though Rivaldo may get there first.
He is a charming, intelligent, happy-go-lucky man whose natural warmth inspires affection rather than jealousy among his less gifted team-mates. In that respect, and perhaps in that respect alone, he resembles Paul Gascoigne. When he was spotted in a Kobe bar a few hours after Brazil’s victory on Monday night, there were no stories of riotous behaviour to report the next morning. For the past two years he has worked as a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations, publicising a development programme aimed at alleviating the sort of poverty he knew as a child by encouraging greater cooperation between rich and poor nations. He seems to be taking it seriously.
In terms of football his rebirth will please the whole world. This certainly includes those members of the England squad — such as Rio Ferdinand, his direct opponent on Friday –who are happy to admit that their early steps were inspired by his example. Although this World Cup has so far been characterised by success for teams rather than individuals, Ronaldo could yet be the man to give the competition its symbolic figure, as he was supposed to do four years ago.