Imagine, Iowans, that Ames and Iowa City were the same city – i.e. that ISU and UI were located in the exact same town, and that their football teams shared a stadium. Everyday you’d walk along the street not knowing if a passerby was a friend or foe. During football season, the Hawks would have their home games, and the Clones theirs, and this hypothetical city would belong to whoever’s team had such a


87 years ago this year, Galo’s rival, Cruzeiro Esporte Clube, known simply as Cruzeiro—or, to

Each team has its run-of-the-mill fans, who follow their beloved club and detest their rival, but their fan-ship is all talk. At the extremes of each side lives the vanguard of each team’s fan base. For Atlético, it’s Galoucura, a contraction between Galo and Loucura (madness), thus meaning


All right, that should be sufficient background for the average Gringo to understand the craziness that is football in Brazil. Now let’s get to the game itself.
So Ricardo, the kid I live with from Vitória (I still need to tell his story), is a huge Cruzeiro fan. I came here neutral, but have since been baptized by this Mafia Azul commando-in-training as a Cruzeiro fan, albeit a mild one. Two weeks ago we went to a game between Cruzeiro and one of Minas Gerais’ small interior teams, Vila Nova. It was a brilliant game; Cruzeiro played terrible until the final 15 minutes of the game, coming back from 2-1 down to win the match 3-2 on a PK with 5 minutes to go. The game mattered little, however, and thus only about 10,000 or so fans showed up to the Mineirão stadium, which can comfortably hold 80,000, though has in the past seated—or rather stood—over 100,000. After this game, Ricardo was set on going to O Clássico to make up for such a rather tranquil match. I was leery. Everyone I’d talked to about O Clássico had told me how dangerous it was, how easy it would be to get caught in the crossfire between Galoucura and Mafia Azul. In the end, however, I made up my mind to go. A friend of a friend stood in line to get our tickets, which sold out in less than 8 hours. (As a side note, the tickets are CHEAP here! Student tickets cost 7.50 Reais, about $4.50, while general admission is still a mere 15 Reais, or 9 bucks. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Gary Barta!) Ricardo and I, along with the grandson of Dona Dirce, Lucas, decided to take a bus from Coração Eurarístico to Pampulha, a wealthy neighborhood on the north side of the city where the guy who bought our tickets lived, which was conveniently a 10-minute walk from the Mineirão. This was a HUGE mistake. The three of us resolved to wear nothing at all having to do with Cruzeiro, which turned out to be the best decision any of us had ever made in our lives. As soon as the bus stopped at the southern edge of downtown, about 30 Galoucura members hopped on, and almost immediately began singing their war songs—dozens of them. Fans of both teams have pretty ugly chants they shout at one another. The Hawkeye creed that “I’d rather have a sister in a whorehouse than a brother at Iowa State” doesn’t even come close to the dirtiness—and, admittedly, creativity—of the mud these two sides hurl at each other. One of the cleanest and most popular, which both sides use equally (as I said, it’s a war of rhymes), goes “Ei, Galo/Zeiro, vai tomar no cu!” (“Hey, Galo/Zeiro, you’re going to take it in the ass!”) During the 45-minute bus ride to Pampulha, the three of us sat still and never even thought of making eye contact. Luckily, our silence in the midst of this maelstrom didn’t give away our allegiance.
Once we arrived in Pamulha, we chilled for a bit at the ticket-buyer’s house (I missed his name) and waited for some more friends to arrive. We ended up heading off to the Mineirão in a group of 9, which included two other Americans—the first I’d met since arriving here, who ended up being missionaries and friends of a friend of the ticket-buyer. Once again, we were lucky to have worn nothing Cruzeiro, or anything blue for that matter, as the route from the ticket-buyer’s house to the Mineirão took us right through the Galo “tailgate” as it were. Droves of crazy, drunk Atlético fans were getting away with as much mayhem as they could under the constant vigilance of the omnipresent Military Police, ready to break someone’s skull upon with their batons at a moment’s notice. We made our way to the Cruzeiro side of the stadium and, after being patted down by the MP, went in to find some seats. We were in the lower deck of the stadium and amid the throngs of fans we were lucky enough to find seats that gave us a pretty decent view of the field. I wish I could’ve brought my camera in to capture the scene we walked into. The Mineirão is more or less an oval. Behind one goal sits (again, read stands) the Galo fans, behind the other those for Cruzeiro. Along the sides of the oval, taking up about 4 whole sections on either end, is an empty buffer zone, home to only the MP and their German Shepherds. Absolutely no chances are taken that could result in all out war breaking out! For a good hour before the game, each side’s fans hurled slurs at each other as their teams warmed up on the field and innocent—and

The game started with Cruzeiro on the attack early, keeping Atlético on its heals for the better part of the first ten minutes. From then on, the quality of offense on both sides dropped dramatically, making the rest of the game an ugly and anticlimactic defensive struggle. The game ended a 0-0 draw, with fans more hushed and disenchanted than I had first envisioned two weeks before. We scurried out as soon as the final whistle blew to beat the crowds. We chilled at the ticket-buyer’s house for a little bit before getting a ride back home, wanting more than anything not to repeat our bus fiasco from earlier that afternoon. On the way home we passed through Praça 7 de Setembro, a downtown square where Galoucura or Mafia Azul meet up after a victory to unofficially “claim” the city. Despite the marked MP presence, the praça was virtually devoid of hostile life.
This morning at school, fans from both sides wore their team colors with pride, each side believing that their team had played less ugly than the other. As I stood chatting with friends outside in the history and geography department courtyard, I watched as a student in a Galo jersey and another in a Cruzeiro jersey were about to cross paths. In a moment of rare Brazilian sportsmanship, instead of a sneer, instead of a verbal jab, instead of merely ignoring each other, the two fans smiled and cocked their heads back, giving each other a low-five as they each walked by the other. If even for a second, and albeit in the calming shade of palm trees in a well-off university campus, all was right in the football world of BH in that moment.
1 comment:
I can't believe after such a short period of time in here you already saw "o clássico" at Mineirão! hehe I've been living here my whole life and never did it! Maybe that's cause I've took the bus in BH in days like these or had seen how strong is the rivalry between them.. anyway, you were brave! hehe
Oh! And btw, it's good to hear you're more likely to become a cruzeiro's fan! :)
Of course, I'm a cruzeiro fan. And as you may have noticed, mostly everyone in here has something to say about football ("soccer")!
That was a very good post Brett! I think I'm gonna make coming by here a habbit of mine.
Cya at PUC!
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