I swear I never thought of writing this column – 01/21/2023 – Juca Kfouri

Edson was not much of a reader. Perhaps he has never read anything written by me. The few speeches I wrote for him, I am sure, he never read.

I’m right because I saw it. He asked, I wrote and, at the moment, the extraordinary Minister of Sport improvised.

He opened his lines, after showing the paper, saying that he had prepared a speech, but that he would improvise.

And, almost certainly, what came out in the press about Pelé was told by someone close to Edson.

Anyway, I write the first column since Edson left.

I swear I never thought this day would come because I blindly believed that he would reach 100 years old — and that the ten years that separated us would be enough for me to go earlier.

Well, they weren’t.

And don’t you, rare reader, be quick to ask yourself: “But weren’t you the one who wrote the King’s obituary?”

Yes, it was, but, as it usually happens, before the outcome.

So I spent the holidays carrying stones.

Because there were so many requests for interviews around the world, in addition to answering other vehicles I work for, that, just when I thought everything would calm down after the long days until the funeral, we experienced the horror of January 8 in Brasilia.

Impossible to remain silent in the face of fascist terror, stimulated by the far-right media with its hate speech.

And my blog at UOL became the means to express the indignation.

I always thought it was funny to see the directors of the women’s magazines of Editora Abril tell what they did on vacation in the editorials of the publications they commanded.

Men, as a rule, don’t have such naturalness, which is why it didn’t even cross my mind to report what I did or didn’t do.

Everything has a first time and, unfortunately, this is not a festive time, quite the contrary.

Also because Manchester City, of Pep Guardiola and Kevin De Bruyne, goes downhill in the English Championship; Stephan Curry’s Golden State Warriors have had a mediocre season in the NBA and Corinthians not only were eliminated from the Copinha but also debuted with a defeat at Paulistinha, that is, not even as entertainment did the idle schedule smile to wander around in the least happy way.

If that wasn’t enough, incomparably worse, the huge Roberto Dinamite also said goodbye, a new insurmountable pain in the world of football.

We also saw the CBF, belatedly and conveniently, repudiate the use of the national team shirt as fascist clothing — and the STF balance itself on the border of authoritarianism, although against worshipers of dictatorships and torture to the point of excess are understandable, something that not everyone understands, like Glenn Greenwald, to whom Brazil owes so much.

Milton Nascimento played his last show and we all hope that, like Sílvio Caldas, he will do a dozen of them.

Chico Buarque continues to enchant us, like a bunch of brave women who took on important ministries to make up for the country’s backwardness — special mention, here, to Ana Moser, in Sport.

And Flávio Dino, the name of a scoring striker, the last name of a classic defensive midfielder, both Corinthians stars in the 1960s, honors the Ministry of Justice, a first-class jurist, impeccable Portuguese, the firmness of a northeastern man against barbarism.

Anyway, there it is 2023.

Year of reconstruction, of the need to pacify those who do not want war and to punish terrorists, useless innocents and their stimulators with the rigor of the law.

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