Vasco dos Camisas Negras, champion of 1923, changed football – 08/11/2023 – Sport

“The Club de Regatas Vasco da Gama has definitely and brilliantly secured the title of champion of Serie A of the 1st division of Metropolitana, with the result of the game the day before yesterday, with S. Christovão. It committed itself with the maximum of his strength to bring down the San Cristobal cadre, obtaining a brilliant and fair triumph, as compensation for the effort expended”, reported Jornal do Brasil, one hundred years ago.

The text did not deviate from the pattern of the still insipid sports chronicle of the time. But that championship, decided on August 12, 1923, on the field on Rua General Severiano, has a prominent place in history. Not only the history of Vasco, champion of Rio de Janeiro for the first time. It was a victory with repercussions for sport in Rio de Janeiro, an achievement for a group made up of poor people, including blacks and browns, figures that were not welcome in the then elitist football.

So was that Vasco team, which wore black shirts. Workers played, workers from establishments such as taverns, many of them owned by Portuguese. They arrived at “elite”, a word that had an even greater semantic load in that context, through the access divisions of football in Rio.

What no one expected was that these players from the suburbs would threaten the hegemony of the nobles Flamengo, Fluminense, Botafogo and America. “By the time the adversaries came to terms with themselves, it was too late”, observed Correio da Manhã. Disbelief, according to the newspaper, extended to the champions themselves: “No one at Vasco da Gama – directors, partners and players – thought that the club could reach the heights of today”.

But it arrived.

With new features for that combat.

“The mulatto and the black were, in the eyes of the fine clubs, a kind of prohibited weapon. Not a revolver, a razor. If no big club pulled the razor, the others could continue fighting with foil”, wrote Mario Filho, in his famous –and, it is true, somewhat romanticized– “O Negro no Futebol Brasileiro”.

“A club from the second division, however, rose to the first division. It was called Clube de Regatas Vasco da Gama, and it brought with it, mulattos and blacks. Nelson Conceição, who had left Engenho de Dentro, a mulatto; Ceci, from Vila Isabel, almost black; Nicolino, from Andaraí, black. The others, white, some barely knowing how to sign their name. Vasco, the colony club, followed the good Portuguese tradition of mixing.”

The mix worked. Vasco only lost one game out of 14 in the championship, a 3-2 to Flamengo with a lot of complaints about the arbitration – and a huge party from the opponent, immortalized in the words of Mario Filho, with the right to corso and provocations in bars. “The Flemings were still not satisfied: the statue of Pedro Álvares Cabral, still close to the clock, in Glória, dawned with necklaces of strings of onions.”

It became a Flemish glory –the adjective “flamenguista” did not yet exist– tarnishing what was such a relevant campaign, almost invincible, by the opponent who became arch-rivals. According to Mario, the result “had given the illusion that everything was going to go back to what it used to be, the white teams winning championships, the black teams always losing”.

But the illusion was short-lived. “The fine, society clubs, as they said, were facing a fait accompli. You couldn’t win championships just with teams of whites. A team of whites, mulattos and blacks was the champion of the city. whites had been unable to do anything”, wrote Mario, a disciple of Gilberto Freyre. “It was a real revolution taking place in Brazilian football. It remained to be seen what the reaction of the big clubs would be.”

The reaction was the creation of a new league, Amea (Associação Metropolitana de Esportes Athleticos), with privileges for the founders and a series of requirements that, in practice, prevented Vasco from participating. There were requirements regarding the field of each team and the employment of the players, who needed to be literate.

The club then reported that it was out. In the episode that became known as the “historic response”, he sent a letter to the association saying that the position of inferiority imposed on him was not justified. And he defended the 12 players whose entry into the Amea had been banned.

“It would be an undignified act on our part, to sacrifice to the desire to be part of the AMEA, some of those who fought for us to have, among other victories, the 1923 City of Rio de Janeiro Foot-Ball Championship. , young people, almost all Brazilians, at the beginning of their careers, and the public act that can stain them, will never be practiced with the solidarity of those who run the house that welcomed them, nor under the pavilion that they so gallantly covered with glory” , said the text, signed by President José Augusto Prestes.

There was, then, a division, with the realization of two championships. “The distinction that was established between Amea and the Metropolitan League was this: one, a league of white clubs, the other, a league of white, mulatto and black clubs, everything mixed”, summarized Mario Filho.

The division –common also in other centers, such as São Paulo– was in the context of one of the great battles of Brazilian football in the period, amateurism x professionalism. Amea even established an “Inquiry Commission” to visit alleged jobs and check if the players had jobs.

The rich teams, as a rule, defended the amateur game, without payment. “Amateurism, sport for the sake of sport, was for those at the top. As long as there was amateurism, whites would be superior to blacks, the rich to the poor”, observed Mario, who was, as can be seen, an enthusiast of professionalism.

It bothered the teams beaten by Vasco that the players weren’t always at work. The team’s huge and well-documented advantage in the second half was attributed to the unusual physical preparation, the result of daily training under the command of Uruguayan Ramón Platero. If players trained every day, how did they work? Or could it be that the Portuguese merchants only gave them jobs so they could play football?

The discussion would become obsolete in the following decade, with the official adoption of professionalism. And Vasco’s absence from Amea lasted just one year. The team was already too good and had too many fans – at the time, it was by far the biggest in Rio – to be ignored. He entered the championship again, with his blacks. And the blacks would soon also win the shirts of the old elite clubs. It would not take long, for example, for Domingos da Guia to become an idol for Flamengo, where he played from 1936 to 1943.

There is a lot of questioning about the purity of feelings of the leaders of Vasco –white, as they are white today– in the 1920s. The “historical response” became a modern piece of marketing and had its design reformed. But effective actions in the fight against discrimination are still demanded from the cruzmaltina association – and from all the others.

In an article from 2021, published on the Ludopédio website, researcher Ricardo Pinto dos Santos –who worked at the Vasco Memory Center– asked these questions. And he had to deal with the wrath of Vasco da Gama, especially the group that calls itself “Black Shirts”.

“The desire to keep good and victorious players in their team of athletes translates much more into Vasco’s need to maintain a strong, victorious and profitable team, than effectively part of a movement to fight racism within the club. Until that moment, nor later, none of the clubs in Rio de Janeiro, including Cruzmaltino, dealt with racism or the black issue in a systematic way, nor en passantin its internal meetings”, wrote Santos.

“It is clear that leaving the league was not the result of the club’s engagement in the black cause. In fact, it was part of the process of football’s commodification, since, without those players, the club would suffer losses in sporting and financial terms, with no At that time, there was no other option that could keep the club in the spotlight in football”, added the researcher, doctor in comparative history from UFRJ (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro).

In any case, the 1923 title and its aftermath are a source of enormous and justified pride for Vasco da Gama. One way or another, a team with blacks and browns ran over opponents and changed football in a Rio de Janeiro that had just left slavery.

“The victory of the black shirts was a significant historical fact that exposed the racial contradictions of a society”, stated Hugo da Silva Moraes, also a doctor in comparative history from UFRJ. “Modernity translated into an amateur model succumbed to the professionalization process, becoming an important element for the rise of popular sectors.”

Hired this year by Vasco, defender Léo was introduced to the history of 1923/1924. Black, he got emotional when he recalled the situation in which he was prevented from entering a shopping center in Rio de Janeiro, on his way to a training session.

“It was a mark that stayed, a scar. Being at Vasco in the centenary of the black shirts, for me, has a special flavor. It was an act, back there, that opened the door for me today”, said the defender.

“It reminded me of what I went through.”