
Given the extent to which football and music are woven into Brazil’s self-image — not to mention its evenings and its weekends — it should be no great surprise that the two threads have frequently become entwined.
Most obviously, there is the annual footage of the top Brazilian players, glassy-eyed and demob-happy, swaying to the visceral drumscape of Carnaval season. But this goes far beyond the nagging pull of the night. National-team players like Dani Alves and Rafinha are talented musicians in their own right and have been known to prepare for big matches by leading mass sing-alongs on the team bus. Past greats like Pele and Ronaldinho have had guest spots on popular songs. Former Corinthians goalkeeper Ronaldo Giovanelli was briefly the darling of the domestic rock scene with his band, Os Impedidos (The Offsides). Edmundo and Romario, the terrible twins of Brazilian football in the 1990s, released a crude hip-hop single together.
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Nor is this some one-way crush; some of the great Brazilian musicians have also looked towards football for inspiration. Take the song “O Futebol,” in which Chico Buarque dreams about unleashing a shot “with the precision of an arrow”, or Gilberto Gil’s “Meio de Campo” (“Midfield”), an ode to iconoclastic Botafogo player Afonsinho. Before them came “Aqui é o Pais do Futebol” (“This is the Country of Football”), made famous by singer Wilson Simonal, with its winking refrain about Brazil being empty on a Sunday. (Why? Because everyone is at the stadium, of course.) In more recent years, rappers like Marcelo D2 and MC Guime have added to the canon.
By far the most celebrated entry in the songbook, however, is Jorge Ben’s 1972 hit “Fio Maravilha” — a nimble, sashaying tribute to the Flamengo striker of the same name. It was the final cut on Side A of “Ben,” one of Jorge Ben’s most beloved albums. Almost 50 years later, it remains a staple of his live show, its sparkle undimmed.
Yet the story of Brazil’s greatest football song also contains its share of shade. It is a tale of opportunism and idiocy, of good intentions undone by bad judgment. It forced Jorge Ben, one of his country’s great lyricists, into a hasty rewrite and left a bitter taste in his mouth. It turned Fio Maravilha from a folk hero into a pariah.
Once more, he arrived in an inspired mood
With much love, with emotion, ready to explode with goals
Shaking the fans into life 33 minutes into the second half
After scoring with a celestial move
Many Brazilian footballers have played with the kind of grace that demands to be immortalised in art. Joao Batista de Sales was not one of them. He was awkward, clumsy in his movements. He played for Flamengo, the biggest club in Rio de Janeiro, for eight years, but was rarely a first-choice pick. He was too erratic, too wasteful to be properly relied upon.
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What he did have was charisma. When he smiled, teeth beaming out of his mouth from every direction, the world smiled with him. He tried hard but he didn’t take himself too seriously, a combination that endeared him to the fans who flocked to the Maracana every Sunday. “I was no Pele, but I scored a few goals, shinned a few in,” he once said. “I can’t complain. I made the Flamengo supporters very happy.”
His childhood nickname clung to him in the Brazilian manner. When he was a boy, his mother would watch him play and scream “Vai, meu fio!” (“Go on, my son!”) from the touchline. His team-mates picked up on this and started calling him “Fio Maravilha” — “Marvellous Son.” Even this contained a coded allusion to his home-spun charm: the word for son is actually spelt “filho”; “fio” is a slangy, informal version that hinted at his humble upbringing.
It is not difficult to see why a songwriter like Jorge Ben — eclectic, playful, a die-hard Flamengo fan — might take a shine to a footballer like Fio Maravilha. Yet the song is not a general statement of fandom but a celebration of a single moment. A single goal, in fact: the late equaliser in a 1-1 draw with Benfica on January 15, 1972.
There is no video footage of the strike, only a patchwork of anecdotes to attest to its beauty. Plus, of course, the poetry of Jorge Ben, who went about setting his wonderment to chords the second he returned home from the stadium.
He swapped passes, then dribbled past three defenders
With another touch, he went around the goalkeeper
The only thing that stopped him following the ball into the net was his humility
It was a goal of real class that showed his malice and his desire
People loved the song. Flamengo fans belted out the chorus whenever Fio Maravilha scored. A version by Maria Alcina was chosen as Brazil’s entry for the Festival Internacional da Cancao — the country’s international song contest — in the year of its release. The Jorge Ben recording was not much more than two minutes long, but it quickly became a reference point in his oeuvre.
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It was the very definition of a success story, and one which only enhanced Fio Maravilha’s legend. All of which made what came next doubly strange.
One day, with no prior warning, a court official showed up at Jorge Ben’s house and handed him an envelope. Inside was a summons. Fio Maravilha was suing him for using his name without permission.
Jorge Ben could not believe his eyes. It must have felt like a sick joke, but it wasn’t remotely funny and it wasn’t going away. And while he regained his bearings in time to defend himself in court and win the case, with Fio Maravilha ordered to cover his legal fees, that did not feel like closure.
He seethed. He thought about the song and the man he wrote it for. He resolved to change the lyrics and the title.
Fio Maravilha became Filho Maravilha — same basic meaning, but now more generic. A store-brand refrain about a great son rather than a personalised hagiography. He sung it that way for three decades; pick up a Jorge Ben compilation from the 80s or 90s and you’ll see the rejigged title. Anyone who missed the song the first time around or came late to Jorge Ben’s music might never have known about the original.
It was the goal of an angel, truly worthy of a statue
And the grateful fans sung like this:
Filho maravilha, we like you
Filho maravilha, score another one for us
Fio Maravilha’s version of events is slightly different.
The way he tells it, the lawsuit came as just as much of a shock to him as it did to Jorge Ben. He has claimed that he first found out about it on a bus in Rio, when he overheard two women looking over at him and whispering, “You see that boy there? It’s that ungrateful former Flamengo player who is suing Jorge Ben.”
That seems a touch disingenuous, for he has also said he spoke to a lawyer friend about the possibility that Jorge Ben owed him royalties. His argument is that the lawyer then pursued the matter without his assent. Whether you believe that is likely to depend on your base levels of cynicism and innocence.
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More interesting than the explanation is Fio Maravilha’s shifting attitude towards the affair. When the Folha de Sao Paulo newspaper tracked him down in 1994 — he was living in San Francisco, working as a delivery driver for North Beach Pizza — he was oddly defiant. “Now that he has taken my name off it, everyone knows who Fio Maravilha is,” he said. “People remember me for that. If it was just for the football, I wouldn’t be as well known.”
By 2007, when he was interviewed on Globo TV, that stance had softened. Tears welled up in his eyes as he listened to the song on a bench overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge. “I’m emotional,” he said. “It’s always good hearing that.”
This was followed by an overdue message to Jorge Ben, delivered straight to camera with a sheepish grin. Not an apology as such, but close enough. Certainly better than nothing.
“I want to send him a hug and say this: Jorge, I have nothing against you, and I never did,” he said. “The day you start singing ‘Fio Maravilha’ again, I will be very happy. I thank you for putting my name on such a beautiful song — one I will never forget. Hopefully, we’ll bump into each other at a Flamengo game at some point, and we can have a chat. Like two old fans, remembering the good old days.”
Brilliantly, Globo managed to show this video to Jorge Ben. He would have been forgiven for turning his nose up, but his reaction was a lesson in warmth and humility.
“I have waited so many years to hear that message,” he said. “Every time I sing it, I think about the goal. I stopped singing his name because the situation was distasteful. He was one of my idols. I loved him, and I created a song just for him, exalting his qualities. Then, out of nothing, there was a lawsuit against me. I was bowled over by that. I never wanted to sing his name again. But if he wants me to sing it again, I will.
“Fio, I want to tell you that everything is fine. We can’t hold onto a grudge all these years later. It’s not good for us. Long live kindness.”
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He has sung the original lyrics ever since. The lyrics that brought Fio Maravilha fame and then infamy. The lyrics that had begun to ping around in his brain on that night in 1972, when the goofy-looking substitute in the No 14 jersey turned one of the best teams in world football inside-out. The lyrics that go like this:
It was the goal of an angel, truly worthy of a statue
And the grateful fans sung like this:
Fio Maravilha, we like you
Fio Maravilha, score another one for us
(Photo: Placar magazine)
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