The Wiz: Music & Soccer - Fio Maravilha - Jorge Ben Jor
What connects orthodontics, a pizza delivery driver, the late Ehud Manor and the football stadium that once held the largest crowd ever?
There are plenty of football songs. Just this week, Gerry Marsden died. With "The Pacemakers", he turned a musical-theater song into a recording Liverpool supporters claimed as their own, one of football's greatest anthems. Here it is live on the pitch:
Other songs honor superstars, like the Argentine punk band celebrating their local and international idol, who recently left us.
My post dedicated to Maradona:
But it is rare for a player who was not a superstar to become a cult figure through a song. Meet the wonderful son: João Batista de Sales, better known as Fio Maravilha.
The nickname Fio, a colloquial form of "son" in Portuguese, stuck during his days with Flamengo's youth team, when his mother accompanied him and shouted encouragement from beyond the fence.
He was a good striker, rather than a dazzling one, but fans loved this big, hard-working homegrown player, with his broad smile and prominent teeth.
One evening changed everything. On January 15, 1972, Portuguese champions Benfica, then one of Europe's strongest sides, visited Brazil for a friendly.
The match took place in one of football's most storied temples, Rio de Janeiro's Maracanã.
The Flamengo-Benfica friendly was not filmed. Only around 44,000 people attended a stadium then holding roughly 150,000. But one spectator was enough to engrave the match and a special goal in Brazilian memory through a hit song.
That spectator was Jorge Ben Jor, one of my favorite Brazilian singers, a kind of Brazilian Bill Withers for me.
Ben described Fio's heavenly winner. Brought on at the crowd's insistence, he beat two defenders and the goalkeeper in the 33rd minute of the second half. Rather than humiliating his opponents by walking the ball into the net, he finished with a kick, a gesture the song celebrates as modesty.
Although no film survives, the radio commentary made it to YouTube, accompanied by a still photograph:
Beyond football, this is a gem of gentle samba. Somehow its melody reached me as a child, and some of you may recognize the chorus. I only discovered the original during the happy downloading days of the early 2000s.
Here is the wonderful song, which first appeared on "Ben" in 1972. I warmly recommend the album alongside his other early records:
A lovely television performance from the single's original 1972 period, equally gentle, with beautifully caressing percussion:
There have been covers over the years, and Ben himself recorded a faster version closer to Brazil's more popular samba sound:
Here he performs it in a medley of three hits. Some reached Israel in different forms during the Brazilian wave that swept the country in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Ehud Manor adapted the medley's first song into Hebrew for Yehudit Ravitz and Matti Caspi: "País Tropical". It should take only seconds to recognize it.
And Ravitz performs it live on the 1980s television program "Zehu Ze!". Ben even appears in the video credits.
A few details:
In 1975, the song became "Filho Maravilha" rather than "Fio Maravilha", following a dispute over use of the player's name. Thirty-two years later, Fio authorized Ben to use it again, saying the original dispute had come from pressure by his lawyers.
The Maracanã was built for the 1950 World Cup. Nearly 200,000 people attended the decisive Brazil-Uruguay match, a football attendance record. Brazil needed only a draw and lost. Perhaps avoid reminding Brazilian supporters.
After playing for more Brazilian clubs, Fio moved to the United States in the 1980s and played for two local teams before retiring. He later worked, among other jobs, as a delivery driver.
More recent reports described a full-circle moment: coaching other wonderful sons in youth football. He also found time to straighten his teeth, as the picture shows.
May we soon return to the matches, stadiums, concerts and venues we love!
Love you, brother. Happy birthday! O.Miz
In the image:
Bottom row: Ben on a 1979 album cover and Fio in the 1970s, with more recent photographs above. Center: nearly 200,000 spectators at the Maracanã in 1950. Upper-left: a pizza delivery driver, an Israeli Brazilian-music compilation named after Ben's big hit, and Matti Caspi modeling a Brazilian mood with friends.
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