Ronaldo certain of place among Brazil's heroes despite the knocks and scandals
James Lawton - The Independent
There was a time when nothing seemed beyond the powers of the brilliant stripling but then when the cruel times came he was always quick to say, "a Brazilian football player knows from the start that he will live many days in the shadows because so much is expected of him. But he always has the dream."
Ronaldo's turned into a nightmare, at least on the field, some time ago and a flight to France this week at the age of 31 for a third major operation on a ruptured knee was not expected to bring more than a flicker of hope, Still, what a dream it was.
It is also true that even though the last few years have made a parody of that sinuous young superstar – a future three-time winner of Fifa's world player of the year award – and his move last year from Real Madrid to Milan, where he had been a football god in the blue and black of Internazionale, was mostly greeted with scorn by the supporters of his new club, the ageing Ronaldo can always keep the chill out of his well-upholstered bones with one undying fact.
It is that on a night of soft summer rain in Yokohama in 2002 he answered, for all time, the question that had dogged his steps from a shanty town in Rio.
It was re-presented on the eve of the match that would define his career by a leading Brazilian commentator, who said, "Look at him, when he moves on goal he is like a beautiful thoroughbred, but we must still wonder if he is made of glass"
That summer he was of more substantial material. He scored eight goals as Brazil won their fifth World Cup, with the seventh and eighth strikes coming in the final against Germany. Like so much of Brazilian football, it was a triumph which had an almost eerily spiritual content.
On the eve of the tournament – and four years after his dismayed countrymen watched him do no more than go through the motions in another final against France in Paris – he gave an interview to Brazilian TV which was to be kept under wraps until the day of the final. Ronaldo declared, "My name is Ronaldo Luis Nazario de Lima. I am 25 years old and I want you all to know on the day of 30th of June Brazil will win the World Cup."
It was not a vintage tournament and for much of it Ronaldo's goals seemed to be doing not much more than delaying a slide into mediocrity, but in the end only the meanest soul could question the degree of personal redemption.
Ronaldo was candid about the degree of his torment after the catastrophe of the Paris final, when he suffered a fit the night before and many felt had been included in the team, which lost 3-0 to France, at the last minute only because of the pressure of sponsors Nike. An insider rejected the theory but still painted a bleak picture of the Brazil dressing room, saying, "It was just panic.
"Mario Zagallo [the coach] said 'Ronaldo is Ronaldo, if he wants to play he plays'. Unfortunately he was nothing like Ronaldo and the decision left the captain Dunga crazy. No one could concentrate. The World Cup was lost before the first kick."
Before carrying Brazil to victory in Japan, Ronaldo said, "I feel I have been through the bad years, the pain and the operations and all the misery, and that maybe God has decided it is time to smile on me again. The game is easy again. I feel like I did before the trouble in Paris. That was terrible. I didn't know what was happening to me when I went through the body scan. It was an unimaginable nightmare. The doctor said there was nothing wrong with me. So I said, 'I must play – what would the Brazilian people say if I didn't and they heard what the doctor said'."
God did smile on Ronaldo, but only briefly. In Germany two years ago the president of Brazil, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, observed the portly star in the team's Black Forest training camp and said, much to the player's anger, "Isn't Ronaldo fat." He was indeed, and as his team-mate Ronaldinho brought equal concern with his mediocre form and apparently indifferent attitude, there were times when they looked like football's oddest couple. Ronaldinho, in his blue bandana, moped through training sessions, while Ronaldo resembled most a reluctant heavyweight in his first week of training camp.
Yet Ronaldo scored three goals as the world waited for Brazil to fire and the last one, against Ghana on an overcast afternoon in Dortmund, carried him beyond Gerd "Der Bomber" Muller to the record-breaking mark of 15 in World Cup finals.
So why, when the Milan coach, Carlos Ancelotti, this week spoke of his "concern and sadness", was there such a sense of lost opportunity, of a certain hollowness that went beyond the mere injury crisis of a time-expired superstar? Maybe it was because Ronaldo had promised so much when he burst upon European football with a relentless stream of goals for PSV Eindhoven and Barcelona and that when, after Real Madrid signed him after his triumph in the Far East for Ł30m, he became part of a circus and not a team that had flourished so promisingly with the arrival of Zinedine Zidane. Sir Bobby Robson, then in charge of Barça, had marvelled at the power and the facility of the young Brazilian when he arrived in Catalonia in 1996. "There is nothing beyond the limits of this boy," he said.
For some Ronaldo will always be seen as the Super Nova that trailed off course. It is maybe a harsh assessment when you consider the degree of his injury problems but his days as a bloated galactico in Spain and the jeers which greeted his return to San Siro will surely always colour the memory of a player who once bestrode football without a challenge. However, he will always have the days when he stepped so far beyond the shadows and became, like Pele and Garrincha, a hero of Brazil. How many footballers, after all, would die for such an epitaph?
