ABSTRACT
The airwaves popped and hissed as Decio de Almeida Prado, a twentyone-year-old university student in São Paulo who would later become a leading essayist and public intellectual, listened attentively to the crackling radio commentary from Bordeaux as Brazil and Sweden clashed in the 1938 World Cup. It was an inauspicious year; the forces of National Socialism in Germany reigned triumphant as fascist Europe carved up the continent, Austria and the Sudetenland were annexed, and the storm clouds of war gathered. In the sporting world, Hitler had drawn an immutable color line through the Olympic movement two years earlier, while in the United States racial segregation dictated the lives of American athletes, infamously so in the segregated baseball leagues. Sprinter Jesse Owens and boxer Joe Louis-both sons of southern sharecroppers-bucked the racial essentialism of 1930s America, but despite their successes white supremacy continued to fl ourish in their homeland. But over the airwaves came a different story from France. Huddled around a radio set in a São Paulo coffeeshop, Decio de Almeida Prado “suffered,” he recalls, through the “interminable match” before the score-line was fi nally broken with the news of a Brazilian goal in extra time. It was the player soon to be named Black Diamond, Leônidas da Silva, who slotted it home past the outstretched Swedish goalkeeper.1
