Ronaldo Again

June 30, 2006
Ronaldo Defies the Weight Watchers
By JERE LONGMAN
BERLIN, June 29 — The Brazilian forward Ronaldo came into the World Cup overweight and underappreciated. Even before the tournament began, he sustained blisters, a respiratory infection, dizziness, lacerating wounds of mockery and a terminal rash of awful headline puns.
In a video conference with the team, none other than Brazil's president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, said: "So what is it? Is Ronaldo fat or isn't he?"
To which Ronaldo shot back, "Just as he says I'm fat, everybody knows he drinks too much."
Adding, "It's just as much of a lie that I am fat to say that he drinks too much."
Having been verbally red-carded for his cleats-up remarks, da Silva sent an apologetic fax "reaffirming his affection for the player."
And now everyone seems to be reassessing their opinions of Ronaldo, 29, who has become the World Cup's leading career scorer with 15 goals as Brazil has advanced to play France in the quarterfinals Saturday in Frankfurt.
His record goal came Tuesday in the fifth minute of a 3-0 victory against Ghana. Alone after breaking an offside trap, Ronaldo took a long pass from midfielder Kaká. Ghana's goalkeeper, Richard Kingson, charged off his line, but Ronaldo stepped over the ball and Kingson tumbled to the ground at the luminous feint. Ronaldo sliced to his left and, with a defender running futilely at him, pushed the ball into the net with his right foot.
Summoned in that stirring instant was the nimbleness, creativity and anticipation that many believed had escaped Ronaldo.
Some in the German news media had taken to calling him Pummelnaldo, or Roly Poly Ronaldo. But he has delivered three goals in four matches, upstaged his younger teammate Ronaldinho and kept Brazil on target to win an unmatched sixth World Cup title.
"He is again on top of every player in the world," Carlos Alberto Parreira, Brazil's coach, said of Ronaldo after the victory against Ghana.
With 15 career goals in the World Cup, Ronaldo surpassed the 14 scored by Germany's Gerd Müller in 1970 and 1974. International newspaper headlines that once said Ronaldo could not pull his weight now hailed him as a goal glutton.
"Fat's the way to do it," said The Liverpool Daily Post of England.
Müller offered his praises in an interview posted on the World Cup Web site of FIFA, soccer's world governing body. "Playing at such a high level over such a long period of time, always managing to be fit at the right moment is unusual nowadays," he said.
"In my opinion, he's the best, most complete attacker there is at the moment. Brazil needs Ronaldo. They haven't got anyone quicker than him upfront."
Ronaldo has been named soccer's world player of the year three times. He is one of the greatest strikers in the history of the game. But his World Cup career has been one of striking contrast. And he has always seemed to play better in the face of skepticism.
In the United States in 1994, as a 17-year-old, he did not leave the bench as Brazil won its fourth title, even though Parreira's mother admonished him to put the player called the Phenomenon into the lineup.
Four years later, Brazil again reached the final, but Ronaldo had what has been called a seizure the day of the championship game against France. Teammates said he was found convulsing in his hotel room.
Ronaldo has said he remembers nothing but being cold and shaking. He played listlessly in the final and Brazil lost, 3-0, setting off a wild celebration in Paris.
In 2002, after torn knee ligaments twice threatened his career, a rejuvenated Ronaldo scored eight goals in seven matches, including both in a 2-0 victory against Germany in the championship game in Yokohama, Japan.
Perhaps this should have been a lesson not to write him off here in Germany. But he had been in a personal and athletic slump entering this World Cup. His marriage to a Brazilian model fell apart last year three months after the wedding. A thigh injury with Real Madrid shelved him for most of April in Spain's La Liga. Fans there jeered him.
Michel Platini, the former French star, suggested that Ronaldo carried "too many years" and "too many kilos." Pelé, his countryman, suggested that Ronaldo's career was being adversely affected by his problems off the field. Irritated, Ronaldo charged that Pelé was a "cheap opportunist."
Yet early in the World Cup, Ronaldo appeared thick around the waist and immobile. His sedentary performance in a 1-0 opening victory against Croatia startled many who had witnessed Ronaldo's once fabulous combination of speed, muscle and dexterity.

Pizza

June 29, 2006
TV Review 'American Eats'
'American Eats' Offers the True American (Pizza) Pie
By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN
American pie is no longer apple, if it ever was. Or so goes the argument of the History Channel tonight, when stateside pizza is the focus of the channel's buoyant, intelligent and cuisine-ecumenical series "American Eats."
The migration of pizza westward — from southern Italy to New York, Chicago, Los Angeles — is the story of mutation, innovation, perversion. And in spite of the documentary's wonderfully nonjudgmental narration, viewers will find it hard not to take sides.
Midwestern deep-dish types tend to see coastal pies as too wan or too fancy. Californians like their Spago-era artworks all fusioned and deluxe; I imagine they silently believe that other kinds of pizza are only for fat people. New Yorkers, who are fundamentally right on this subject, know they have the real thing.
Or almost. One thing this documentary does well is show how importation is always transformation: even when Gennaro Lombardi, the founding father of American pizza, opened his shop on Spring Street in SoHo a century ago, he was tampering with tradition. He had to use local tomatoes, explains the voice-over, "instead of San Marzano tomatoes grown in the volcanic soil of Mount Vesuvius." And atop the local tomato sauce he melted ordinary cow cheese, instead of the distinctive Italian mozzarella made from water-buffalo milk.
But Lombardi's real contribution, let's face it, was droopiness. Neapolitan pizza tends to be crisp; its slices stay horizontal when you eat them. New York pizza droops. This dubious, if cherished, effect comes from the coal ovens.
The pizza chef at Lombardi's today, John Brescio, is a childhood friend of the grandson of the original Lombardi. With his Bada Bing swagger and major dialect, Mr. Brescio is far and away the star of this "American Eats" episode, which doubles as an ad for his venerable pizzeria. His deadly serious explanation of the coal oven makes a dandy aria.
"I want to show youse the fire," he says to the audience, beckoning viewers inside.
"Right now, where the coals are burning, it's 2,200 degrees. That heat transfers over to the floor of the oven, where the pies are cooking, and it goes down to about 850 to 900 degrees. And it takes three and a half minutes. With a coal oven you get a smoky, crusty flavor on the outside, and a light, airy — if your dough is made right — a light, airy, with nook and crannies all inside. So it's like biting into heaven."
The documentary also supplies a brief but zingy pre-American history of pizza, from its obscure origins in Rome or Phoenicia, no one knows for sure. This much is offered as fact: beginning in 1522, when the Spanish conquistadors found tomatoes in the Andes and brought them back to Europe, Italian peasants cooked with them, shrugging the anxieties of their social betters who worried that the red fruit, which is related to nightshade, might be poisonous. But when the indigent tomatophiles didn't die, others took their chances and by 1700 tomatoes were being profitably grafted onto focaccia in Naples.
In the History Channel's telling of pizza's rise to fame, near the close of the 19th century, Italy's queen, Margherita, asked on a whim to taste the vulgar dish that delighted the lower orders. A pizzaioli named Raffaele Esposito prepared three pies: pork fat, cheese and basil; tomato, garlic and olive oil; and one made to look like the Italian flag, with mozzarella, tomatoes, and basil leaves. Guess which one she loved.
(On some anniversary or another Spago or California Pizza Kitchen, the restaurants where Ed LaDou invented and then popularized eclectic pizza, should offer all three in a tasting menu, especially the pork fat one, which sounds delicious.)
After covering Italy and New York but before California, the program makes a detour through New Haven, where Frank Pepe, who was allergic to cheese and tomato, first put white clams on a pizza. In the 20th century it seems that every chef and franchiser wanted to try his hand at pizza, and the documentary entertainingly and respectfully chronicles the contributions of Pizzeria Uno, Domino's and even DiGiorno's frozen pizza.
But in all this hat tipping the History Channel is especially indulgent with Chicago, which got into the pizza trade during and after World War II, when soldiers came home hungering for Italian fare. Ike Sewell and Rick Ricardo, two non-Italians, decided that Italian and New York pizza wasn't brawny enough for real American guys; they bulked up the crust, thickened the cheese and added meat enough for a meal. This is deep-dish pizza, and it takes about 40 minutes to bake

Brazil´s Cup and Ronaldos

June 23, 2006
Ronaldo Ties Scoring Record as Brazil Just Keeps Rolling Along
(REUTERS)
The Brazilian striker Ronaldo tied Gerd Müller's World Cup finals record of 14 goals, scoring twice in a 4-1 victory yesterday over Japan in Group F in Dortmund, Germany.
Ronaldo equaled the record by Müller, the former striker for West Germany, when he grabbed his second goal of the game in the 81st minute.
Japan, coached by Zico, the former captain of Brazil, took a 1-0 lead on a goal by Keiji Tamada in the 34th minute before Ronaldo, who had been criticized for his performances in Brazil's first two games, scored in first-half added time.
Second-half goals by Juninho Pernambucano, Gilberto and Ronaldo allowed Brazil, the defending champion, to finish group play with a maximum 9 points.
Brazil will face Ghana in the Round of 16. Japan, with 1 point, was eliminated.
"I'm very happy I've made such a significant improvement physically and technically during the competition," Ronaldo told reporters after the match.
"Patience is the key word," he said. "I managed to stay calm and patient in all the difficult moments."
Ronaldo kept his starting spot when Coach Carlos Alberto Parreira made five changes for the game against Japan.
For the first 20 minutes, Brazil's game flowed freely for the first time in the tournament as it sliced through the Japanese defense.
Only goalkeeper Yoshikatsu Kawaguchi stood between the defending champions and a significant lead.
Kawaguchi turned away two shots from Ronaldo and one each from Robinho, Kaká and Juninho.
But Brazil left gaps in the defense, and Japan took advantage when Tamada fired a first-time shot past the Brazilian goalkeeper Dida.
It was the first goal Brazil had conceded in its last seven international matches, the last being against Bolivia last October during qualifying.
Brazil was knocked off its feet, then scored the equalizer out of the blue. Ronaldinho's diagonal pass found Cicinho, who headed across the goal mouth, and the unmarked Ronaldo nodded the ball home.
Juninho put Brazil ahead with a dipping 40-yard effort that went through Kawaguchi's hands in the 53rd minute.
In the 59th minute, Ronaldinho produced a slide-rule pass for Gilberto to break down the left and put the third goal past Kawaguchi.
Ronaldo made the score 4-1 when he swiveled before curling in a shot from the edge of the box.
"Ronaldo is not in the best possible physical shape, but step by step and little by little he is getting there," Parreira said. "I'm sure he will be better as each game goes. We deserved to win. We had about 25 shots blocked."

Wines

June 21, 2006
Wines of The Times
HEY, you! Yeah, you, Mr. Mucketymuck, in your black power suit and shades. You never let 'em see you sweat, right? You and your air-conditioning turned all the way up — at home, in the car, in the office, in the beach house — you like to see the others shiver. You're the man, starched and creased. While around you people wilt and melt into puddles, you're triumphant, with your big, expensive cabernet in the dark, chilly steakhouse.
You're not the kind of guy who'd ever be caught dead with a prosecco, are you? What is that, you ask, some kind of girly wine? Hey, did someone turn off the air-conditioning? Now what will you do? It's getting hot. It's getting sweaty. You can't take it, can you? You've got to go? Exit, stage left!
Whew. Sorry about that, but I had to get rid of that guy. So annoying! And he does not understand summer, or summer drinking. Of course he wants a prosecco! Prosecco was made for summer, when you need something blithe, airy and carefree. It's a light summer dress, a summer thriller for the beach, an entertainment, not a burden. It's a social drink. You cannot brood over a prosecco.
Not that I have anything against air-conditioning on a scorching day, but drinking prosecco is more like the gentle cooling of a rippling breeze, always leaving you wanting more. It's almost meant to be consumed outdoors in the heat or the shade, partly because it's low in alcohol, generally under 12 percent. It's refreshment, and it's stylish, too. Millions of Italians can't be wrong about that.
Nobody drinks sparkling wine as regularly as the Italians do. It's made in almost every Italian wine region, and no meal seems complete unless it starts with a frothing glass of spumante, the melodious Italian word for sparkling wine. Among all the Italian sparkling wines, prosecco is rising rapidly in popularity, trailing in the United States only that old standby, Asti spumante, which takes its name from its region of origin. And why not? You could not ask for a better value in outdoor sparklers, in the garden, at the beach, up on the roof or under the boardwalk.
The Dining section's tasting panel was thinking summery thoughts recently when we sampled 25 proseccos. We felt lighthearted, able to transcend the relatively gloomy confines of our Midtown office with the cheery hiss of bubbles in the air. Florence Fabricant and I were joined at the tasting by Piero Trotta, wine director at San Domenico, and Marco Albanese, wine director at Lupa.
Let's be clear about what we were tasting. All of the wines were made predominantly of prosecco, the grape, sometimes mixed with a small percentage of pinot bianco, pinot grigio or chardonnay. Some, but not all, of these proseccos were actually, to be polysyllabically precise, Prosecco di Conegliano-Valdobbiadene. That is the — here we go again — denominazione di origine controllata, or D.O.C., a designation earned if wines meet certain standards, for example which grapes are used, where they are grown and how the wines are aged.
To earn the D.O.C. designation the grapes must come from the hilly area between the communes of Valdobbiadene and Conegliano in the Veneto, the region of Venice and Verona in northeastern Italy, and the wine must be made of at least 85 percent prosecco.
And yet it's a tricky issue for consumers. Even if the grapes are not from the designated area, or if the winemakers do not adhere to regulations concerning the proportion of grapes used, the wine may still be called prosecco, but not Prosecco di Conegliano-Valdobbiadene. In this case, the wine must be at least 75 percent prosecco.
For example, Zardetto, one of the leading prosecco producers, made two wines that cracked our top 10 list. The Zeta was a prosecco D.O.C., one of only two vintage-dated bottles in our tasting, made from grapes grown in a single vineyard. It was our most expensive bottle, at $22. But Zardetto also makes a non-D.O.C. prosecco, which we liked practically as much. It sells for $10 a bottle, and was our best value.
Mionetto, another leading producer, makes a half-dozen or more different proseccos, some D.O.C. and some not. We tasted two, both not, and they made our top 10, though truth be told, you can't even call Mionetto's Sergio a prosecco because it's only 70 percent prosecco.
Does it really matter? After all, if you think too hard about prosecco, you are defeating the purpose of this breezy, cheerful wine.

June 21, 2006
A Legacy of the Storm: Depression and Suicide
By SUSAN SAULNY
NEW ORLEANS, June 20 — Sgt. Ben Glaudi, the commander of the Police Department's Mobile Crisis Unit here, spends much of each workday on this city's flood-ravaged streets trying to persuade people not to kill themselves.
Last Tuesday in the French Quarter, Sergeant Glaudi's small staff was challenged by a man who strode straight into the roaring currents of the Mississippi River, hoping to drown. As the water threatened to suck him under, the man used the last of his strength to fight the rescuers, refusing to be saved.
"He said he'd lost everything and didn't want to live anymore," Sergeant Glaudi said.
The man was counseled by the crisis unit after being pulled from the river against his will. Others have not been so lucky.
"These things come at me fast and furious," Sergeant Glaudi said. "People are just not able to handle the situation here."
New Orleans is experiencing what appears to be a near epidemic of depression and post-traumatic stress disorders, one that mental health experts say is of an intensity rarely seen in this country. It is contributing to a suicide rate that state and local officials describe as close to triple what it was before Hurricane Katrina struck and the levees broke 10 months ago.
Compounding the challenge, the local mental health system has suffered a near total collapse, heaping a great deal of the work to be done with emotionally disturbed residents onto the Police Department and people like Sergeant Glaudi, who has sharp crisis management skills but no medical background. He says his unit handles 150 to 180 such distress calls a month.
Dr. Jeffrey Rouse, the deputy New Orleans coroner dealing with psychiatric cases, said the suicide rate in the city was less than nine a year per 100,000 residents before the storm and increased to an annualized rate of more than 26 per 100,000 in the four months afterward, to the end of 2005.
While there have been 12 deaths officially classified as suicides so far this year, Dr. Rouse and Dr. Kathleen Crapanzano, director of the Louisiana Office of Mental Health, said the real number was almost certainly far higher, with many self-inflicted deaths remaining officially unclassified or wrongly described as accidents.
Charles G. Curie, the administrator of the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, said the scope of the disaster that the hurricane inflicted had been "unprecedented," and added, "We've had great concerns about the level of substance abuse and mental health needs being at levels we had not seen before."
This is a city where thousands of people are living amid ruins that stretch for miles on end, where the vibrancy of life can be found only along the slivers of land next to the Mississippi. Garbage is piled up, the crime rate has soared, and as of Tuesday the National Guard and the state police were back in the city, patrolling streets that the Police Department has admitted it cannot handle on its own. The reminders of death are everywhere, and the emotional toll is now becoming clear.
Gina Barbe rode out the storm at her mother's house near Lake Pontchartrain, and says she has been crying almost every day since.
"I thought I could weather the storm, and I did — it's the aftermath that's killing me," said Ms. Barbe, who worked in tourism sales before the disaster. "When I'm driving through the city, I have to pull to the side of the street and sob. I can't drive around this city without crying."
Many people who are not at serious risk of suicide are nonetheless seeing their lives eroded by low-grade but persistent feelings of sadness, hopelessness and stress-related illnesses, doctors and researchers say. All this goes beyond the effects of 9/11 and the Oklahoma City bombing, Mr. Curie said. Beyond those of Hurricanes Andrew, Hugo and Ivan.
"We've been engaged much longer and with much more intensity in this dis

June 20, 2006
A McDonald's Ally in Paris

PARIS, June 19 — Never mind that Denis Hennequin was the top executive here when a half-built McDonald's restaurant was bulldozed seven years ago to protest the Americanization of France.
"We are an icon, a symbol, we don't claim to be otherwise," Mr. Hennequin said. "Yes, we were shocked," he went on, recalling how his business meeting was interrupted by the news of the bulldozing.
But even as protesters sought to cast McDonald's as the embodiment of all that is wrong with fast food and American culture, the French never stopped eating its hamburgers. Indeed, for all the attacks on the company, McDonald's operating profit in France last year was second only to that of McDonald's in the United States.
Mr. Hennequin is very much the engineer of the restaurant chain's success here, and one of his most compelling lessons about doing business in France came from the bulldozer incident. After the demolition, he started ad campaigns telling customers more about McDonald's France, what ingredients it used and what kind of people it employed.
Part of his success lies in blurring the national lines about what kind of restaurant McDonald's is. For one thing, all the buns, meat and other ingredients are from France; virtually all the work force is French.
In fact, the only ingredient that is not French, paradoxically, is the cheese on the cheeseburgers. That is because McDonald's relies on cheddar — the one kind that the French do not make very well. So, when McDonald's France promotes a one-month special of large burgers with cheese each winter, the cheese comes from the Netherlands or Austria.
And now, the French operation is a McDonald's cash cow. Mr. Hennequin's skill lies in his selling something quintessentially American to a people who purport to be against American culture. That has helped him climb to the highest rung for a non-American in this distinctly American company, one not noted for advancing foreigners.
His secret is that he follows the McDonald's playbook: careful choice of locations and personnel, training of personnel and indoctrination of the McDonald's credo. And he says that, frankly, he has relied on the quirkiness of his own people, the French: an overt distaste for Americana in concept, mixed with a kind of admiration for American food, films, music and television programming.
McDonald's success in Europe comes amid its resurgence in the United States. As in Europe, McDonald's in the United States attracted attention by introducing healthy food items, like salad and fruit. But unlike Europe, McDonald's revival in the United States came in recent months partly because of the enormous success of the Dollar Menu, where all items, like double cheeseburgers and fried chicken sandwiches, cost $1.
France and the rest of Europe did not suffer as harsh a slump as did McDonald's in the United States. In fact, the strength of the French and other European restaurants helped the parent company get through the rough patch. In several quarters last year McDonald's noted that the company got a boost from its European restaurants, its second-biggest market.
As the president of McDonald's Europe, Mr. Hennequin, 47, is responsible for 41 countries and is the first European to hold the job at McDonald's. That put him in a tough spot last fall during student protests against changes in the youth labor law, for McDonald's has also become a symbol for precarious employment, as the French call it — that is, jobs that are easy come and easy go.
So it is not surprising that even Mr. Hennequin's own family believed his career at McDonald's lacked an element of respectability, much less cachet. Haute cuisine, yes, but McDonald's? "My grandmother thought I was selling French fries on the Boulevard Saint-Michel," he said.
Mr. Hennequin joined McDonald's after obtaining degrees in law and economics and then working for a short time for a consulting firm. After training at a McDonald's in Mulhouse, in the east of France, he quickly climbed the corporate ladder from restaurant manager to field consultant to president of McDonald's France, and then, last year, to president of McDonald's Europe, with its 6,276 restaurants. There are now 1,035 McDonald's restaurants in France, making it the third-largest European market after Britain and Germany.
In some ways, he admits, McDonald's reflects the contradictions of French society. France has opened to the world, and its companies have long adapted to global rules for selling their products. Yet for many French patrons, McDonald's remains that little piece of America. "We are an icon of the United States, and also, when you enter a McDonald's restaurant, you enter America," he said.
"It's one of the French paradoxes," he went on. "The French like to be a little disruptive, provocative. Yet at the same time they vote with their feet. We serve one million customers every year."
"Suddenly there was this wake-up call. What are we doing? We started explaining what's behind the arches, how we deal with ingredients, employees. Without any cynicism, I thank Mr. Bové for helping us grow into that role." He compared it to judo, in which an opponent's thrust is turned to an advantage.
"The French have a way of protesting by struggling," he said, picking out the lessons he learned. "Don't forget, we killed our king; in Britain, they still have the queen.
"We have a culture of confrontation. You can say it's bad or good, but that's what it is."
As for the ticklish question of youth unemployment in France, it is a subject on which Mr. Hennequin has clear views. If France is not generating jobs for the young, it is not the fault of McDonald's France alone.
When he joined McDonald's in 1984, the average employee age was 22 to 23; today it is 26 to 27. Every year, McDonald's fills 40,000 jobs in France, yielding an 80 percent turnover rate. "It's an easy-access job," he said, "but for those who want careers, there are real career opportunities."
He says the French took so quickly to McDonald's, despite their own sophisticated cuisine, because it was fast, convenient and affordable. And it was child-friendly, not a characteristic of the traditional French restaurant.
"If you had kids and tried to go to a traditional restaurant," he said, "it was a nightmare, not a pleasant experience."
Also crucial, he says, was a French "fascination with America."
"It's love and hate," he said. "And there are so many Americas. The America of George Bush and that of Bill Clinton. New York is not San Francisco."

June 14, 2006
The Brazilian Way: Work First, Then Samba
They will try to tell you this was an ordinary start to a World Cup for Brazil, a narrow victory on a night of humid conditions and Croat determination not to lie down and surrender.
Do not listen.
The goal that Kaká scored was a masterpiece by an embryonic young player aspiring to graduate among the exalted group that surrounds him.
His goal was matched, no it was transcended, by the meaning of the place we were in.
This was Adolf Hitler's stadium, the home of the 1936 Olympic Games at which the black American athlete Jesse Owens won four gold medals to discredit the theory of white Aryan supremacy under the Führer's gaze.
And despite more than $300 million spent on renovating the old stadium, it still exists. Its oval shape is unaltered, a fresh blue running track replaces the old cinders, a roof encircles the stands. But the stone monuments remain, and those austere steep concrete steps leading up to the cauldron where the flame was lighted before most of us were born are preserved.
The place is at once chilling, and an education.
As we settled inside it, waiting for Ronaldo, Ronaldinho, Adriano, Cafu, Roberto Carlos to entertain us, a golden sun was setting just behind the one open sector of the Olympiastadion, and directly behind those steps.
Credit the Berliners for keeping this history alive, and for not trying to hide or bury the past.
And join me in assessing Brazil in Berlin.
This is no ordinary team, no ordinary soccer nation. Mario Zagallo, a 74-year- old Brazilian who has either played in or helped to groom all five Brazil triumphs at World Cups had told the "boys" not to expect samba on the first night.
He had felt the mood was too euphoric. He feared that the 560 Brazilian journalists who crawl over this squad like ants were building the team up to knock it down. The class is there, but Zagallo's message is that no team ever conquers the world without hard effort.
Zagallo preaches, even more than does the coach, Carlos Alberto Parreira, that the best four-letter word is "work."
I have been guilty in the past of arguing against his work ethic, almost as if it spoiled the image of the "beautiful game." With age, it dawns that without work, there will be no beauty. One is the platform for the other.
And how those Croats made Brazil sweat. Zlatko Kranjcar, Croatia's coach, devised tactics intent on denying Brazil. His men, in red-and-white checked shirts, clung closer than brothers to the Brazilians, tackled fiercely, blocked the beauty for as long as they could.
As we watched, and in a way appreciated, the skilled way that Kranjcar's sons (one of them, Nico Krancjar, an actual son), the criticisms of everyone from Brazil's president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, down came into focus.
Ronaldo, are you too fat? Certainly he looked like a player who has not performed much since Christmas, and only rarely did he hint at the majestic striker who is equal in goals at World Cups, with 12, to Pelé. One more, his 13th, and Ronaldo eclipses the greatest Brazilian; three more and he goes beyond the all- time record of Gerd Müller.
We must wait, and I will tell you one man who believes we shall not wait in vain. Mario Kempes, an Argentine idol in 1978, observes: "Ronaldo hasn't played an official game before Wednesday for two months. I think its because he's saving himself for the World Cup.
"People say he's overweight, but, fat or thin, give him the ball and in four yards he will gain a yard on you."
For four yards, or closer to 40, the Brazilians can find someone who will take the breath away. When the ball came to Kaká, who at 24 has his great games ahead of him, his match winner was sublime. He had two men marking him, and he lost them without moving his feet.
A body swerve, a moment of deceit and composure combined, and then two touches of the ball before, out of nothing, his left foot struck it. The motion looked so calm, empowering the ball with such grace that it rose and arched and defeated the despairing right hand of a fine goalie, Stipe Pletikosa, into the net.
With that goal, and with the discipline that Brazil was prepared to defend it, the first victory was in the bag. It was water on a parched tongue, a prelude to Brazil's attempt at its sixth World Cup victory.
Salute, for now, a single example of its art. There will be more because this, I believe, is the best Brazilian collection of talents since the 1970 side, the best in my lifetime.

June 4, 2006
World Cup 2006 The Legends
Most Bonito
By JOHN CARLIN
You look at Ronaldinho, the world's most talented and lethal soccer player, and what you see is the smiling epitome of Brazil's culture of pleasure. You look at John Terry and you have a deeper understanding of how it was that a small island nation once conquered half the known world. Terry — the captain of the English Premier League champions, Chelsea, and pillar of his national team's defense — has the height, the bulk and the air of cold command of the red-coated British sergeant who in days of empire instilled terror in his troops and enemy forces alike. When the two went head-to-head in a game earlier this year, it was more than a clash between two different ways of playing soccer, of approaching life; it was the proverbial case, or so it seemed, of the unstoppable force meeting the immovable object.
It happened in March, at a critical moment in last season's clash of European titans, Ronaldinho's Barcelona against Chelsea, in the round of 16 in the Champions League tournament, club soccer's biggest competition. The score was 0-0, and 12 minutes were left in the game. Ronaldinho received the ball in the center of midfield, 15 yards from the Chelsea penalty area. Around him were four Chelsea defenders. Ronaldinho left one of them for dead and avoided two more. The fourth, the last man standing between him and glory, was John Terry. Ronaldinho's response was to do what he does better than anybody else: the unthinkable. Having mesmerized the Chelsea ranks with the speed of his feet and the swerve of his dancing hips, he met brute force with brute force — and won. He shouldered the English Goliath — perfectly fairly — to the ground. And it was from this abject vantage that London's finest looked on, a picture of defeat, as the samba-loving Brazilian whipped the ball low and true, past the Chelsea goalkeeper and into the net.
That electric sequence of events — barely four seconds elapsed between Ronaldinho's receiving and dispatching of the ball — captured, for the watching millions, one of soccer's great truisms: the English invented the game, but the Brazilians perfected it. They found the game brick and left it marble. They patented what has become known the world over as jogo bonito, the beautiful game, a style of soccer that combines exuberance with success and that Ronaldinho, more than any other player alive, embodies. People respect winners, they admire them, but they don't always love them. The bright, canary-yellow shirt of the Brazilian national team — the canarinho shirt, they fondly call it in Brazil — elicits feelings in soccer fans everywhere that unite reverence for Brazil's unquestioned supremacy (it has won the World Cup, held every four years, five times in the last half century) with an affection, a warm sense of personal ownership, that transcends the sport's inherent tribalism. Every neutral fan following this month's World Cup will want Brazil to win, and every soccer-lover with a national stake in the competition will have Brazil as his second team. Soccer is the world's biggest religion, cutting across race, faith, geography, ideology and gender like no other global phenomenon. Brazil is the religion's favorite church.
Why the love? Some of it comes from the fact that Brazil is a country without enemies. That a defeat at home to Uruguay in the World Cup final in 1950 still ranks, in all seriousness, as one of the greatest tragedies in Brazilian history bespeaks a nation without much of a war-making tradition. Brazilians prefer a rip-roaring carnival. More important, perhaps, is the appearance of racial harmony that Brazil's national team projects. Some players are black, some are white, but usually they are a blend of the two, the shades and shapes representing the range of types that come from the Amazon basin, from West Africa and from the European countries that have contributed so much to the genetic cocktail: Portugal, Italy and Germany. The first superstar of Brazilian soccer was the green-eyed, curly-haired Arthur Friedenreich, who scored the winning goal in a celebrated 1-0 victory over Uruguay in 1919. Racial stereotypes — blacks are more graceful, say, or whites more tenacious — break down. Ask any Brazilian who, in terms of pure skill, was the greatest Brazilian player ever, and chances are he'll be torn between the competing claims of the brown-skinned Garrincha and the blond Zico.
All this would be of merely anecdotal interest, however, were the Brazilians not so darn good. For the first six decades after the arrival in 1894 of soccer's first evangelist in Brazil, a handlebar-mustachioed British gent by the name of Charles Miller, Brazilian soccer made few waves beyond Latin American shores. But then, in 1958, when the World Cup was held in Sweden, Brazil's impact on the competition was seismic. Thanks to grainy black-and-white images still replayed on TV today, the aftershocks of a goal scored in the final by a 17-year-old named Pelé, a spindly unknown, continue to deliver their timeless thrill. What Pelé did no one had ever seen before. Wearing the clumpy boots of the era, he flicked the heavy leather ball used in those days over the head of a towering Swedish defender, spun around him, got to the ball before it touched the ground and drilled it, on the volley, into the net.
Brazil also won the next World Cup, held in Chile. This time Pelé was out injured most of the tournament and Garrincha was the star of the show. The Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano says of Garrincha, in a lyrical little book titled "Soccer in Sun and Shadow," that "in the entire history of football no one made more people happy." Partly deformed from birth by polio (one leg was shorter than the other and both were bent like bows), he possessed such genius with a ball at his feet that each game he played became, as Galeano writes, "a circus ... a party." Clown and juggler at the same time, he entrenched the myth — so much a part of the Brazilian legend — that in his country people play soccer less for victory than for fun.
Brazil's apotheosis, and Pelé's, came in the 1970 World Cup in Mexico. The consensus is absolute among soccer's intelligentsia that this was the greatest team ever to grace the game. Some debate lingers as to who was the greater player, Pelé or Diego Maradona (who would win the World Cup with — or rather, for — Argentina in 1986, also in Mexico). But no one questions the pre-eminence — the peerless combination of flamboyance and effectiveness — of that 1970 Brazil team, with its supporting stars like Jairzinho, Rivelino, Gérson and Tostão.
A lean period followed: it would be 24 years before Brazil won the World Cup again. But such was the power of the spell cast by that triple-winning Pelé team that the legend not only remained alive but, as legends do, flourished. It didn't matter how strong or weak they looked on paper, no team ever got the pulse racing the way the canary-shirted Brazilians did. Then in 1994, led by Romário, Brazil resumed its dominance by winning the World Cup in the United States. Brazil lost in the final against France in Paris in 1998, but then won again in Yokohama in 2002 as the unstoppable onslaught of "the three R's" — Rivaldo, Ronaldo and Ronaldinho — swept all before them.
This time around Brazil is again the favorite to win, on rational as well as sentimental grounds. A 4-1 crushing of Argentina (a two-time World Cup winner and always among the favorites) in a tournament in Germany last summer has lent force to an idea that has been building since 2002: that Brazil would not only win again, but do so in a fashion not seen since 1970. Ronaldo, the game's most admired striker in recent years and three times the winner of the FIFA World Player of the Year award (voted on by all the national-team coaches and captains), is back. So is Cafu, the captain, and Roberto Carlos, the most offensive-minded left back in the history of the game and the one with the most thunderous shot. Three new young superstars have emerged: Adriano, a bull of a man up front with the touch of a ballerina; Kaká, a midfielder who glides over the grass like Gene Kelly; and the young Robinho, small and doe-like but reckoned by many in Brazil to be a Pelé in the making. And, most exciting of all, this year's team has Ronaldinho, the reigning two-time winner of World Player of the Year and winner of the no-less-prestigious European Footballer of the Year prize last November. In May, he led Barcelona to its second consecutive La Liga title in Spain and to European victory in the Champions League.
Whatever happens at this World Cup (and there are some who worry about the aging legs of Ronaldo, Roberto Carlos and Cafu), Ronaldo de Assis Moreira, an attacking midfielder known to everyone as Ronaldinho, has already done more than enough not only to keep the Brazilian legend alive but also to breathe new life into it. Not so much because of what he has achieved (an enormous amount for a player who just turned 26), but because of the manner in which he has done it. Like Pelé, he scores sublime goals, and lots of them; he is arguably the world's best and most penetrating passer, the master of the assist; he may be unequaled in the dominion he exerts over the ball. On top of all that, he plays with a big smile on his face, even when he misses a shot. Whereas so many professionals in every sport seem to carry the world's worries on their faces as they play, Ronaldinho radiates the fun of a carefree 8-year-old boy. Which happens to be how old he was when his father suffered a heart attack in a swimming pool and drowned. After that shock, which he has never forgotten (following every goal he scores, he looks up to heaven and points a finger that says, "For you, Dad"), Ronaldinho might be excused were he introverted or morose. Yet he seems the exact opposite.
He is courteous, too — one of those "After you," "No, after you" types — and seems to have few of the airs and graces one might expect of a regular superstar, to say nothing of the most globally celebrated sportsman alive. He does not strut so much as shuffle, and when asked to describe that goal during which he sent John Terry tumbling to the ground, he gracefully makes excuses for the Englishman. "I had the good fortune to be coming at him having built up some speed, while he was moving from a standing position," he says, "so I had a big advantage."