Echoes of the Tragedy: The Sport Memoir and the Representation of the 1950 World Cup

Abstract

This article delves into the meaning of the 1950 World Cup, held in Brazil after a 12-year hiatus due to the Second World War and two decades after a South American country (Uruguay) had hosted the tournament. The aim of this paper is to reflect on the role of sport memoirs in the cementing of a collective imagination on the Brazilian National Team's defeat in 1950. Anchored on a triple dimension – organisational, tactical and technical – the analysis explores the way in which the loss of the title to the Uruguayan team was experienced by a number of actors – among them players, management personnel and fans – and set in writing by many generations of sports writers. Through the diachronic choice of works published by journalists (which include memoirs, news stories, biographies and autobiographies), the objective is to point to the congealing of a rhetoric made up of negative remarks associated to the football event, such as ‘trauma’, ‘drama’, ‘tragedy’ and even ‘catastrophe’. Contemporary historical perspective, which questions the deep-rooted opposition between memory and history will be turned so as to support the consideration of whether the former can in fact direct, or even shape, the latter's features.