This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.
Manuel Francisco dos Santos, the Brazilian winger known as Garrincha, was born with a body that seemed wrong for soccer.
His left leg bowed outward; his right, longer by more than an inch, bent inward. By varying accounts, he was born with a congenital spine condition or had contracted polio as a boy. His eldest sister thought he resembled a frail and elusive little bird, so she nicknamed him Garrincha, a local Portuguese word for wren.
It hardly seemed likely that he would grow up to play soccer, let alone to lead Brazil to its first two World Cup titles — in 1958 and 1962 — as the team’s forward on the right wing. In 1962, he tied for leading scorer and was named the World Cup’s best player.
Garrincha performed with such bewitching wizardry that some experts, even today, consider him unequaled in dribbling the ball.
He had exquisite balance, a sharp burst of speed, a boxer’s sense of the feint and a change of direction that was quick and unpredictable. He would place a foot on the ball and dare a defender to try to take it away. He would dribble past a defender, then let him catch up before taking a mocking shot into the goal.
When Garrincha played, “the field became a circus ring, the ball a tame beast, the game an invitation to a party,” Eduardo Galeano, the Uruguayan writer sometimes known as soccer’s poet laureate, wrote of Garrincha in “Soccer in Sun and Shadow” (1995). “Like a child defending his pet, Garrincha wouldn’t let go of the ball, and the ball and he would perform devilish tricks that had people dying of laughter.”
“In the entire history of soccer,” Galeano added, “no one made more people happy.”
Brazil’s national team never lost any match that Garrincha played until his 50th and final one, during the 1966 World Cup. By then, he was unable to overcome damage to his right knee, and his personal life had become complicated with alcohol abuse, financial difficulties and trouble with women. He grew depressed, and more than once tried to take his own life.
He died on Jan. 20, 1983, at 49. The cause was cirrhosis of the liver, gastritis, dementia and acute alcohol-related psychosis, Ruy Castro wrote in an unflinching biography, “Garrincha: The Triumph and Tragedy of Brazil’s Forgotten Footballing Hero,” originally published in Portuguese in 1995.
On the field, he shared a pitch with the great Pelé, who was seven years his junior, and the two never lost a match they played together. But while Pelé became a soccer deity regarded as a man of the world, Garrincha effectively remained a flawed, relatable boy from the neighborhood, endeared to the Brazilian public for his joyful approach to the sport.
“While Brazilians put Pelé on a pedestal, they do not love him the way they love Garrincha,” Alex Bellos wrote in “Futebol: The Brazilian Way of Life” (2002).
“Pelé does not reflect national desires,” Mr. Bellos added. “Pelé, above everything else, symbolizes winning. Garrincha symbolizes playing for playing’s sake. Brazil is not a country of winners. It is a country of a people who like to have fun.”
Manuel Francisco dos Santos was born on Oct. 28, 1933, into an impoverished family in the village of Pau Grande, Brazil, about 40 miles north of Rio de Janeiro. He was of Indigenous ancestry and his grandparents had been enslaved. His father, Amaro Francisco dos Santos, worked as a guard at a local textile mill. His mother, Maria Carolina dos Santos, raised goats, pigs and chickens.
After advancing to the third grade, Garrincha quit school and showed little interest in anything but hunting, fishing and playing soccer. His first ball was made of newspapers that had been stuffed into an aunt’s stockings. He learned to play in bare feet, developing his crafty dribbling on a bumpy clay field where a misstep could mean losing the ball over an embankment.
He played for a factory team in Pau Grande, then in a regional league, joining a professional club called Serrano, where he earned about a dollar a game in 1951, a bit shy of $13 today. In 1953, when he was nearly 20, he made his professional breakthrough with Botafogo, a prominent club in Rio.
Garrincha is often credited with inspiring the first soccer chants of “olé,” during a club match in Mexico City in February 1958. As he tormented a defender by putting the ball through the poor man’s legs and dribbling around him, the enraptured crowd cheered as if they were watching a bullfight.
He joined Brazil’s national team in 1955. During the World Cup in June 1958, Brazil kept Garrincha on the bench for its first two matches. He started the third match, along with Pelé, then 17, against the Soviet Union. In a frenzied opening, Garrincha’s audacious dribbling left three Soviet players on the ground, and the stadium filled with laughter.
He lashed a shot off the goal post, then passed to Pelé for a shot that deflected off the crossbar. In the third minute, the forward Vavá scored, giving Brazil a 1-0 lead in an eventual 2-0 victory. Gabriel Hanot, a French journalist, called it “the greatest three minutes in the history of football.”
In a 5-2 victory over Sweden in the final, Garrincha assisted two goals with crosses from the right wing. Four years later, after Pelé sustained a groin injury in Brazil’s second match of the 1962 World Cup and missed the remainder of the tournament, Garrincha helped win it with remarkable individual performances. He scored with his legs and his head — rare at the time — delivering two goals apiece in the quarterfinals and semifinals, then played while suffering from a fever in the final, a 3-1 victory over Czechoslovakia.
A Chilean newspaper, El Mercurio, asked in a headline, “Garrincha, What Planet Are You From?”
But by the 1966 World Cup, which Brazil exited meekly, his life had taken a tragic turn. His drinking was alarming. He left his first wife, Nair Marques, and their eight daughters to marry a renowned samba singer, Elza Soares, in a tumultuous union that became a national scandal.
In 1969, while reportedly driving drunk without headlights in the dark, Garrincha got into a wreck that killed his mother-in-law, who was in the passenger seat. Soares left Garrincha in 1977 after he punched and kicked her. They later divorced.
Despite the tragic chaos of his final years, his death in 1983 sparked a wave of national grief. Fans, friends and former teammates filed past his open casket during a wake at Rio’s famed Maracanã Stadium, then lined the roads and pedestrian overpasses as the coffin was taken atop a fire truck to a cemetery about 40 miles away, near Pau Grande. The inscription on his gravestone invoked one of the phrases by which he was known: “Here rests in peace the one who was the Joy of the People.”
