Garrincha

A doctor certified him crippled as a child. His right leg was six centimetres shorter than his left, the left one turned outwards and the right one turned inwards.

He played fifty times for Brazil and lost once.

Manuel Francisco dos Santos was born on 28 October 1933 in Pau Grande, a district of Magé in the state of Rio de Janeiro. He was smaller than the other children, and his sister called him Garrincha — a wren, the little brown bird.

Scouts knew about him for years and he did not care. Wikipedia puts it plainly: he "did not arrive in professional football until his late teens; he had no interest in a professional career despite his immense talent."

When Botafogo finally got him into a training session in 1953, he did something that decided the matter immediately: he nutmegged Nílton Santos, a Brazil international with sixteen caps. Santos went to the club's directors and told them to sign him.

He made his first-team debut on 19 July 1953 against Bonsucesso and scored a hat-trick.

The deformity is not a footnote to his career. It is the mechanism.

Defenders are trained to read hips and weight. Garrincha's body did not give the signals a body is supposed to give, and he was comfortable on both feet, so the standard information a full-back uses to guess which way a winger will go simply did not apply. He would beat a man, wait for him to get up, and beat him again.

Mel Hopkins, the Wales defender who marked him in the 1958 World Cup quarter-final, described the problem from inside it: "Garrincha was more of a danger than Pelé I believe at the time, a phenomenon, capable of sheer magic. It was difficult to know which way he was going to go because of his legs and because he was as comfortable on his left foot as his right, so he could cut inside or go down the line and he had a ferocious shot too."

Ten days before the 1958 World Cup he scored the goal that explains the rest of him. Against Fiorentina, he beat four defenders and the goalkeeper and stopped on the goal line. Instead of tapping it in, he waited for Enzo Robotti to come back and dribbled past him too, then scored.

His coaches were furious. It is very probably why he did not start Brazil's first two matches at the World Cup that followed.

He came into the side for the third group match, against the Soviet Union. So did Pelé. It was the first appearance at a World Cup for both of them.

Vicente Feola told his team to attack from the kick-off. Garrincha took the ball on the right wing, beat three men and hit the post. That opening passage has been called the best three minutes of football ever played.

In the final against Sweden, Brazil went a goal down early. Garrincha beat his man on the right and crossed for Vavá to equalise; before half-time he did exactly the same thing again and Vavá made it 2–1. Brazil won 5–2. He was voted into the tournament's best eleven.

Pelé was injured in the second match and missed the rest of it. What followed is the most complete one-man World Cup anybody has played.

Against England in the quarter-final he opened the scoring with a header from a corner. In the second half Vavá scored from a rebound off a Garrincha shot, and then Garrincha picked the ball up outside the area, paused, and bent one into the bottom corner — the banana shot. Brazil won 3–1. The British press wrote that he was Stanley Matthews, Tom Finney and a snake charmer all rolled into one.

Against Chile in the semi-final he scored twice: a twenty-yard left-foot shot and a header. Brazil won 4–2. A Chilean newspaper ran the headline: What planet is Garrincha from?

Four goals in two matches, from a winger.

Then, in the eighty-third minute of that semi-final, he was sent off for kicking a Chilean player — he said he had been kicked all afternoon. There were no automatic suspensions for red cards at that tournament. A disciplinary committee met the next day and decided not to ban him, a decision Wikipedia says was likely influenced by the intervention of the presidents of Chile and Peru.

He played the final against Czechoslovakia with a severe fever. Brazil won 3–1.

He was voted player of the tournament and finished joint top scorer — the first man ever to take the Golden Ball, the Golden Boot and the World Cup in a single tournament.

Afterwards he went back to Rio and won the Campeonato Carioca with Botafogo.

A knee injury caught up with him and never left. By 1966 he was well short of fitness and still played in Brazil's opening match, a 2–0 win over Bulgaria, scoring from a free kick.

The next game was a 1–3 defeat to Hungary at Goodison Park. It was his last international, and it was the only match he ever lost in a Brazil shirt.

He was sold to Corinthians in 1966. Then Atlético Junior in Colombia, Flamengo, a spell in Italy, Olaria in 1972. He drank heavily for most of his adult life, and in April 1969 crashed into a lorry in an accident that killed his mother-in-law.

He was hospitalised eight times in his final year. He died on 20 January 1983 in Rio de Janeiro, of cirrhosis of the liver, in an alcoholic coma. He was forty-nine.

The funeral procession ran from the Maracanã to Pau Grande and drew, in Wikipedia's word, millions. His epitaph reads: Here rests in peace the one who was the Joy of the People — Mané Garrincha.

This table does not reconcile, and neither does the source it came from. Wikipedia's Botafogo table has the same two contradictions, checked on 2026-09-19: its season rows give 77 league goals against a stated league total of 84, and 24 other goals against a stated other total of 17. The two errors are equal and opposite, so both routes reach 101 and the career figure is safe either way, which is presumably how the error has survived this long. The 1963 row is short one appearance on the same source. Nothing here has been adjusted to make the columns work; the numbers are left as the source has them.

Fifty caps. One defeat.

Individual: World Cup Golden Ball 1962. World Cup Golden Boot 1962, four goals. World Cup All-Star Team 1958 and 1962. Campeonato Carioca player of the year 1957, 1961, 1962. FIFA World Cup All-Time Team, 1994. FIFA Hall of Fame, 1999.

Djalma Santos, who played beside him for Brazil: "He had a childish spirit. Garrincha was football's answer to Charlie Chaplin."

Eduardo Galeano wrote the passage that gets quoted more than any statistic about him: "In the entire history of football no one made more people happy. When he was out there, the pitch was a circus ring, the ball a tamed animal, the match a party invitation. Garrincha nurtured his public, the ball, and together they created such mischief that people almost died laughing. He jumped over it, it gambolled around him, hid itself away, skipped off and made him run after it. And on the way, his opponents ran into each other."

There is a line on Wikipedia about him that sounds like folklore and is simply a fact: Brazil never lost a match in which both Garrincha and Pelé played.

He fathered at least fourteen children. He was married twice and both marriages ended badly. He earned money for two decades and died with none of it, in a public hospital, at forty-nine, with a liver that had given out.

None of that is what the country remembers on the day it thinks about him. It remembers a man with two broken legs beating the same defender twice on purpose because beating him once was not funny enough.