Jorge Luis Borges had the soapbox and the authority to complain about this myopic understanding of the duty of Latin American writers, which sometimes forecloses their unique modernism and experience of modernization in favor of a mythic past or an artificially constructed ideal national subject. So likewise in João Gilberto Noll, readers shouldn't expect samba and Carnival and football. The Brazilian national identity is not one of his primary concerns.
People are very proud of Newcastle, very proud to come from here. This is a working class City and they just want to enjoy themselves and live life to the full. They work all week, pick their wages up at the end of the week and they spend it over a weekend by having a good time and watching the football. That's our life.
To borrow a simile from the football field, we believe that men must play fair, but that there must be no shirking, and that the success can only come to the player who hits the line hard.
How on earth can otherwise sensible people get so involved in a football game? You could measure the lasting impact on the lives of the people who played it at just about zero.
The way to be successful is through preparation. It doesn't just happen. You don't wake up one day and discover you're a lawyer any more than you wake up as a pro football player. It takes time.
In baseball, it's tough to get up for every single game, every single moment. In football, you have 90,000 fans screaming and the band's playing. I do miss that adrenaline rush.