Bebeto, Romario were not friends, then the cradle celebration happened

Two afternoons before the quarterfinals against the Netherlands, Brazil coach Carlos Alberto Pereira told his men to unwind. Some of them hit the swimming pool, some went to explore Dallas. But striker Bebeto did not leave his room, and pranced restlessly in the corridor, waiting for the hotel phone to ring.

Hours passed, and he went down to the teleoperator and sat with him. His wife Denise was heavily pregnant when he left for the tournament. Soon after he left, she was robbed of her car and Rolex at gunpoint. In the morning his father told him that she was going to the labour. “We were expecting our third child, and I was there with her for the other two,” he later told FIFA.

Around sunset, the phone finally buzzed. It was his mother, who broke the news that a son, Mattheus, was born. Hours later, broadcast giants Globo arranged a video call with Bebeto, his wife and newborn, through an expensive video-phone device. “I broke down in tears and kept crying for minutes. I couldn’t talk, I was so emotional because I was not there with them,” he would say.

The media called the father baby-faced assassin, for his fresh-faced looks. He played in a front-two with the hubristic Romario, the lead act who scored with a sniper’s precision but fitfully volatile. Bebeto’s role was to facilitate Romario’s fearsome strikes, to create space by dragging the defenders with his clever runs and finessed passes. The management was initially worried because of they were not the best friends, an animosity that flared in the leagues of Brazil and Spain, and they were of contrasting personalities (Bebeto is a family type, stay at home. I’m a street cat, Romario once said), but on the turf, they telegraphed each other’s designs with a clairvoyant’s intuition.

Romario was all the rage in the 1994 World Cup, but the afternoon in Dallas was Bebeto’s. First, he sprinted nearly 30 yards to pick a cross from his half, conjured a perfectly weighted pass onto Romario marauding into the box, which he smacked on one bounce to the nets. Minutes later came a glorious goal and an iconic moment in the World Cup. Bebeto’s cradle celebration, the ode to his son.

A stray header from Branco bubbled towards Romario halfway in the Dutch box. They vociferously claimed an offside, Romario certainly was. But he didn’t touch the ball, and the Dutch left it unattended. Bebeto sprang onto it, controlled the ball with his right thigh, slid away from a Dutch defender’s stretched leg from behind, ran three measured strides, rounded off the goalkeeper Ed De Goey and and slammed the ball into the empty nets. He recollected the sequence: “Romario was offside. I looked at their last man and thought, ‘I’m not offside.’ I was off with everything I had. At that moment, I pleaded with God to allow me to score a goal against Holland in homage to my son,” he said.

Beaming, he galloped to the touchline, contorting his arms like a cradle and rocking it, as though he were cradling an imaginary baby. He turned to his left, he saw Romario doing the same; he gazed to the right, midfielder Mazinho was doing the same. Mazinho had two sons — Thiago and Rafinha. Thiago (Alcantara), a silken midfielder, chose the nationality of his mother and won trophies for Spain; he was Pep Guardiola’s midfield conduit in Bayern Munich. Rafinha, barely one then, played for Barcelona and Brazil. Romario had a nine-month-old son too — Romarinho, who also became a footballer, turning out for Fluminense among others.

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Romario, burying all the differences with Bebeto, hugged him and whispered, or so the myth goes, “I love you.” “It was so beautiful. It was a simple gesture. But I didn’t know it would become this famous,” Bebeto told FIFA.

So famous that it is often the first entry into any list of goal celebrations, recreated faithfully by every footballer who became a dad thereafter. The move was unrehearsed, he would say. He put it poetically: “When I made that celebration maybe it was like Mattheus was baptised by God.” He has reprised a hundred times to excited strangers in different corners of the world. “It doesn’t matter where I go in the world, everyone wants to talk to me about that celebration. I still get emotional talking about it. It means so much to me, my family.”

But he gets emotional each time someone whips up the moment. He calls it the Mattheus goal. And his favourite goal. “I scored a lot of goals in my career – wonder goals, goals that won titles – but everyone only remembers the Mattheus goal. And that’s one I remember the most too,” he said.

More than a celebration

It became more than a goal and celebration—it became a tradition for new fathers.

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And what of Mattheus. He grew up watching others celebrate his father’s foal, and became a footballer himself, an attacking midfielder good enough to turn up for Portuguese club Sporting CP, now playing for the Tampa Bay Rowdies in Florida. “Football was all he was ever interested in. I think his first ever word was probably ‘football’,” Bebeto told Globo. But the son never became the player his father was, or replicated his father’s famous celebration himself, even though he is a father himself. “For some reason, I have never felt like doing it,” he told Fox Sports. As an afterthought he added: “Maybe, before I retire, I would one day! Then, the most fabled celebration of all time would complete a full circle.