Estadão - Ubiratan Brazil

A packed Maracanã stadium, a weekend afternoon in the 1960s. The game was proceeding normally when Botafogo fans released a vulture carrying a Flamengo flag. More than a provocation, it was a harsh criticism: to the black and white fans, Flamengo fans were nothing more than favela dwellers rummaging through garbage for food. In other words, vultures. The high-profile response was printed in the next day's edition of Jornal dos Sports: a drawing of an adorable vulture wearing a Flamengo jersey.

"Before retaliating in kind, he opted for good humor and adopted the animal as the team mascot," says Ivan Cosenza de Sousa, son of the cartoon's author, Henrique de Sousa Filho, better known as Henfil. An avid Flamengo fan, he began a passionate communication channel with the fans, who, following his advice, adopted the provocation and embraced the vulture, much to the dismay of their rivals. A relationship that would last until the late 1970s and would be revived in the 80s, resulting in a wealth of material, the most precious cartoons of which are in the book "Urubu" (144 pages, R$25), which Desiderata publishers are releasing this week.

Divided into chapters (Urubu, Futebol, and Rei Zico), the book's first part covers the club's second and third Rio de Janeiro championship titles and recalls the defeat of the fourth, as well as the participation of the club's players. The second part covers football as a general theme: issues that remain relevant today, such as the mockery among fans (not always resolved civilly), the perennial dissatisfaction with refereeing, and even the teams' revenue evasion.

The final chapter is dedicated to the club's greatest idol, remembered for both his glorious moments (his great achievements, his amazing goals) and his dramatic ones (his knee problems, the missed penalty against France in the 1986 World Cup). Such veneration that Henfil even drew Zico as the Pied Piper of Gávea, a reference to the fable of the Pied Piper of Hameln, in which the star player played a tune and was followed by a line of enchanted balls.

"Henfil was an unabashed fan in his cartoons, but he was also generous with other teams, to the point of creating mascots for them as well," recalls Ivan, listing Bacalhau (Vasco), Cri-cri (Botafogo), Pó Pó (Fluminense), and Gato Pingado (América). "His passion for Flamengo was so evident that the other mascots even complained in the strips, which aroused sympathy from other fans. A smart move, as it also won over rival fans."

In fact, Flamengo fans followed him like a guru—if Urubu suggested a banner against a certain manager, the banner was there by the next training session. If he launched a contest for the biggest banner, the Maracanã stadium would be covered in monumental pennants the following Sunday. He even found answers for the inexplicable, like the cursed penalty Zico missed in the match in which Brazil was eliminated by France in the 1986 World Cup in Mexico. The next day, the hangover was brilliantly countered with a cartoon recreating the scene and the caption: "God defended him!!!"

Aware of the hypnotic power of his drawings, Henfil also sought to use them for good. To minimize the intense rivalry between Vasco and Flamengo, for example, which often bordered on violence, he made Urubu and Bacalhau accomplices in his pranks on the other mascots. "The power of his strips reached such a height that, in his later years, he would draw in just 20 minutes, but would spend another two hours analyzing the cartoon, trying to discover any detail that could spark dangerous discord," says Ivan.

The result was his abandonment of the mascot family in the late 1970s, after having appeared in the pages of Jornal dos Sports and Placar magazine. "It was unprecedented: to stop because of the excessive demand." The silence was short-lived, and with Flamengo's string of world titles, Henfil returned to drawing, this time for the newspaper O Dia. Until his death in 1988, at the age of 43, due to AIDS-related problems, Henfil maintained his passion for the red-and-black club. "He was a true chronicler of Flamengo's history," says Ivan.