Word: gaucho
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...Rogerio Marcio Botelho, 27, and his life a case study in the game gone global. Botelho, nicknamed Gaucho after former Brazilian national-team player Renato Gaucho, is one out of some 850 Brazilians professionally chasing football outside their homeland. These days his friends play for clubs in places like Azerbaijan, Armenia and Vietnam. "How was it today?" I ask as Gaucho steps out of the dressing room in a white turtleneck and a brown winter coat. He rolls his deep brown eyes. Then, his handsomely chiseled features warm up in disarming laughter. "I try. I give all myself...
...Gaucho's Eastern European career has been a bit of a roller-coaster ride. In Bulgaria, he played for Levski, a Sofia-based club then owned by a Russian oligarch named Michael Chorny who, at the time, was banned from setting foot on Bulgarian soil because of alleged ties with organized crime. A big star in Sofia, Gaucho threw a tantrum after a coach replaced him in an important UEFA Champions League qualification match. He picked up his brother and a bottle of Jack Daniels and disappeared for a week, leaving reporters to speculate about his whereabouts. (He had retreated...
...next tour took him to the Russian city of Samara. There, aside from "drinking like mad," Gaucho learned something about xenophobia and racism. "For me the color is not a problem," he says in the mostly present-tense English he picked up from a former teammate from Costa Rica. "Africans had a problem [in Russia] and I had a problem because I was with the African guys." He adds: "I have some stories to tell...
...Compared to Russia and Bulgaria, Gaucho says the Czech Republic is a breeze. His troubles have shrunk to figuring out where to go fishing, his favorite pastime. In Prague, he is tilting at bureaucratic windmills in order to angle a fishing permit. He used to fish in the Czech town of Olomouc, where he played with another team. But in all the time he spent at the local river there, he managed to catch only "one trout and a karpyonka [Russian for carp]." He is mystified about the kind of bait Eastern European fish prefer. "I don't know what...
...ironic twist, the biggest disappointment of the trip, the 4-3 loss to Boise State in the quarterfinals of the Gaucho Classic, may have made the road defeat of Pepperdine possible. The Crimson had handled Boise State easily the week before, but the weather proved to be a significant equalizer. The skies were blue, but the wind was screaming, and the Crimson was not prepared...