“Do you know what it feels like to be a promise? I know it. Including a broken promise. The biggest waste in Football: me.”
In a letter published Tuesday on the website of “The Players’ Tribune”, the day after the release of his autobiography “Meu medo maior” (“my biggest fear”), Adriano, who made the heyday of Inter Milan at the start of the 21st century, puts into words his new life, far from the notoriety and glitz of football.
Appearing several times in recent weeks in videos on social networks showing him in a daze, the former Brazilian striker denies taking drugs but confirms he drinks alcohol daily. “I always go to the same place in my neighborhood, to the Naná kiosk. If you want to meet me, come see me there,” he tells the reader.
Now 42 years old, Adriano spends his days in the favela of Vila Cruzeiro, in Rio de Janeiro, where he grew up. He often lives there bare-chested, in shorts and bare feet. “I play dominoes, I sit on the sidewalk, I listen to music, I dance with my friends and I sleep on the ground. I also see my father in each of these alleys.”
“Mirinho” died on August 3, 2004 of a heart attack. “I was 10 years old when my father was shot. He was shot by a stray bullet at a party. It went through his forehead and lodged in the back of his head. The doctors had no way of extracting it. After that, our life was never the same. He started having frequent epileptic seizures,” he explains. From the loss of his dad, twelve years after he was hit by a shot, Adriano never recovered. “To this day, it’s a problem I still haven’t been able to resolve.”
In his story, Adriano remembers the first time his father, who had lost his father to alcohol, surprised him with a drink in his hand. He was 14 years old. “I filled a plastic glass with beer. This fine, bitter foam that went down my throat for the first time had a special flavor. A new world of “pleasure” opened before me (…) But my father went crazy. He snatched the cup from my hands and threw it in the gutter.”
At 19, when he discovered Serie A, Adriano only wanted one thing for his first Christmas in Italy: to return with his family to Brazil to taste his grandmother’s pastries. “I was destroyed. That night I drank a whole bottle of vodka and cried all night. What could I do? I was in Milan for a reason. It was what I had dreamed of my whole life. God had given me the opportunity to become a football player in Europe (…) But that didn’t stop me from being sad.
The life of a professional player, of a football celebrity, simply did not seem made for the man who was nicknamed theEmperor (the Emperor) in the early 2000s. “When I’m here, people don’t know what I do. Nobody understood why I returned to the favela, he continues. It’s not for alcohol, women, even less because of drugs. It was for freedom. Because I wanted peace. I wanted to live and become human again. Just a little bit. That’s the damn truth.”
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