Ronaldo, lay off the feijoada.
Ronaldo’s considerable girth has really grabbed media attention. Even Lula, Brazil’s president has weighed in on this issue (pun fully intended). Ronaldo looked decidedly inert in the Croatia match. But so did every Brazilian player except Kaka.
According to Brian Viner a bit of porkiness does not hurt. In fact, we love those pudgy athletes. But this comes from the ingrained association of the two pairs of adjectives. Fat and loveable. Thin and sour.
The Babe Ruths, the John Dalys, the Mike Gattings were all overweight athletes and loveable. Jason Giambi does not cut a svelte figure but he can hit a ball. Phil Mickelson is decidedly chubby. Till recently his stumbling block was a tendency to choke on the big occasions, and not due to some anthopometric anomaly. Cricket has some of the lardiest (is that a word??) characters around. Bishen Singh Bedi, one of India’s legendary spinners was quite a butterball. Viner also mentions Bill ‘Fatty’ Foulke, a goalkeeper who played at the turn of the century. They were all successful in their sports.
This is where Viner and I part company. The point of the Babe Ruth analogy is when you are overweight and deliver, you are loveable. If you don’t you are just a fat guy and no one loves you. Ronaldo, listen up. You have Gerd Muller in your sights with the last chance to break his record. It is not getting any easier for you with all these goalscorers.
One comment on “Ronaldo has put on some gerd. El Phenomeno or El Fatso?”
as well, those other sports don’t require one to constantly run for two 45 minute periods. Notice you don’t see overweight basketball, hockey, tennis players; cricket/baseball and golf have a much lower cardiovascular fitness requirements than pretty much all other sports so one can be fat and as long as they’re good at that one required motion (hey, look, they both requrie you to swing your arms!), then you can be great.
Now, that said, Ronaldo is most likeyl still in relatively good shape, not on par with, well, maybe everyone else playing in the tournament, but if he’s smart he’ll put in a good 45 minutes a game, control the midfield with his skill and perhaps put a few shots on goal. Brazil has enough other players that can substitute in and finish off a game in his place. Or they could just not play him in favor of a player who’s fit.