Ten years ago in 2007 (it feels surreal to think that 2007 was so long ago), I got into an argument with the girl I loved at the time, over who was better between Kaká and Lionel Messi. She was a Barcelona fan. I don’t recall who won the argument, but I think we settled on the conclusion that Kaká was the best at the time but that Messi would eclipse him.
Kaká is retiring with the same grace with which he played and lived
Kaká could have left his career with regrets. Instead, he leaves it with the same grace he embodied throughout his career.
Photo by Claudio Villa/Getty Images
Her denigration of Kaká — or what I felt was a denigration since she wasn’t fawning over him — made me angry, and I remember feeling ashamed at that anger because I knew she was right. But I loved Kaká in a very childish and possessive way. I wanted to protect him and I had failed to do so by exposing his name to people who only saw him as a player, as a thing that would have its time and fade away like all things before it, as a finite being. I felt that he was goodness manifested and that had no place in an argument about talent. After she rejected him, I never talked about him with her again.
When I think of Kaká I think of the word grace. Not graceful. “Graceful” gets used as a synonym for elegant and it’s usually restricted to the appearance of things — to the way a ball is controlled or how a player like Zidane moved. A ballerina is graceful. The way Javier Pastore runs and dribbles is graceful.
“Graceful” describes an aesthetic, “grace” is a state of being. Kaká’s true grace to me was in his person, a grace that came from a higher power and manifested in his every action. He behaved as if he was compelled to be refined, from the way he played to the way that he dealt with setbacks. His appearance wasn’t just graceful; that was who he was.
Kaká was that sporting definition of graceful, too. His running looked effortless, as if he had wings on his feet. His long legs moved in such a continuous and fixed motion that sometimes you could only understand how fast he was going or when he was accelerating by paying attention to the players around him.
Players who were grimacing and pushing their legs as hard as they could seemed to be running in sand when he breezed past them. His dribbling style was just to run past players because he was faster than them with the ball. Kaká hardly ever needed tricks. Not that he couldn’t do them — he sometimes nutmegged defenders — but he seemed intent on getting to the goal and being as efficient as possible in doing so. Kaká’s beauty came from a place of simplicity, not pragmatism.
I remember how radical he seemed when he revealed an undershirt that read “I belong to Jesus” after the Champions League in 2007. During the most important year of his career — one which would see him crowned the best player in the world after getting revenge on a team that had beaten Milan two years prior, as ridiculous money was pouring into soccer and Kaká himself was the subject of transfer speculation that linked him to Manchester City for more than £100 million — there he was, on his knees in front of the watching world, proclaiming that he had a higher calling than everything around him. He didn’t belong to the game, to Milan, or to whichever team would buy him in the transfer window.
That’s why I loved Kaká beyond what he did on the field. He seemed above the troubles of human life. As much as he loved the game, he didn’t let it take him over, and as hurt as he was by things that happened to him, they never changed who he was.
He never reacted to defenders who went at his ankles or tried to injure him. When Milan was close to selling him to City and fans protested for him outside of his house, he said “If Milan want to sell me, I’ll sit down and talk. I can say that as long as the club don’t want to sell me, I’ll definitely stay.”
He didn’t have much continuity at Real Madrid because of injuries, but he took those as misfortunes that were out of his control. José Mourinho froze him out in his last year in Spain, and Kaká defended the manager rather than lash out in anger and frustration. After MLS referees sent him off for playfully putting his hands on a former teammate’s face (who even pleaded with the referees not to send Kaká off), Kaká accepted the punishment and forgave the refs.
There was an ad that came out the following season after the Champions League win, a few months after I had the argument with the girl I loved, in which Kaká talked about everything he overcame to be a professional player. In October of 2000, he fractured his sixth vertebrae and was put in a neck brace. He thought he would never play soccer again.
After the accident, he made a list of goals he wanted to achieve. He wanted to play soccer again, to start for Sāo Paulo, to play in the 2002 World Cup, and to play for a big European team. The last was to win the Champions League. Near the end of the ad, he signed a self portrait of himself on the bottom right corner of the canvas, “Kaká, God is faithful.” The same words that he had stitched on the tongue of his boots for most of his career.
He achieved all those things that he wanted and now he’s done. He was a finite being after all, and that’s even more obvious next to the accomplishments of the extra-terrestrial Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo. There’s a lot he could regret about how his career turned out — like injuries and poor management — yet he seems to accept his conclusion by placing himself in his faith again; by reiterating that his journey extends beyond the game.
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