Ronaldo, Ronaldo Luiz Nazario da Lima

First name
Ronaldo Luiz
Last name
Nazario da Lima
Nationality
Brazil
Date of birth
22 September 1976
Country of birth
Brazil
Place of birth
Rio de Janeiro
Position
Attacker
Height
183 cm
Weight
90 kg

Ronaldo Luiz Nazario da Lima

SÃO PAULO, Brazil -- The extra pounds, the new crop of hair and the unfamiliar jersey make him hard to recognize. His long career as a millionaire striker in Europe for teams like Real Madrid ended amid a knee injury and a personal scandal. Nowadays he splits $89-a-night rooms with teammates in remote Brazilian burgs with names like President Prudent.

But the big news is that Ronaldo, the three-time FIFA World Player of the Year and all-time World Cup scoring champion, is playing soccer again. And he's doing what made him, for a time, one of the planet's most celebrated living athletes. He's scoring goals.

In March, after 384 days off the field, Ronaldo entered a soccer stadium again, this time wearing the shirt of São Paulo's Corinthians for a match in an agricultural town of 95,000 deep in Brazil's interior. Despite lumbering back some 20 pounds overweight, Ronaldo has scored five goals in seven appearances and tapped into a huge fan base in a nation where soccer is called a second religion. There's already talk about putting the striker back on Brazil's national team.

Video Ronaldo Luiz Nazario Da Lima


he rough-and-tumble Brazilian leagues may look to be a huge step down for Ronaldo, who once stayed in five-star hotels from London to Istanbul. But by the accounts of those close to him, the 32-year-old, whose full name is Ronaldo Luís Nazário de Lima, is living a fairy-tale rebound that could happen only in his home country.

"If this is the script of a movie, the ending is a fifth World Cup" for Ronaldo in 2010, says his agent, Fabiano Farah. "This is the No. 1 global story of the comeback of a human being."

It's also a comeback for the Corinthians, a team famed for its rabid cadre of 25 million fans, dubbed "the Faithful." In 2007, the club had been demoted to a second-tier league, and prosecutors accused its top management of laundering money and having links to Russian mobsters.

Ronaldo's return after 14 years may be a watershed for Brazilian soccer, whose teams -- plagued by corruption and mismanagement -- have scraped by, selling their best talent to foreign clubs. In 2008, Brazilian teams traded away 1,176 players, including 209 to Portugal and 23 to China.

Ronaldo played his first game in a Corinthians jersey on March 4. Before the match, the country's most famous player after Pelé admitted to a case of nerves, saying he "didn't know what to expect" because he'd followed Brazilian soccer "only on TV."
He soon got the hang of it. After his first goal he jumped a barrier and ran straight at the leaping crowd of shirtless fans. As they tore down a fence, riot police hammered them and announcers screamed, "Ronaldo! Goooooool!"
"It's been two years since he's had the kind of attention he has now," says Jose Ferreira Neto, a former Corinthians star and TV sports commentator. "I've never seen him so happy."
Fans' biggest worry now: that Ronaldo could reinjure his knee. In mid-March, the Corinthians' self-appointed mystical adviser, Father Nilson, held an Afro-Brazilian ceremony involving a wax replica of Ronaldo's injured leg. The replica has been on tour around Brazil.

"We're asking God to illuminate [Ronaldo] one more time, and protect him from further contusions," Father Nilson said.
Raised in a poor neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro, Ronaldo began playing professionally at 16. At 18 he was traded to Holland's PSV and went on to star with clubs in Barcelona and Milan, where he earned the nickname "the Phenomenon" for his uncanny scoring abilities.
The striker's greatest moment of glory came playing for Brazil in the 2002 World Cup, when he scored twice against Germany's almost unbeatable goalkeeper Oliver Khan to take the title.
Knee injuries have three times upset Ronaldo's career. In 2000, he snapped a right-knee tendon, sidelining him for over a year. Last February, his other knee gave in during a match in Italy, and the striker rolled on the ground in tears.

In April, police were called to a "love motel" in Rio to break up an argument between Ronaldo and a transvestite prostitute. "It was the worst decision of my life. It's going to stain my personal life forever, but nothing will stop my career," Ronaldo told Brazil's Globo TV at the time. By June, his contract with Milan expired and he was without a multimillion-dollar contract for the first time since he'd left Brazil. Many doubted he'd play soccer again.
According to Ronaldo's doctor, Joaquim Grava, Ronaldo's injury, known as a patellar tendon rupture, is rare but curable with surgery and 10 months of rest. Returning to soccer, says Dr. Grava, is a matter of willpower and grueling therapy.
According to his agent, by last fall Ronaldo was on the mend and entertaining multimillion-dollar offers from the sort of up-and-coming teams in Europe and the Persian Gulf who are always interested in marquee names -- even old and bruised ones.
In an unexpected turn, Corinthians made an offer to keep Ronaldo in Brazil. Corinthians couldn't afford a European-size salary. The club pays him $175,000 a month (still a huge fee by Brazilian standards) and sweetened the deal by sharing sponsorship earnings, and giving Ronaldo 50% of ticket sales from any foreign matches.

For the new management trying to rebuild the Corinthians franchise, Ronaldo's story was a perfect fit. "I've been trying to explore the Rocky in ourselves all year long," says Luis Paulo Rosenberg, Corinthians director of marketing. "Our focus is on self-esteem, to make [fans] forget the humiliation."

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