He can blame a skinny, shaggy-haired kid everyone calls Guga. Early last week, in the French Open’s final, 23-year-old Gustavo Kuerten outtoughed the Swedish powerhouse Magnus Norman for five punishing sets and nearly four hours to win his second French Open. In the process Kuerten clinched the top ranking in the Association of Tennis Professionals and intensified the fever that was already sweeping sports-mad Brazil: Gugamania.
Thousands of fans were waiting when Kuerten landed at the airport in Florianopolis, his hometown in southern Brazil. “Gugaaah! Gugaaah!” they chanted. After the mayor bear-hugged him on the runway, he mumbled: “I don’t think I deserve all this attention.” Brazil thinks otherwise. Kuerten’s unruly hair and big, boyish smile are ubiquitous on newsstands, television ads and billboards. Not since Ayrton Senna, the Formula One racer who died in a crash in 1994, has a sports figure so enraptured the nation. Guga.com.br is one of the country’s hottest Web sites. Rio’s top newspaper, O Globo, proclaimed him the new king of tennis! in a headline big enough for the Second Coming. A little-known fashion model has accepted a lucrative offer to pose for Playboy’s Brazilian edition. Her claim to fame? She used to date Guga.
Kuerten’s sport, once the domain of a tiny, moneyed elite, is suddenly the whole country’s pastime. Tennis academies in Rio and So Paulo are hiring extra instructors. “Everyone wants to be the next Guga,” says Claudia Joppert, marketing chief of Lob, a Rio tennis school. Courts everywhere are booked solid–but Silva can’t complain. His company, Flimax, sells Dunlop tennis balls and racquets in the manufacturer’s fastest growing market in the world. Last year Brazil imported 1.9 million cans of balls, a tenfold increase in only four years.
Guga himself is doing quite nicely, thank you. Since winning his first French Open three years ago he has earned $5.6 million in cumulative prize money and at least that much again from sponsors like Head and Diadora, the Italian sporting-goods maker. Marketers ruthlessly compete for his endorsements. “Signing up Guga was like serving an ace,” says Renato Naegle, marketing director of Banco do Brasil, a major national sponsor. “We couldn’t buy the kind of publicity he’s had.”
A few Brazilians seem immune to the epidemic. “He should take a bath,” says one fashion consultant, distressed by Kuerten’s scruffy appearance. But Kuerten’s down-to-earth style, his irreverence and his sheer love of the game are hard to resist, especially in a sport often dominated by prima donnas and enfants terribles. Guga himself seems more than a little embarrassed by all the fuss. Last week in Florianopolis the returning hero declined to be paraded through the city atop a fire engine. He signed autographs until he was at risk for tendinitis. He ducked into a local hair salon and emerged with his mane in dreadlocks. Then he went home to enjoy his mother’s cooking. Some things money just can’t buy.
