Never Stop Believing

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Dear Atlético Mineiro,

This is the boy named Givanildo. I came from Campina Grande, Paraíba, and you know me as “Hulk” on these pitches. 

Today is our Galo’s anniversary — the rooster is turning 117 years old! And for days — no, actually weeks — I’ve been thinking about what gift I could give to the club that has always believed in me.

It’s hard, because how big should my gift be to equal all the good things that Atlético and its people have given me since the first day I stepped foot here, four years ago? Is there anything on this planet that I could go buy and gift-wrap it for you all? Something at least similar to the love you give me during every game? You know, when the 90 minutes are almost up, when my body is exhausted, and out of the corner of my eye I see you all around me…. And somehow, I get that 30% more energy. 

Look, I’m going to say something… from a player who has stepped on dirt fields, snow fields, good grass and bad grass everywhere, thank God… I don’t know any fans like you, anywhere in the world. That’s why I’m here today to say thank you. A modest gesture compared to everything I’ve received, I know that, but it’s all that I can do. 

And I want to say thank you in writing, and tell a part of my story that few know. I’m actually a very reserved person  — it’s just in my nature, you can forgive me. But I want to take this opportunity to try to summarize in words what Galo represents in my life. To do that, first of all, we need to take a trip to Paraíba.

The beginning. 

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I must have been Hulk since I was three or four years old, because of my obsession with lifting things. I couldn’t see a gas can, a kitchen table, a wardrobe, or a pan cabinet without wanting to lift it off the floor.

“I’m the Incredible Hulk, haaaaaa!!”, I would shout, while my father, Mr. Gilvan, laughed out loud. The nickname stuck. I became Hulk, to my grandmother’s despair: “A beautiful boy with an even more beautiful name and you guys referring to him as this green monster?!?!”

Grandmas are all the same, right?

Only to her was I still Givanildo. 

That was the time when I lived in the Zé Pinheiro neighborhood, in Campina Grande. I was the only son, with three older sisters and three younger sisters. We moved around a lot, but always in that region. I remember many happy moments from my childhood there, but little by little I also began to realize the difficulties our family faced. One of our homes, for example, didn’t even have a toilet, just a hole. The seven children slept on a double mattress without a bedframe, plus our parents wherever there was floor space. We never went hungry, but there were days when we ate flour and sugar for lunch and sugar and flour for dinner. I was crazy about sweets — pssshhh wow. I needed energy to walk! Every day, several times, I had to go to and from the Central Market where my parents worked. It took half an hour to go and a little less to come back, when I took the hill in my favor. As a child, I walked so much to the market that it must have strengthened my legs and my kick, right? 

This routine started when I was seven years old. I would wake up and leave the house before the sun came up. But my father had been at the Market since long before that. He would go at 2 a.m. to get everything ready at the stall before opening up to the public at 5 a.m. As the only son, I had to rush there every morning to get a one-real coin from him (like 20 cents in Euro), and then go back to the bakery to buy bread and take it home. Everything was done quickly, so as not to miss the start of school. On Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays, I would come back from school, rest a bit, and go to Parque da Criança to train. But on Thursdays and Fridays, as well as the whole of Saturday, the busiest days at the Central Market, I would go to work after school and help my parents.

Both of them sold beef. Since they didn’t own the stalls, they were just employees, and everything was left to them.

Receiving the meat, unloading the meat, cutting the meat, cleaning the meat, selling the meat.

And I was left with the carcasses and bones! I carried them on my back up and down to the trash area. Nowadays, when people talk about how strong I am and ask me if I’ve worked out a lot in my life, I tell them, “Yes, I deadlifted a lot of cow carcasses at the Central Market.”

It was hard work, especially for my mother, Mrs. Socorro. My father was an employee, he had a small salary and worked good hours, from 5 a.m. to noon. But my mother rented a stall to work in the afternoon, when the market was empty. There were days when she bought a quarter of a cow and couldn’t sell it all. We would say, “Today, the meat floated,” meaning there was leftovers. This made her very sad, because she didn’t have enough money to pay the daily rate for the stall. I was a kid, but I’ve never forgotten the image of my mother, covered in blood and fat, sitting in a corner, devastated because she didn’t know what to do. I would spy on her from behind the boxes, covered in blood and fat like her, and cry because I couldn’t do anything to help.

My other nickname is from that time, too: Nit. A way to humiliate myself, actually, because my father, the meat man, was the Lice. And Lice’s son was Nit. “There goes Little Nit,” people laughed on the street as I passed by. But I didn’t care, because I wore my bloody and greasy clothes as if they were a cowboy’s jerkin.

In my child’s mind, that dirt was proof of my hard work. I even liked walking home filthy and having people tease me on the way. “Hey, Little Nit! Bravo!! You are a hard-working boy!” In the end, that’s what I keep from the Central Market. A place to learn discipline, responsibility, dedication, commitment to the things we set out to do. 

That’s how I play football.

Besides all that, there was also a ball at the Central Market. I mean, there was my friend Denilson, from the fruit stand, and we always played together. We were on the Parque da Criança team, but whenever we could we would go there after school to play alone. Balls in the air, balls on the chest, balls on the thigh — and lots of sprinting in the sand. We would encourage each other and dream of one day playing for another Galo team, which is the affectionate nickname they give Treze de Campina Grande.

Denilson was also my partner in earning my first little bit of money. When the crowds at the market were calm, around 3 p.m., I would run to Denilson’s stand and his father would say: “Bring me the apples, Hulk!” We would fill the cart with 30 bags of apples, each bag with 20 apples inside, and take them to the stand. But on the way, we would stop and take an apple from each bag to sell on the side. Then we would go around the entire Market shouting:

“Look at these apples! This is a good one! Only here for fresh apples!!!”

We would each earn about four reais at the end of the day. It was enough for the pastries, which we ate fearing that Denilson’s father would find out and, worse, tell my father. That would be a pain. But it ended up being fun. And less hard than working with meat. I like to remember that fun in the midst of the hardships of our lives at that time. If football didn’t work out, my plan with Denilson was to establish a partnership in a stand at the Central Market. But one day, football really called to me. It happened the first time my father took me to watch Treze live at Amigão, our city’s stadium.

I rarely had the chance to watch sports, even though I was always with the ball. On the rare occasions when a television set came on, I would watch the black and white image and think the players were dolls. But that afternoon at Amigão, I understood everything. I had never known such joy. The game really existed! The players existed! It was all real and colorful!

A little later, I met a guy from our neighborhood who had become a professional player and was successful at São Paulo FC: Marcelinho Paraíba. What I felt was a certainty, a realization, a great happiness: “Man, if he was a kid like me, I can be like him!”

I’ve never forgotten the image of my mother, covered in blood and fat, sitting in a corner, devastated because she didn’t know what to do. I would spy on her from behind the boxes, covered in blood and fat like her, and cry because I couldn’t do anything to help.

- Hulk

From then on, I took to football as if it were a plate of pasta with sardines, and I began to stand out in tournaments in the city, then in the state. Then Zé do Egito showed up, a friend of a friend of my father’s in the Central Market. He was involved in the world of football, and he saw me play one day and said he would take me on a trip to do some trials for clubs. There was a lot of crying at home, because my mother didn’t want to let me go: “But the boy is only 12 years old, how can he stay away like that?! He won’t!” My dad had to convince her, vouching for Zé do Egito’s credentials as an honorable and trustworthy man. 

With Zé, who became my first agent, I traveled to João Pessoa, Vitória, São Paulo and, in 2001, at the age of 15, I arrived in Portugal for the first time. I stayed there for a year, at the youth camp of a club called Vilanovense, from the city of Vila Nova de Gaia, which is just across the bridge from Porto.

One day I was at the camp and someone called me to answer the phone. It was our bus driver, Motoca:

“Hulk, what are you doing?”

“Nothing. Just resting.”

“Then get ready and I will come pick you up to surprise you.” 

Motoca took me to the Estádio das Antas, where Porto was going to play a UEFA Cup match. I remember it like it was yesterday because the colors were so bright that the image never left my eyes. I was amazed, I got goosebumps. I had never been in a stadium as big and beautiful as that one. The fans were so loud that I had to shout:

“Motoca, one day I’m going to play here.”

“Huh?”

“I’M GOING TO PLAY HERE, MOTOCA!!”

It was like a vision. Nothing around me mattered, only my conviction, my will to be out there some day. 

Always believe!

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Before that, however, I had roamed the earth a lot, me and Zé do Egito. When I returned to Portugal that year, he took me to São Paulo FC. I spent six months training with the youth team and at the end of the trial period they wanted to sign me. Zé said: “First of all, I made a promise to Hulk that the club that signs him must give his parents a house worth 50,000 reais in Campina Grande.” The people at São Paulo said they couldn’t make that investment. So Zé do Egito kept his word and took me back to Paraíba.

A month later I was in Bahia to do a trial at Vitória. On the first day, playing as a left midfielder, I scored three goals. On the second, two. And on the third, two more. The coach told me to leave the pitch and go straight to the director’s office. I was out of breath from the training session and didn’t even have time to say anything. The director said it all at once:

— We have already agreed to buy your parents’ house and we are ready to transfer the money. If you want to stay with us, we will call your agent here and you can sign it.

It was a professional player’s contract with a salary of 500 reais per month! At 16 years old. I called home right away:

“Mom!! We are going to become millionaires!! They offered me 500 reais per month! I am going to be a pro! You and my father will never pay rent again and my sisters will only eat flour with sugar if it is for dessert, not for necessity.”

“But 500 reais is a lot of money, honey. How are you going to save all of this?”

“I will send everything to you, don’t worry.”

On my first vacation I returned to Campina Grande, and my parents and sisters were already living in the new little house. It is ours to this day. We call it “The Farm.” You can pick lemons and cashews from the tree to make soft drinks and take a dip in “the tank.” Sometimes they talk about selling the house, but I don’t think they ever will. That house is a great symbol. It doesn’t let our family forget what can’t and shouldn’t be forgotten.

I only stayed in Vitória for a year or so. And then my international journey began. I arrived in Japan earning what I thought was a good wage – $3,000 a month – but at first I barely had any money left to save, because the cost of living there is very high. There I put into practice a valuable lesson from Zé do Egito, who one day called me and said: “Pay attention, boy. Between a person who earns $100,000 and spends $120,000 and another person who earns $10,000 and spends $1,000, who is the richest?”

“Eh?” 

“Well, get one thing in your head, because I’m only going to say it this once. Always save 70% of what you earn.”

But Japan ended up being much more than money for me. It was the place where I became wise about certain things. For example, on the first day I moved to Kawasaki City, my next-door neighbor came to mow the lawn in front of my house. He didn't even speak to me. Then they told me that it was a common gesture among Japanese people, a gesture of welcome. I was amazed. I had never seen anything like that. We became friends, this neighbor and I. Neither of us spoke English, but we found a way to communicate. He would come to watch my games, take me on trips to places and teach me a little Japanese. I would invite him over for lunch and cook beans, his favorite Brazilian dish.

By the way, I only learned to cook beans in Japan out of necessity. When I got there, the only thing I knew how to cook was rice with fried eggs. Since my salary didn’t allow me to eat at a restaurant every day, I had to make do at home. One time, before a training session, I only had some old bread left over—already moldy— and an egg to eat. I tore off the moldy parts of the bread, fried the egg on the griddle, and that was my lunch. When it was time to train, I started to feel dizzy and realized that I couldn’t eat like that anymore. I called my mother as soon as I got home. It was still the MSN era. I put on my webcam, and she taught me step-by-step how to cook beans. After that, I never went to training hungry again. And beans became Chef Hulk’s specialty.

I lived in Japan from 2005 to 2008, a wonderful place with wonderful people. When I packed my bags to go to Europe, earning much more than the 3,000 dollars I had earned when I started playing Japanese football, I concluded that having money is good, but learning values ​​like humility, friendship, and solidarity, which the Japanese hold in high regard, is even better.

Seven years after I told Motoca that one day I would play for Porto, Atlético Madrid put an identical offer on the table. Still with that vision in mind, my decision took less than a second: I’m going to Porto, of course!

I landed in Portugal to a lot of mockery. The stadium was no longer Antas, it was now Dragão, but the atmosphere at the club was the same. And so was I: a total unknown with a superhero name. I remember the journalists asking: “Now that Hulk has arrived, when is Spider-Man coming? And has Batman been signed too?” 

It hurt me, but what could I do?

Well, in the first training session, I did something. Quaresma, Lucho González, Bruno Alves, Cristian Rodríguez and all those guys were there. I received a ball in midfield, advanced a little and hit it: TUM! That left-footed shot right into the top corner. There was total silence. And you already know the end of the story…

When I’m retired from football, sitting around my parents and children, drinking a glass of wine with my wife and watching an Atlético match on TV, I will miss all the joy that this club gave me.

- Hulk

I had a season at Porto when I scored 42 goals and provided 25 assists, just two fewer than Messi. I helped the club win a Europa League, a Portuguese league, a Portuguese Cup and a Portuguese Super Cup. Today, if you go to the Porto museum, there is a statue of me there — another reason that I am so proud of my career.

Porto was a second home for me, so when I went to Zenit in Russia, I wanted to leave after the first season. There was a lot of jealousy from some of the older players on the team and a lot of racism from the rival fans. There was even a fake bomb with a note saying “Hulk Out” left at our training center. I overcame these initial difficulties, ended up staying there for four seasons, won titles and lived very well in Russia. Until the Chinese football boom came along, and there was no way I could refuse Shanghai’s offer. Neither I nor the president of Zenit could say no. It was the best contract of my life.

I didn’t know what to expect from China, but I wasn’t disappointed. The country is amazing, safe, has very friendly people, and the football has become very competitive – with good South American and European players. I just didn't want it to be the end of the road for me. I didn't want to fulfill the five seasons stipulated in my contract and, at 34 years old, end my career with that emptiness in my chest that I had felt since I left Vitória, 15 years before.

I wanted to go back to Brazil, where it all began. 

That’s when Atlético came into my life.

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It was the end of 2020 and I was in Campina Grande, resting and thinking about the next step after China. If my phone hadn’t rang with Rodrigo Caetano, who was Atlético’s football director, asking “Do you want to come here?” then I would have gone to Turkey. I would play for two or three years and spend the rest of my days feeling incomplete, regretting a void that I couldn’t fill, despite all my titles.

But the phone rang and I answered yes right away! I knew that it was all uphill for me in Belo Horizonte. Galo was giving me the chance to fulfill my dream of playing at a high level for my people.

When I arrived at Cidade do Galo, I received a magazine on the club’s history, which I read in its entirety. I flipped through the pages and only real superheroes appeared, like Eder Aleixo and Reinaldo.

I was 34 years old, but I was as excited as I was when I was 18. I had a huge desire to be in that magazine. And I always believed it was possible, because one thing I learned there in Campina Grande and especially here, with the unwavering faith of our fans, is that only those who believe from the first to the last minute win in life. And that only a giant club never stops making room for new idols. I was at one of the biggest in the world, the biggest in Minas Gerais, and it all depended on me.

The first year, 2021, was incredible. We won the Mineiro, the Brazilian Championship and the National Cup. But at Galo, my joy never depended on the titles. I know they are important, of course, and I wake up every day wanting to lift a trophy and run with it to the fans. But Atlético offers me much more than that.

One day I realized that stepping onto the Mineirão field wearing our black and white jersey, listening to the fans singing non-stop, seeing my father dressed as the Hulk, jumping like a kid in the stands … it was a magical feeling, because it transported me to a state of happiness that I had only known as a boy. It was like pulling an apple cart with Denilson, or returning home with bloody clothes and my head held high after carrying the beef carcasses all day, or just sitting on the sidewalk in my neighborhood and drinking a cashew juice.

If that boy who worked hard at a Central Market in the countryside of Paraíba made it this far, you can make all your dreams come true as well. 

Always believe!

I believe that I still have a long way to go, and many things to achieve in Belo Horizonte. And when I’m retired from football, sitting around my parents and children, drinking a glass of wine with my wife and watching an Atlético match on TV, I will miss all the joy that this club gave me.

From our fans who never stop believing.

From the day I believed I would be in the magazine of Atlético idols.

My dear Galo, it’s your birthday, but the gift is ours, from those who are lucky enough to walk by your side, helping to write the pages of your history. I offer my eternal gratitude in this simple gift and also, as long as my legs can handle a good hill, my desire to win, fight and always believe.

Congrats, Atlético Mineiro!

Aqui é Galo!!

Happy birthday!!! 

Big hug,

Hulk