Brenda Pontes, right, the reigning queen of the Peladão’s beauty pageant in Brazil's Amazon rain forest getting ready for a television appearance at the A Crítica television station where she works. (Photo: NYT)
By JERÉ LONGMAN | NYT
JULY 6, 2014
MANAUS, Brazil — It was a newsroom like any television station newsroom, unless you count the brunette receptionist wearing a crown, sash and leopard print dress and offering friendly advice on how to spice up the World Cup.
“Beauty queens,” Brenda Pontes, 19, said.
The World Cup does have many things — consuming attention, enthralling soccer and a carnival atmosphere — but it does not have beauty queens.
In the Amazon rain forest, though, there is a tournament that is equal parts soccer and beauty pageant. It is one of the largest and most unusual amateur soccer competitions in the world, and perhaps the only one with a reality show. Pontes is the reigning queen.
The tournament is called the Peladão. The name is a reference to pelada, a Portuguese word that can mean a naked woman. But in this case it means soccer disrobed of big money and glamour and revealed in its informal essence — pickup games played in Brazil on dusty fields, on sandy beaches and even on ferries in floating villages.
Read more at The New York Times.
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