FUNCHAL, Portugal -- The waiter at the little café used to be a soldier. A long time ago, Alberto Martins went to war with a boy he grew up with, Dinis Aveiro, whose son would grow up to be Cristiano Ronaldo.
They'd known each other since childhood when they flew into Africa on Sept. 4, 1974. They rode a rattling train with wooden benches through Angola, a train so slow they could get off and smoke and then jog to catch back up. Trucks took them from the end of the train line to a village by the Zambian border, a place named Mossuma. This was their new home, in the hot African savannah, with nights black and ominous, conjuring a familiar feeling for boys who grew up on an island surrounded by deep water and powerful currents.
They returned to that island after the war, and neither moved away. Aveiro worked a little, when he could find an odd job here and there, and he drank a lot, relying on the charity of friends for his next round whenever the money ran out, which it always did. Long before Ronaldo became famous, and before Aveiro fell low enough to sell his son's Manchester United jerseys so he could buy booze, he'd always tell his friends, including Martins, he had a son who'd get all the things he'd failed to get out of life. "My son will be the best player in the world," he'd tell them, and they would always laugh and roll their eyes.
"We would call him a fool," Martins says. "He always believed."
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