 football player of all time. But there is one lesser known football legend from South America who is also the sole living member of his team—a team that pulled off one of the greatest upsets in football history.
It was the 1950 World Cup, played in host country Brazil. In the final game the home team faced an opponent from next door, the small country of Uruguay. There were 200,000 fans inside the world’s largest football stadium that was built just for the World Cup, rooting for Brazil. It seemed impossible for Uruguay to upset the home team.
Brazil only needed a tie against Uruguay to win the Cup and only an upset win could give it to Uruguay. Everyone was so sure of a Brazilian victory that local newspapers had already printed an announcement of the win the morning before the match. Uruguay’s coach bought every copy in their hotel’s newsstand and brought it back to the room for his team to pee on.
Brazil led much of the game 1–0 until Uruguay’s Juan Schiaffino scored to tie it at 1–1. Still, a tie was all Brazil needed—they just had to hang on. With only 11 minutes remaining, Uruguayan Alcides Ghiggia scored, winning the game at 2–1.
The massive crowd was stunned into silenced. Uruguay won the game and the Cup. The loss became not only part of Brazilian history, but also of the Brazilian psyche. It was and still remains known to this day as the Maracanaco, meaning “shock.” A noted Brazilian commented that every country has its own national catastrophe, and for Brazil, it was the loss to Uruguay in 1950.
The hero of that game, a legend in world soccer and especially in his home country of Uruguay, is the only survivor of that historic team. In 2013, still very much part of world soccer, Ghiggia was honored to be one of those at the final selection process of the 2014 World Cup match, which will also be played in Brazil. Ghiggia plans on being there—to root for Uruguay, of course. In 2014, Ghiggia will be one of only two people (the other being the president of Uruguay) who will be allowed to touch the coveted World Cup trophy as it travels through Uruguay to Brazil.
1 David Greenglass
The Last Living Rosenberg Co-Conspirator
On June 19, 1953, an American couple named Julius Rosenberg and Ethel Greenglass Rosenberg were executed for spying and handing atomic bomb secrets to the Soviets in a trial that was a defining moment in Cold War espionage history. Over 60 years later, only one of their major co-conspirators is left—Ethel Rosenberg’s brother, David Greenglass.
The spy ring began with a brilliant nuclear physicist who worked at the secret Los Alamos nuclear facility designing and building the first atomic bomb, Klaus Fuchs. In 1949, the Soviet Union exploded their first atomic bomb, years before they were expected to be able to. Fuchs was the scientist who fed US and Canadian atomic secrets to the Soviets that allowed them to shave years off their development of an atomic bomb. He confessed to spying and implicated a chemist named Harry Gold. Gold, who would be convicted of espionage and sentenced to 30 years in prison, implicated David Greenglass, a US soldier stationed in Los Alamos. Greenglass had been recruited by Julius Rosenberg through Greenglass’s wife, Ruth Greenglass. David Greenglass became a Soviet spy, passing on secrets through Gold and Julius Rosenberg to the Soviets.
Ruth Greenglass and Julius Rosenberg were both passionate communists, but Ethel Rosenberg did not seem to share her husband’s passion and did not appear to be involved in the espionage. Her only guilt seemed to be she was the sister-in-law of Ruth Greenglass. During the Rosenbergs’ trial, David Greenglass testified that Ethel Rosenberg had typed some of the secret documents he had passed along to the Soviets, thus implicating Ethel Rosenberg directly as a spy. Greenglass probably said this to save the life of his wife, who was not prosecuted, even though it appears certain Ruth recruited her husband to spy for the Soviets.
In exchange for his testimony, David Greenglass received a 15-year sentence instead of death. Greenglass would late