Aldyr Schlee, creator of the ‘canarinho,’ official shirt of the Brazilian national team | Image: Gilberto Perin, use under licence CC BY-NC 2.0 In September 1953, the newspaper Correio da Manhã ran a competition calling for proposals for a new kit for the Brazilian national football team. Three years after the team lost a World Cup at home against Uruguay, in the episode known as the Maracanazo, this was an attempt to give a new look to Brazil's most important outfit. The requirement was to use the national flag’s colours in place of white, which was already used by other teams. A 19-year-old who lived near Brazil's southern border with the country that caused the so-called “Maracanazo” defeat, and who sympathized with the Uruguayans, began to sketch some ideas on paper. The yellow shirt, the “canarinho,” created by Aldyr Garcia Schlee, was the chosen one and it turned into one of the most iconic in world football. Its premiere was in 1954. After 70 years the Brazilian jersey, which has had several versions and seen five world titles since, has become a symbol used by right-wing and far-right protesters in Brazil, something very distant from Schlee’s life. He died in 2018. Schlee's son, who bears the same name as his father, Aldyr Rosenthal Schlee, spoke with Global Voices about his father's experiences as a journalist, illustrator, academic, writer, and pro-democracy activist. “It's a very sad thing to see what happened, because my father — politically, obviously — would never have sided with the people who have been wearing this shirt lately,” Rosenthal Schlee said. The creator of the shirt which became a national symbol was born in Jaguarão, in Rio Grande do Sul, on the border between southern Brazil and Uruguay, which today has around 26,000 residents. Raised in the middle of two cultures, as a teenager he moved to the Brazilian city of Pelotas, about 140 kilometres away. It was there that Aldyr raised his family and began a journalistic career, illustrating goals from matches in a local newspaper. Soon after, he built academic and literary careers. As a doctor of humanities, he was a university professor, founded a university and a newspaper, and won awards in journalism and literature. Aldyr Schlee's drawings and sketches for the Brazilian national team shirt | Image: Personal archive, used with permission The younger Aldyr observed that, as it was a time when the sport did not yet attract large amounts of money, the prize for and the public reaction to the shirt's creation were not that significant. It was through the internet, decades later, that his father became well-known: O futebol não tinha as proporções que tem hoje. A gente não pode imaginar o futebol dos anos 1950 (com a importância que tinha naquela época) com a importância que tem hoje. Hoje qualquer coisa no futebol é uma coisa milionária, mas naquela época era tudo semiprofissional. Football didn't have the proportion it has today. We can't imagine football of the 1950s (with the importance it had at that time) given the importance it has today. Today anything in football is something for millionaires, but back then it was all semi-professional. As well as having his drawing chosen, Schlee got an internship at the newspaper that organized the competition in Rio de Janeiro. His son recalled that this period “was the most important thing for him,” and he often thought of it. He describes his father as a defender of democracy, who always “stood against anything totalitarian,” such as the military dictatorship in Brazil which followed the 1964 coup d'état. Aldyr Schlee was never linked to political parties, but his son remembered that he was nevertheless summoned by the police and detained. On one occasion, he was accused of being a communist because he had shown his university students a text “that spoke of the way the Constitution was being violated with [how the situation] was at that moment,” as he recalls: Uma aluna levou o texto para o pai dela, que entregou para um capitão do Exército, que era parente deles […] Em função disso meu pai passou a ser acusado de ser comunista, teve que enfrentar Inquéritos Policiais Militares (IPMs), respondendo por subversão e pela forma como sempre se postou. A student took the text to her father, who gave it to an Army captain who was a relative of theirs […] As a result, my father was accused of being a communist, he had to face Military Police Investigations (IPMs), questioned about subversion and the positions that he always took. The son also noted that the repression and censorship of the time had a direct impact on Schlee's academic career, and prevented him from defending his doctoral thesis, which discussed peoples’ right to self-determination: A vida familiar ficou muito difícil.