When he stepped into the AC Milan dressing room as a seventeen year old, Alexandre Pato was presented with an ultimatum in the form of a copy of Playboy.
Towards the end of the noughties, the AC Milan dressing room was riven by a culture war, not dissimilar to the one which has raged in America since the 1980s.
In the Milan dressing room in 2007, the divide was between those who liked to read the Bible and those who liked to read Playboy.
And never the twain shall meet. A strict segregation policy between the two camps was enforced.
In his earliest days in the San Siro, the spiritual and moral leaders of both the Bible and the Playboy camps stood before Pato and told it was 'time for choosing'.
Ronaldo, an evangalist for the Playboy way of life, shoved a copy under his nose and told he could hang around with his mob or he could pal around Kaka and the rest of the Holy Joes.
He had to pick, either way.
“Ronaldo and Maldini were sitting close to me and Kaka was in front of me in the dressing room. Ronaldo came to me, he asked me how I was and told me: ‘You have to choose between me and Kaka’, showing me a Playboy magazine. ‘You can either enter my group or his (Kaka) group.’”
“That moment was a bit strange. I used to play Ronaldo with my Play Station and I didn’t expect that, but it was still an important moment.”
In the celebrations after Brazil won the 2002 World Cup, Ronaldo was unusual among his teammates in not claiming that Jesus had any special love for him.
He point blank refused to vandalise his shirt with bold declarations of Jesus's love for him. Kaka has never been reticent about such things, crediting Jesus Christ for his various successes wherever and whenever possible.
