James Buckley Jr. - Who Is Cristiano Ronaldo?

The island of Madeira is in the Atlantic Ocean, about 620 miles from the coast of Portugal. Madeira is a region of Portugal. Cristiano Ronaldo dos Santos Aveiro was born on Madeira on February 5, 1985. His mother, Dolores dos Santos, chose the name Cristiano. His father, Jos Dinis, chose Ronaldo, after Ronald Reagan, the American president at the time, and a man Jos Dinis admired. For most of his life, Cristiano has been known just by his first two names, which is not unusual for people from Portugal.

Cristiano was the youngest of four children. The family lived in a three-room house with a tin roof in a poor part of the islands biggest city, Funchal. Soccer was a huge part of Cristianos life from when he was very young. Jos Dinis worked as the equipment manager for a local soccer club called Andorinha (Portuguese for the Swallows). He took care of the uniforms, known as the kit, the balls, and even the grass on the teams fields.

Once Cristiano finally got his own ball, it almost never left him. He slept with his ball, it never left his side. It was always under his armwherever he went, it went with him, remembered his godfather, Fernando Sousa. Once when Cristiano brought the ball to school with him, a teacher told him he was making a mistake. She told him that the ball would never feed him; he had to put it aside and learn his lessons.

He played most often in the street, because their neighborhood had no fields. He and his friends would form goals with rocks or rags, and they had to move out of the way quickly when cars came by. From the first time he touched the ball, Cristiano was something special. He could dribble past anyone. He made moves that only older players would try. Cristiano followed his father to work sometimes and tried to play with the older kids on the junior team. By the time the young player was nine years old, he had joined Andorinha.

As great as he was at soccer, Cristiano was still very young. He cried oftenwhen he missed a goal, when his team lost, when the ball wasnt passed to him. In fact, one of his nicknames on the team was Crybaby.

His teammates gave him another nickname: Abelhinha, which means little bee in Portuguese. They saw him zipping around like a buzzing insect as he played.

Jos Dinis often came to watch Cristianos games. Dolores watched, too, but she later said she was too nervous. She did not want to see her son get hurt!

Cristianos skills were now being noticed by other teams. A larger youth club called Nacional wanted him to join. In 1995, Andorinha was given twenty soccer balls and two sets of team uniforms to release Cristiano so he could join the other team.

He was not with Nacional very long. When he was twelve, a pro soccer club called Sporting Lisbon, in the capital of Portugal, asked him to try out. They had heard stories of this amazing island player who was tall and skinny, fast and dedicated. Top pro teams in Europe often have youth academies. They pay for young players to live and train together. The hope is that many will grow up to play for the clubs top teams.

At only twelve years old, Cristiano would have to leave his island home for the first time and live across the water in the city of Lisbon, far from his family.

Cristiano didnt think twice. It was a chance to keep playing the game he loved. In August 1997, he flew to Lisbon to begin his pro career.