Goooool! A soccer tournament in Brazil's Amazon is a win for a community and a business.

In Brazil, uma pelada, slang for a soccer match, is akin to a national religion. Every Sunday, the faithful don uniforms, remove their shoes and head for the beach. Quickly, the players open a clearing, place a soccer ball in mid-field and all of Brazil is again united in the national faith--soccer. In the Amazonian city of Manaus, the pelada has evolved into something more: the peladao.

At first, the peladao looks like a normal, albeit tinge, soccer tournament with as many as 900 teams playing on beaches, cleared forests and sandy lots throughout the Amazon. There's a twist: Each of the teams must bring a beauty queen, who also competes. If a team is eliminated but its beauty queen advances to the next round, as determined by judges, the team re-enters competition. Professional models are banned and each beauty queen, besides being merely pretty, must somehow represent the essence of the team.

Players see the tournament, which lasts from August to December, as a way to relive glory days. "I work nights and am older than most of the players, but before I was 'Robertinho' and I played professional soccer in Brazil," says 40-year old Jose Roberto.

The tournament may host more than 12,000 players and equally as many support staff. Hundreds of beauty queens employ an army of makeup assistants, costume designers and hair stylists. Food vendors sell barbecued steaks, fried cheese and beer. When the empty beer cans go flying from the bleachers, a crew of recyclers quickly crashes them and hauls away the aluminum.

The festival has made other winners. The peladao beauty pageant queen in 2002, 19-year-old Priscilla Meirelles, went on to win free Miss Beach pageant in Mexico and later won Miss Brazil. She says she owes her success to the soccer tradition. "I am a medical student so I don't have much time for these pageants, but this is the most important thing to have ever happened in my life; it was the key that opened all the doors," Meirelles says.

No one knows how many thousands of villages are now carved out of the Amazon River basin, but there is just one modern city: Manaus, on the banks of the Rio Negro, home to 1.6 million. The Brazilian government has long sought to develop the infrastructure of the huge Amazon basin region, and Manaus has been its focal point.

Homegrown. In 1966, Manaus was declared a free-trade zone and today Philips Electronics, Panasonic and Sony each have multimillion dollar manufacturing plants in the same city where mow keys routinely steal food from people's kitchens and five-meter long anacondas occasionally swallow toddlers in the backyard. Manaus today mixes modern and ancient worlds. Tourists, scientists and settlers all flock here for a chance to see, study or sell one of the last remaining intact rainforests in the world.

Manaus is also home to Calderaro Communications, owners of A Critica, the largest newspaper in the Amazon region, which created the soccer tournament. Beginning as a small, daily newspaper in Manaus, the company is now a conglomerate running television and radio operations. Beginning in 1972, company founder Umberto Calderaro organized the peladao, which was designed not to promote winners and losers but to create a homegrown cultural event. "Peladao is a city a party--everyone gets involved," says Dissica Calderaro, grandson of the executive who invented the tournament. "Brazil has three loves, one is futebol, the other is women, the third is beer. When you get these three together, forget about everything else."

Calderaro Communications wants to become the voice of the Amazon for the world. In June 2003, the company launched the first Amazonian news service, covering the states of Amazonas, Acre, Rondonia and Roraima. "We expect that the news service will become a reference source for Europeans, Americans and Japanese. We have a topic [the Amazon] which interests the whole world," said Joao Bosco Becerra de Araujo, an executive superintendent with Calderaro Communications.

But it's ideas like the peladao that have won A Critica awards. The International Newspaper Marketing Association in 2002 gave A Critica four first place prizes for community service, public relations, radio promotion and newspaper research, as a result of the newspaper's "Love Thy Neighbor" campaign.

For some, however, the bottom line is fun: "I have another profession; we all do," says Genival Alias de Souza, 24, a math teacher. "But soccer is a very important part of life. Soccer helps to alleviate stress and remind you that life is not just about work."