Hercílio Luz

Zenon was seventeen when he first pulled on a shirt at Hercílio Luz, in 1971, before Guarani made him an idol and Corinthians a champion, and before Brazil capped him in 1979. The boy from Tubarão never came back to wear red and white as a professional again.

Hercílio Luz carries the nickname Leão do Sul, and it earned it on the pitch: the club was the first from the southern coast of Santa Catarina to win the state championship, and it did so twice running, in 1957 and 1958. The first final, against Carlos Renaux, needed a third match in Florianópolis, and Hercílio Luz won it 2-0 with seven men on the field after four were sent off. Those two titles carried the club into the first Taça Brasil in 1959, the first time a team from the state had reached a national competition; Atlético Paranaense put them out in the opening round.

A flood tore through Tubarão in 1974 and forced the club out of professional football. It returned a decade later, then licensed itself again, and spent thirteen years, from 1995 to 2008, out of the professional game altogether.

Sixty-eight years passed between that second Catarinense title and the next piece of silverware. It came in 2026, in the second tier of the state championship, and sent Hercílio Luz back up to the top flight. The club has not played in a national competition since that single appearance in 1959.