Eight World Cups Read online

  We began playing games, a noisy multilingual band taking the subway or bus to Bushwick, Forest Hills, Bayside. The journey to the heart of soccer was to Grover Cleveland High School’s home field, the Metropolitan Oval, on a plateau in Maspeth near the Brooklyn-Queens border—near Bob Seel’s old neighborhood of Ridgewood.

  When we reconnected years later, Bob told me that his father, a German immigrant named George Seel, had learned the sport in Kaiserslautern, and after moving to America had become a star with the German Hungarian club in New York. “I never saw the man play,” Bob told me sadly, but he did see his dad gambol in old-timers’ games, where he was treated with great respect by other players of his generation.

  Bob recalled at least five ethnic social clubs in the old neighborhood, all with a bar and meeting hall on the main floor and changing rooms for the players in the basement. He was not given to bragging but said that as a twelve-year-old in Ridgewood he had scored with each foot in the state championship game for his age group, before his family moved out to eastern Queens. This game was in his genes; it was a pleasure to watch him play.

  On game days we would emerge from the subway, walk through the curvy streets of Maspeth, and find the Oval, mostly dirt and pebbles but what a view—the skyline of Manhattan towering directly behind the west goal. It was one of those holy places—Delphi, Kyoto, Cholula, the ancient Mexican town of 365 temples—where you feel in your bones that you are at the navel of the earth. Not only that, but the Grover Cleveland soccer team actually attracted fans—not just the occasional parent or girlfriend but real neighbors, kids, men and women, old people, shouting encouragement, knowing the game.

  In my junior season I sat on the bench with the subs while Seel and our regulars gave Grover Cleveland a good battle, but ultimately we gave up a few goals, their players shook our hands, and we trudged back toward the subway, proud of ourselves for not giving up more. Sometimes I got to play in scrimmages, with the regulars cheering and shouting instructions while I lumbered toward a loose ball and booted it downfield. I had not learned to make tactical passes, and never did.

  Defense appealed to me. Stop the sneaky bastards before they get too far. To this day, I enjoy watching defenders—football safeties who arrogantly swat away the long pass, hockey brutes who break up an attack with a hip check. On our pebbly home field in Jamaica, the afternoon sun in my eyes, I was the cop on the beat, however clumsy and crude. Whenever I run into people who play soccer, I ask, “What position?” It’s a Rorschach test; it explains your personality.

  In my senior year, many of our regulars had graduated, so I got to start. Sometimes Bob Seel would score a goal or two in the first half and then take over as keeper in the second half, but he couldn’t save all my mistakes.

  In our annual trek to Grover Cleveland, my chief tormentor was a curly-haired thick-necked forward named Reinhart “Bubbi” Herink, who faked me to Brooklyn, faked me to the Bronx, exposing me as a lumbering oaf.

  My career came to an end against Brooklyn Automotive High School on the beautiful afternoon of October 4, 1955, in the Borough of Churches. Baseball fans have already sussed out that date. Up in the Bronx, the Dodgers were playing the Yankees in the seventh game of the World Series. Somebody had a portable radio in the stands, and I kept edging over toward the sidelines to catch the baseball score—something I never saw Franco Baresi or Andreas Brehme do. At halftime, Mr. Harrington said, “If you want to listen to the ball game, you can sit on the bench.” Which I did, for the rest of the season.

  Bob Seel went on to play soccer, basketball, and baseball at the Philadelphia Textile Institute and had a long career as an agent for the Treasury Department. At our fiftieth class reunion, I thanked him for my first example of what this sport could be.

  As for Reinhart Herink: a few weeks after faking me into Newtown Creek, he scored the only goal in the 1955 city championship match against Lafayette High School, with a great feint followed by a goal into the upper corner. When I learned that, years later, I felt a bit better. At least he terrorized everybody.

  * * *

  The sport had a hold on me. When I arrived at Hofstra College the next fall, I had lost forty pounds but was too busy working as a student publicist for the athletic department to even think about going out for soccer. However, I took my four semesters of gym in an autumn soccer class, run by the basketball-soccer coaches, Butch van Breda Kolff and Paul Lynner, terrific athletes themselves, who sometimes would jump into the game to show us a trick or two. They were scouting for athletes who could learn to play varsity soccer, but they never invited me.

  I savored those autumn afternoons, sliding around on grass and mud, the wind and rain whipping off the plains of Hempstead. I must have played forty matches between high school and gym class, but never in my life did I get close enough to take a shot.

  Soccer was still lurking inside me in 1967, when I was a reporter covering baseball for Newsday. I had never noticed the 1966 World Cup in England when it was taking place, but a year later a full-length documentary named Goal! The World Cup began getting good reviews. The film was playing at the Paris or the Guild, one of those charming little art houses in Manhattan, so one afternoon I slipped into the theater and was captivated by the teams from all over the world, the fans, the physicality of the sport.

  I had covered Mickey Mantle’s home runs and Bill Russell’s blocks; these soccer players on the big screen were just as compelling. There was the effervescent Pelé of Brazil, being kicked by cynical defenders, and the dignified Eusebio of Portugal, being hacked, and there were the mysterious North Koreans, impassive and aggressive, in a shocking 1–0 victory that earned the Italian players that tomato barrage when they arrived at the airport in Rome.

  The main theme of the film was the progress of the English and West German teams toward the final, at Wembley Stadium in London. World War II was still part of collective memory in 1966; the film did not mention the war per se but subtly made the point that these two nations had a bit of history between them.

  The final was tied at 2–2 after ninety minutes, and the teams went into overtime. In the 101st minute, a shot by England’s Geoff Hurst hit the bottom of the crossbar and bounced near the wide chalk stripe of the goal line. The officials conferred and ruled it a goal, although the rudimentary camera work of the day suggested that the ball did not actually cross the line. Hurst scored again in the 120th minute for the 4–2 victory, still the only World Cup championship for the nation that invented soccer.

  In that dark movie theater in Manhattan in 1967, I was hooked.

  A couple of decades later, in a World Cup press room, I was charmed by the prehistoric clackety-clack of an Olivetti portable (lightweight, built to last forever), recording the words of Brian Glanville, the great correspondent of the Sunday Times. I have come to think that soccer lends itself to great writing because it thrives in the imagination, like so much of life. Great writers put themselves into the possibilities of the sport—pondering, What if Sócrates of Brazil had passed to his left instead of his right? I suspect that poor doomed midfielder asked himself the same thing. Cervantes, Tolstoy, Dickens would have loved divining the choices of the costumed surrogate armies in our modern world of soccer. Over the years, I sought out the writing of Glanville and Gardner, Foer and Kuper, Galeano and Hornby.

  In one of those media rooms, somebody told me that Glanville had written the script for Goal!, but in those Babel-like settings I could never muster up the courage to ask him about it. The documentary, directed by Ross Devenish, a South African, and Abidin Dino, a Turk—how international is that?—has more or less vanished in the United States because of rights legalities, but in 2013 a friend burned me a DVD, and I was instantly reassured as to just how wonderful, how seminal, the film is.

  The camera catches not only the expertise of the best footballers in the world but also their tumbles, their gaffes. The musical arrangements by Johnny Hawksworth—the spare pace, the chimes, the stray horns—are the epi
tome of mid-’60s cool jazz. At one point, an Argentine player dawdles while leaving the pitch after a deserved red card, and Hawksworth supplies squawks of a burlesque horn to underscore the man’s foolishness, like a circus background in a Fellini film.

  Perhaps the viewer has come for a soccer documentary but is instead treated to an art film—quick shots of teams arriving in England, very ’60s-ish, very Bond-ish, lots of birds in very short skirts. The Spanish team disembarks, and the narrator, Nigel Patrick, softly notes that Spain, for all that talent, somehow comes up short. This was 1966, and Brian Glanville was spot on. Only forty years to go, compañeros.

  In one staccato segment, players hack away at one another, and the narrator alludes to “the football of negativity”—as if players of bygone decades had all been ballet soloists.

  In an Iron Curtain intramural, the Soviets propel one Hungarian over a low wall, into the front row. The player steadies himself and graciously waves a hand to reassure the bobbies that he is well enough to continue. When the Soviets win, the narrator says, “The steamroller has crushed the artist.” It is the closest the narration comes to overt political comment.

  Early in 2013, I rang up Glanville in London, still chipper, now well into his eighties. He told me he had stopped going to World Cups after 2006, leaving him with thirteen, one behind the record of David Miller of England and Malcolm Brodie of Belfast. Glanville also told me that he was the second choice to write Goal! The original choice was Bryan Stanley Johnson, who called himself an experimental novelist. “I called him B. S. Johnson,” Glanville said.

  “I don’t think England would have won anywhere else,” Glanville said about the home-field advantage at Wembley. He fretted that the film might seem “chauvinistic” but was proud that the documentary does not dwell on the history between the two nations. “I mean, I’m Jewish, but I was on good terms with the Germans; it was a football match,” Glanville told me.

  The film is the work of artists who know how to pace themselves. It ends in littered, sun-dappled, and silent Wembley, after the queen and the hordes and the players have all departed the premises. Johnny Hawksworth tosses in spare notes from, of all tunes, “The Farmer in the Dell,” and the narrator enunciates Brian Glanville’s muted final words: “And at Wembley, Mr. McElroy locks up.” Have you ever heard a better ending to a documentary?

  I told Glanville that I hold him personally responsible for my fascination with the World Cup.

  * * *

  Maybe there was another reason I was drawn to soccer—all the foreign connections in my family. My mother was born in England to an Australian father and an Irish mother, and the family migrated to the United States after World War I. My mother’s Irish aunt had moved to Brussels, and that aunt’s daughter, Florence Duchene, died in Bergen-Belsen after being caught harboring Scottish soldiers.

  My father had Old World ties, too. He had been adopted by an old Hungarian family that had long settled in Connecticut. (My guess is that my father was part Jewish, but we will never know.) His adoptive mother spoke with a thick Hungarian accent, and my aunt Irene sang in Hungarian nightclubs on the East Side of Manhattan.

  In our first years of marriage, my wife and I loved visiting my Hungarian grandmother and aunt, who stayed up late into the night, sipping sweet Tokay wine and chatting about music and spirituality and the old days. One day, my grandmother proclaimed that my wife and I had the makings of good Europeans. I wondered, What does that mean?

  All I knew was that I needed to live on the eastern edge of America, in the city of spices and noses and accents. When my family went to Jones Beach, I felt the Atlantic stretching across to England, where my mother was born. Did my European roots make me receptive to the sport of the world?

  I got my first sense of soccer noise in the summer of 1970, when we were staying in a hotel near the Spanish Steps. There is no place like Italy for a family vacation. Italians made our three young children feel welcome in trattorias or museums or churches. “Famiglia, famiglia,” people said.

  Very late one night, we were awakened by a mob below our windows—chants of “Ee-tal-ya! Ee-tal-ya!” People were massing in a square, waving flags and banners, milling around good-naturedly, cars honking. After an hour or so, the crowd dissipated, and we went back to sleep.

  In the morning I asked the desk clerk about the demonstration. He gave me the short version: Italy won a soccer game in Mexico.

  Many years later I looked it up: at four o’clock in the afternoon (local time) in Azteca Stadium, Italy and West Germany played an epic semifinal of the 1970 World Cup. West Germany equalized in the final seconds of added time, and then the teams scored five goals in the extra thirty minutes, with Gianni Rivera of Italy scoring the decisive goal in the 111th minute. Franz Beckenbauer finished the match with a separated shoulder. Given the eight-hour time difference, that match would have ended at two in the morning in Rome. No wonder people were out in the streets, cheering.

  * * *

  I was busy covering religion for the New York Times in the late 1970s and pretty much missed the brief glowing spurt across the firmament by the New York Cosmos, the legendary professional team that was known for Pelé on the field and Mick Jagger in the stands. When I came back to cover sports in 1980, entire franchises and ancient stars were flaming out from the North American Soccer League, but I was drawn to the spectacle of another of the Cosmos’ aging stars, Giorgio Chinaglia, a stormy Italian who had grown up in Wales, who could plant his bulky frame near the goal and outmaneuver anybody, and who was hell on coaches. Giorgio had played on Italian teams that disappointed their fans in the World Cup; the Cosmos also had Franz Beckenbauer, the suave midfielder who had helped West Germany win the World Cup in 1974, and a smooth old defender, Carlos Alberto, who had played for Brazil’s champions in 1970.

  When he turned thirty-eight years old in 1982, Carlos Alberto retired in the most touching farewell for an athlete I have ever seen. The Cosmos, with their showbiz flair from their part owner, the record impresario Ahmet Ertegun, had the old master play half the match for Flamengo, his previous team, and half for the Cosmos. Afterward, he took a victory lap around Giants Stadium, with the loudspeaker playing Carly Simon’s song “Nobody Does It Better.” To this day, whenever I hear that version, I think of the grand old footballer slowly circling the field, waving at the fans in the gloom of a dying league.

  The aging stars imparted the aura of the World Cup. I looked up the record: Uruguay won at home in 1930, Italy won at home in 1934, Italy won in France in 1938, Uruguay won in Brazil in 1950, West Germany won in Switzerland in 1954, Brazil won in Sweden in 1958, Brazil won in Chile in 1962, England won at home in 1966 (“And at Wembley, Mr. McElroy locks up”), Brazil won in Mexico in 1970, West Germany won at home in 1974, and Argentina won at home in 1978.

  The geometry of the game, the space, the freedom of choice for footballers who suddenly come into possession of the ball—all of these made me love soccer. But even as my appreciation grew, I could not help noticing the disdain from friends of my generation, who clearly hated the idea, the very existence, of the sport. Soccer was not part of their childhood, they seemed to be saying, and therefore could not be part of their adult lives. If soccer was so important, why hadn’t their fathers kicked a ball to them instead of throwing it?

  Generations had been formed by the voices of Mel Allen or Vin Scully talking baseball or Marty Glickman talking basketball. I could easily understand a lack of interest from Americans who had other sporting diversions, golf or auto racing or whatever. Chacun à son goût, as they say in other parts of the world. But I am talking about hatred.

  There was some deeper antipathy or fear that caused television comedians to toss off stale one-liners about scoreless ties—the old “nothing happened” criticism of this low-scoring sport. Soccer seemed to remind Americans of something they instinctively feared—foreign languages, foreign influences. I’ve seen the freaky reaction of Americans’ renaming French fries “freedom fr
ies” in the run-up to the war in Iraq—irrational, but not totally funny. Or the horrible stigma of John Kerry speaking French or Republicans’ shock upon learning that Mitt Romney could also speak French.

  In a country that was founded mostly by people who wanted to get away from the Old World, soccer seemed to bring out a defensiveness, an isolationist posture, a fear of mobs and stomping boots in the generation that was young during World War II and the Holocaust and the Cold War and nuclear proliferation.

  This animosity to soccer has been abetted by many of the best sportswriters of the past generation. I have a theory: traditionally, when young people were breaking into what we used to call the newspaper business, they were assigned to take a crack at soccer. Somebody had to do it. Maybe it was some ethnic league in a funky old stadium, some touring world team with inscrutable names and languages. Go make sense of this, kid.

  The strangers in shorts would then play ninety minutes, and nobody would score, and nobody could explain what just happened. What do you write when you have just witnessed a scoreless tie? You make fun of it. I suspect I did it myself once or twice.

  Wacko theories abounded. Wise and witty and informed sportswriters predicted the sport would never catch on because, after all, Americans cannot possibly relate to a sport whose primary skills involve the pedal extremities. Soccer touched off footy phobia.

  Another theory was: Americans need double-digit football scores and triple-digit basketball scores. Unless they can witness a series of acrobatic dunks, with the scoreboard digitally rising like the National Debt Clock, then Americans lose interest. We like things big, like American restaurants doling out super-size portions, even if they bring on diabetes. By that logic, soccer is tofu and bean sprouts. (I like tofu and bean sprouts.)