Eight World Cups Read online

  I have sat with colleagues at the 1994 World Cup in the United States, when Italy’s Roberto Baggio—the sublime artist, Il Divin Codino, a Buddhist with a pigtail—controlled the ball in midfield with a few swoops and swerves, found a gap in the defense, and dished off a pass to a striker, who delivered a cannonball that soared just wide. The reaction from some colleagues was: nothing happened.

  But look: just before the shot, a defender delivered a hip check that sent the striker slightly off stride, just enough to change the arc of the ball, not enough to merit a yellow card or a red card. That’s what the game is about—waiting for the shocking moment when everything goes right for the offense, or somebody makes a mistake.

  This is not an easy sport, but the skills are exquisite. My photographer pal John McDermott, who worked the World Cup sidelines for decades, once watched his friend Baggio practice free kicks. “He could make ten of ten into the corners,” John recalled. But with a keeper protecting the goal and a wall of defenders bouncing around, hands cupping the most vital part of their anatomy, it was not that simple.

  Why do some free kicks splat into the wall of defenders, like a moth hitting the windshield? Do the kickers get caught up in the moment and forget about fundamentals? This is why everybody celebrates goals. This is why billions of people love the improbability of this sport.

  I have also read the theory that Americans cannot possibly relate to a sport with so many draws. We demand a winner. For the first four seasons of its existence, Major League Soccer pandered to this theory by conducting shoot-outs, but the home office of FIFA, located in Zurich, chastised the young league, so in 2000, MLS legitimized draws, and rightfully so.

  Fans all over the world accept the dynamics of a draw. A team can go on the road on the final day of the season, needing a draw in hostile territory to avoid relegation. The tension in the closing minutes can grip an entire city or region. How hard is that to feel?

  Maybe it’s the British soccer vocabulary that drives Americans crazy. I once had a sports editor, a really good editor, who sent me to a bunch of World Cups but also mocked the sport because of foreign words like “pitch” instead of field and “draw” instead of tie. I always wanted to sneak up behind him and blurt “nil-nil” to see if I could make him levitate, but I refrained. As I said, he is a good friend and a good editor.

  We’ve all got cultural gaps. I get distracted during American football games—all those time-outs and substitutions—and cannot remember who is playing. Still, I would never try to talk anybody out of loving helmetball. (I know a few sportswriters, bless their hearts, who actually coach youth soccer, as a civic duty. I will not name names.)

  Traditionally, American sports editors would take note of world-level soccer only when they came across a photo of a soccer riot, death in the stadium. Horrors like Heysel and Sheffield and Bradford City are a quarter century in the past; hooligans have been minimized in western Europe as the sport became big business with high ticket prices and no-drinking, no-cursing, no-smoking family sections. But even in these kinder, gentler times, racist behavior has become more noticeable in Europe these days, and those who have observed from this side of the Atlantic have often blamed such racist chants on a sport that does not employ hands, a theory akin to birther prattle.

  To me, with my European roots, soccer did not sound like tromping boots, did not smell like tear gas. It sounded like prayer chants and universal rock, it smelled like beer and empanadas, wine and wursts, and it felt like home. I listened to Chinaglia and Beckenbauer and Carlos Alberto talking about their World Cups, and I thought, I really need to see one of these for myself.

  3

  THE BEST GROUP EVER

  SPAIN, 1982

  The World Cup could never get better than this, but I had no way of knowing it, back then. Every World Cup has a “Group of Death”—the most competitive cluster in the first round—but in 1982 the tournament was expanded from sixteen to twenty-four teams, creating a second round of group play.

  The wicked sense of humor of a higher power assembled the greatest talent ever seen in one place—Brazil, with three past championships, Italy, with two early titles, and Argentina, the defending champion. Only one team would advance to the semifinals. This was not a Group of Death; this was a Group of Mass Extinction.

  Recently appointed a sports columnist, I had suggested to my editors at the New York Times that I cover a chunk of the World Cup. They knew very little about this strange sport and its emotional crowds, but they approved my proposal, probably from their superb instincts on international reportage. Since the United States wasn’t in it, they told me to go for the second round and stay through the end. Cool.

  I followed the first round on television, watching tiny figures flitting across the screen. There was no Internet in those days, but I gleaned a few basics from rudimentary wire service reports. Some days I would wander over to the Hotalings newsstand in Times Square and pick up European papers and clip snippets on soccer. In other words, I was unprepared.

  The first round was nuts. In an episode straight out of “The Marx Brothers Go to the World Cup,” the president of the Kuwait Football Association stormed onto the field to protest a goal by France after his players believed a whistle had been blown to stop play. In his robe, sandals, and kaffiyeh, the sheikh berated the Ukrainian official, who then stunningly reversed his decision. The sheikh returned to the stands, and France swamped Kuwait, 4–1. Neither Kuwait nor that official has been back since.

  In another first-round match, tiny Algeria stunned West Germany, 2–1. People were calling it one of the biggest upsets in World Cup history, on a par with North Korea’s victory over Italy in 1966 and the United States’ victory over England in 1950.

  Wait a minute. The United States beat England in the World Cup? This was news to me. I discovered the United States had indeed upset England, 1–0, on a goal by Joe Gaetjens, who was actually from Haiti. I also learned that newspaper editors of the time believed the score was a typographical error when it came clattering over the wires from Brazil, so they awarded the victory to England, until confirmation arrived later.

  Plus, it was only soccer. In 1960, Americans would celebrate the Olympic ice hockey gold medal, and in 1980, they would celebrate another gold medal, but the nation had no collective memory of a soccer World Cup victory over England in 1950. It was as if it never happened.

  * * *

  I traveled to Spain by way of England, where I was introduced to the dark side of soccer. At Wimbledon, I saw Billie Jean King and Jimmy Connors, two geriatric icons having a grand run. During a rain delay, I stood around a hospitality tent watching the World Cup from glittering Spain.

  On the screen, eleven players from West Germany and eleven players from Austria were waltzing with one another, as graceful as dancers in Vienna entertaining Sacher-Torte-und-Kaffee-mit-Schlag tourists. Hans from Austria would lead for a while and then Fritz from West Germany would lead. The Europeans in the hospitality tent were not amused and were directing the anger at FIFA.

  FIFA, somebody explained, had scheduled the third and final matches of each group in the first round on separate days, thereby opening up a huge strategic advantage for the teams that went last. Algeria had two victories and one loss for 4 points (two for each victory) and a 5–5 goal balance. Twenty-four hours later, everybody had figured out the mathematics for this group: if West Germany beat Austria by any margin under four goals, both teams would advance to the next round, eliminating Algeria.

  As the saying goes, wunderbar.

  The ensuing match on June 25 between the two German-speaking countries was disgraceful. West Germany scored in the tenth minute, and the two teams waltzed with each other as most of the fans in Gijón whistled angrily. The 1–0 lead held up for the final eighty minutes of the match, and both countries advanced. Algeria was screwed.

  By the next World Cup, FIFA would mandate simultaneous third matches, which made it harder to manipulate a result. However, FIF
A would wait until 1994 to allot three points for a victory in group play, which served to reward more aggressive play. All of this was too late to help Algeria. In the swank hospitality tent at Wimbledon, I picked up a heady whiff of scorn for FIFA.

  * * *

  By the time I flew from soggy London to sunny Barcelona, everybody in the world knew that FIFA was stuck with a mammoth miscalculation. It had placed two second-round groups in the magnificent city that nurtured Dalí and Miró, the city transformed by Gaudí, but one group would play its matches in the grand stadium called Camp Nou, with its capacity of 115,000, while the other group was in a funky little arena named Sarrià, nicknamed La Bombonera (The Candy Box) which held only 43,000.

  However, because Argentina and Italy had performed below expectations in the first round, they were now matched with Brazil in the little stadium while the stolid collection of Belgium, Poland, and the Soviet Union had qualified for Camp Nou. The stadiums were set in stone, with no room for flexibility.

  The first World Cup match I saw in person was in Camp Nou, between Poland and Belgium. I learned to love the ritual of two national squads marching out for the anthems, exchanging banners, posing for the starting-team photo, and then whacking away at each other. Poland won that match, 3–0, with Zbigniew Boniek scoring goals three different ways—with his foot off a pass, with a header, and by dribbling and faking out the backup keeper. I also learned that Boniek was about to leave his Polish club to play for Juventus, the powerhouse of Italy, as part of the normal market of soccer, in which stars frequently move to larger clubs for larger salaries.

  The attendance was given as 65,000, but it looked more like 30,000 to me. Polish fans did enliven the evening by waving Solidarnosc (Solidarity) banners, supporting the labor uprising going on at home, to taunt any stray Soviet fans in the stadium. Even with this nationalistic fervor, Camp Nou was tepid.

  The next day, by comparison, Sarrià quivered with life. The stadium is long gone now, but I remember it as crammed into an urban neighborhood, a version of Boston’s homey old Fenway Park, at least before Fenway was yuppified. Lucky Sarrià. On three mad days, it was home to the greatest group ever assembled.

  Brazil had already won three of the first eleven World Cups, and this squad was considered one of its greatest ever. My assumption as a novice was that Brazil would surely win the tournament. But the first match of that group was between Argentina, the defending champion, and Italy, which had been wracked by a recent gambling scandal. Paolo Rossi, a fleet forward, had been suspended for almost two seasons but was conveniently reinstated just in time to compete in Spain. The Italian players were smarting over criticism from their performance in the first round—three lackluster draws. Rossi had failed to score, and there were calls for him to be benched.

  The press seats at Sarrià were close to the field—maybe the tenth row or so. After watching from up high in cavernous Camp Nou the night before, I was thrilled to be able to see the features of the players, the long hair of the Argentines, as they stood for their nearly four-minute-long national anthem.

  It is often a mistake to judge teams on the basis of their national stereotypes, but the fact is, the World Cup is an international event, with players representing their homelands and carrying all the baggage of whatever is in the news. The nasty skirmish between Argentina and Great Britain over islands off the Argentina coast, alternately known as the Malvinas or the Falklands, was fresh in everyone’s mind. The war had begun on April 2 and ended with Argentina’s surrender on June 14. The Argentine players would surely insist, fifteen days later, that the only thing that mattered was soccer, but who really knew how the battles, the sinking of ships, the deaths of fellow countrymen, affected the players?

  As the anthem played, I watched Diego Armando Maradona, Argentina’s tempestuous prodigy. He was famous for having cried when he was left off the 1978 Argentina team at the age of seventeen because the coach, César Luis Menotti, had thought Maradona was not ready. Argentina then won the World Cup without him.

  Now Maradona was standing there in Sarrià, all five feet five inches of him, with thick curly locks—a marked man in every sense. As he looked off into space during the anthem, I could only guess what it meant to be Maradona, the hope of Argentina. With his pre-Columbian looks, he was a mixture of Italian and Native American. Maradona had moved as a child with his family from the outback of Argentina into a hard barrio of Buenos Aires. While still very young, he entertained fans with his dribbling and other ball tricks at halftime of club games, and then moved up rapidly through the youth system.

  Shortly before this World Cup, Maradona had signed a lucrative contract with one of Spain’s most venerable clubs, FC Barcelona, the powerhouse that played at Camp Nou, and was under intense pressure to justify his cost. Barça shareholders had already seen him play in his new home in the first round in a foreboding 1–0 loss to Belgium. Sarrià was enemy turf, the home of Barça’s Catalan rival, RCD Espanyol; welcome to the World Cup.

  Maradona was playing with a sore hamstring, but we did not know that. He would be marked by the Italian defender Claudio Gentile, who, I was told, was nicknamed Qaddafi because of his looks, his birth in Libya, and also his nasty tactics on the field. When the match began, I could hear—hear!—the thud of Gentile’s boots on the shins of Maradona. The Romanian official waved a yellow card at Gentile in the first minute but that did not deter him from hacking away at Maradona, whether or not the ball was nearby. The cynical tactic was closer to the bullring than the soccer field, and Maradona began to retaliate in kind—and was shown a yellow card in the thirty-fifth minute.

  Theoretically, the yellow cards meant that both Gentile and Maradona would have to behave or risk being tossed out of the match. Maradona began making outrageous flops on the manicured lawn of Sarrià and the ref awarded a free kick after one egregious foul by Gentile. The aggrieved Maradona took the shot but sent it over the goal. His knees bent. He clutched the back of his neck with both hands. He despaired operatically. The Barcelona crowd was not sympathetic. He was having a bad start in his new town, and he knew it.

  Gentile’s close-order combat was part of the gritty Italian defense, known as the catenaccio, the chain or bolt. Italy had not won a World Cup since 1938 and was mocked by fans of other teams, who said that Italy’s methodical defenders did not know what to do with the ball once they stripped it from marauders. “Eventually, catenaccio became more than a style of play; it became a mentality that dragged Italian soccer down through boring negativity to almost total sterility,” wrote Paul Gardner, the British-born soccer journalist, in his book The Simplest Game.

  Italy was certainly slowing down the defending champions, but with skill beyond my comprehension. My most recent exposure to the sport had been to watch the aging Cosmos, former stars ending their days like beached whales on a foreign shore. I had never imagined the sport could be conducted at such a pace, bing-bing-bing, like a pinball on speed.

  When Italy and Argentina were attacking and counterattacking, I was not able to follow the touches, the names and numbers, as they moved over more than one hundred yards up and down the field. Early in the match, I missed the sequence of a near miss and turned to a fellow reporter named Enrico Jacomini from the Associated Press, who politely reconstructed the quick progress of the ball.

  In the second half, Italy unveiled its counterattack, scoring in the fifty-seventh minute and then springing Rossi in the sixty-seventh minute, with Antonio Cabrini putting in a loose ball after the keeper ventured out too far. Argentina scored in the eighty-third minute on a free kick while the Italians were arguing with the referee after yet another foul by Gentile, but Italy won, 2–1. The hacking of the little bull from Argentina had paid off.

  “There is a rule, as I recall, it is Article 512, that says if you repeatedly foul somebody, you are warned and then sent out of the game,” said Menotti, the slim and long-haired Argentine coach, who had won the Cup in 1978 after not choosing Maradona.

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sp; “Gentile must have fouled Maradona at least twenty times,” Menotti added. “I think Italy was lucky.”

  Gentile’s response was blunt: “Soccer is not for ballerinas.”

  After the match, I wondered why I found myself charmed by the brash intrusion of the Italians. Perhaps it was a memory of Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, who read the Sunday comics on the radio during a newspaper strike when I was a kid. Or perhaps I was recalling my neighbors across the street in Queens, who kept homemade wine in casks in the basement and spewed pungent Italian curses in their kitchen; plus, they often fed me a starter bowl of pasta before I headed home for my own supper. The beautiful girl in my homeroom in high school. The college bar, summer of ’58, when the jukebox played Domenico Modugno warbling “Nel Blu, Dipinto di Blu” every other tune, and everybody in the warm beery night sang “Vo-la-re, oh-oh…” I’m a New Yorker. Therefore, I’m part Italian.

  * * *

  Of course, anybody who follows soccer also becomes part Brazilian. On an off day in Barcelona, I was taking a walk along the Ramblas, the ancient leafy streets with curved tile pathways that undulate like the river that used to trickle down toward the harbor. Hearing a rumble of drums and horns, the shuffle of feet, the throaty roar of Portuguese, I spied a moving mass of varied colors—twenty or twenty-five musicians and singers and dancers and fans, bobbing their way through the Gothic Quarter, in a slow samba beat. Carnival in July. Their hair styles ranged from blond to Afro, and many of the women wore abbreviated outfits. I was told that some female fans had a unique way of celebrating a Brazil goal—by shedding their halter tops. What a country.

  Sports mobs usually annoy me—Americans, with their money and self-indulgent chants of “U-S-A” at the Olympics; fans from England and a few other countries, with their hint of menace. The newspapers said that in Madrid, sixteen English fans had been detained by police, with five of them deported. Brazilian fans do not fight. They shake their tambourines and their bumbums, making strangers want to dance in their wake.