Soccer Men (11 page)

Whereupon Carlos began pressing them to take their free kicks instantly. His aim, it emerged, was not to waste time but to control the pace of the game, as well as to patronize opponents and referees in the spirit of Stephen Potter’s
Theory and Practice of Gamesmanship
. If there were an award for the world’s most irritating player, Carlos would win it annually, and Jose Luis Chilavert, the Paraguay goalkeeper, must reflect with satisfaction at having spat in his face during an international, even if this meant that he started the World Cup suspended. “I’d do it again because Carlos showed me his testicles and insulted my country,” Chilavert explained.

Speed, power, and gracelessness: It is a recipe for success. In fact, the only qualities Carlos lacks are vision and concentration.

Playing AC Milan in the Champions League last month, he kept hitting beautiful fifty-yard square balls. All were pointless, and a couple were
intercepted in dangerous positions, but no one else could have hit them more sweetly. The most surprising aspect of the Milan match was that he was there at all. He had just flown back from a friendly in South Korea with Brazil and was about to return to the Far East for the World Club Cup final in Yokohama. However, Carlos does not miss matches. You would have thought that winning a World Cup might be tiring, but which Real Madrid player has played the most matches so far this season? Yes, it’s Carlos, with twenty-three. A trickier question: Who is Real Madrid’s reserve left back? Perhaps there is no such thing.

Carlos is more useful to a manager than the cameo genius Ronaldo, and he also saves money on employing a left half, who would only get trampled underfoot anyway. Real’s left flank consists of a midget and a pretty winger.

That Carlos was denied the Golden Ball because he is a defender is doubly frustrating, since he is not primarily a defender. Since hardly any team is crazy enough to field wingers against Brazil or Real Madrid, he is usually free to make the play. Yet Johan Cruijff blithely judges, “He is a defender, and I think he has less qualities than the other candidates.”

In the canteen, Carlos says, “It seems that soccer has just an attacking face, and that’s not right. I also think there are weird things going on in this voting. I have a feeling that this award could be dominated by marketing interests.”

Still, it could be worse. “Ronaldo is a very good friend of mine and a teammate. What more can I ask for from a Golden Ball winner?” he said. “He also became the World Cup top scorer and scored in the Intercontinental Cup final, though people shouldn’t forget that I gave him the pass for that goal. At that moment, I realized I had clinched the award for him.”

In short, he has only himself to blame.

April 2003

T
he night after France won the World Cup final, I sat in a chic café near the Paris Opera watching a beautiful blonde Frenchwoman dance for
hours in a “Zidane 10” French shirt. France had changed in an evening. Millions of people had suddenly materialized in Paris’s streets, for the first time ever demonstrating for soccer, and for one player in particular: “
Zidane Président!
” Zidane has since become the property of the world. Today he is usually imagined in the Real Madrid shirt. Yet his role on the French team—and in French life—is greater. The French just hope it won’t end this summer.

Zinedine “Yazid” Zidane is the product of Marseille’s Place Tartane, a square now famous as the backdrop to some of his Adidas advertisements. What mattered on the square was not winning, but how you controlled the ball. Yazid was not the best player on the square, just bigger and more diligent than the others. His signature trick, the
roulette
—rolling the ball back beneath his right sole, pirouetting, then dribbling off—he has practiced every day for more than fifteen years. “What counted for him was soccer, and perhaps also judo,” recalls his mother, Malika. But it was a particular type of soccer. On the Place Tartane, Zidane rarely bothered using his left foot, and he never headed. When at the age of fifteen he moved two hours up the coast to play for Cannes and a coach first threw a ball at his head, he ducked.

The teenage Yazid was polite, shy, and apparently without ego. Cannes made him complete a 240-question personality test, which found that he was very motivated, had low self-esteem, and never placed his own interests above other people’s. The last quality was rare in such a gifted player. Zidane was a queen bee with the attitude of a worker. To this day, he usually passes when he could shoot. This helps explain why his scoring record for France lags behind that of Michel Platini, his predecessor: “Zizou” has twenty-two goals in eighty-seven internationals, while “Platoche” got forty-one in seventy-two.

Zidane progressed from Cannes to Bordeaux and in 1994, at age twenty-two, made his debut for France. Coming on for the last half hour of so against the Czech Republic, with the French losing 0–2, he scored twice to tie the match. Afterward, he phoned the coach who had scouted him for Cannes: “Did you see? One goal with my head, and one with my left foot!” Zidane has such balance, and diligence, that a few years after belatedly starting work on his wrong foot, he could prompt Franz Beckenbauer to remark, “He has equal precision and power in both feet. I have never seen anyone else like it except Andreas Brehme.”

He gradually emerged as France’s playmaker. In the crowded midfield of modern soccer, which Real Madrid’s technical director, Jorge Valdano, calls “a good place to meet people,” Zidane alone regularly finds the time on the ball to make telling passes. It’s a matter of both vision and unearthly technique.

It was supposed to come together at the 1998 World Cup, in his own country. However, after a match and a half Zidane got himself sent off for retaliation against Saudi Arabia. Suspended for two matches, he was then quiet in the quarterfinal against Italy and the semi against Croatia. France’s best player—or so the French had been assuring an unconvinced world—had a forgettable tournament before those two goals in the final. His manager, Aimé Jacquet, noting that the Brazilians marked laxly on corners, had advised him to “take a stroll towards the front post.” If fifteen years earlier you had seen a skinny dark Arab boy doing step-overs on the Place Tartane, you might have imagined him scoring twice in a World Cup final. But never with headers.

That night Zidane’s picture was projected onto the Arc de Triomphe. In the six years since it has been plastered all over France. He is replacing Marianne as the national symbol. You see him on the front door of elementary schools, promoting some worthy goal or other; on television, criticizing the Far Right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen; and as a rather apelike puppet on the French version of
Spitting Image
,
Les guignols de l’info
. Nicolas Cantaloup, who mimics his voice on the program, explains, “He speaks very little, in a very low tone of voice. So to imitate him, you have to accentuate that. Make him almost apologize for speaking. It’s difficult for an imitator to parody Zinedine Zidane because he doesn’t have much asperity. It’s also hard because everybody loves him. So I’ve chosen to provoke humor by playing on his relentless stardom. There’s a scene at an airport where he unthinkingly signs an autograph for a dog.”

This is not far from the truth. Euro 2000, Zidane’s best tournament, made him a French immortal. Not injured, not sent off, not even particularly tired, he led France to a second prize in two years. The day after the final he delayed his holiday to go and say farewell to a dying old man he had known in Marseilles. Each six months the French now vote for Zidane as their favorite Frenchman in the regular poll held by the
Journal du Dimanche
newspaper. He is seen as humble and kind, and however deeply you probe, it
seems genuine. Nobody has ever come forward to say, “Actually, Zizou is an arrogant wife beater.”

His personality is more than a detail. It has helped make
les Bleus
into a unit. You see the team’s collective personality at work when an unfortunate opponent wins the ball and is immediately submerged under a swarm of blue shirts.

As Lilian Thuram, the most thoughtful of
les Bleus
(he had once hoped to become a priest)
,
explained in his autobiography, “We have that spirit because our emblematic player is humble. I think Zidane has obliged each of us to carry ourselves irreproachably on the pitch. In the past the French side had some very skilful generations, but their star players lacked modesty. Zidane never throws a dirty look at a player who makes a bad pass. He never neglects to try to win the ball simply because his name is Zidane. On the contrary.”

All his colleagues seem to regard Zidane with that sort of reverence. Soccer is about the ball. Everyone who has ever touched the thing has struggled to master it. Zidane comes closest to achieving it. His fellow players can therefore best appreciate his gift. Didier Deschamps, captain of France in 1998 and 2000, remarks, “Zidane achieves on the field what everyone dreams of doing just once. Even if I had trained day and night, I would never have got there.”

Deschamps was the first of Zidane’s footmen, later succeeded by Patrick Vieira and Claude Makelele. The job does not just entail bringing the master the ball. In a friendly against England in 2000, a couple of minutes after Dennis Wise had overturned Zidane, Deschamps practically murdered Wise. “You don’t touch Zizou” was the message.

Yet it didn’t help the French at the last World Cup. Zidane landed in Asia exhausted, injured, and distracted by the birth of his third child; missed France’s first two games; and after the third flew home with his eliminated team. The French had shown again how strangely dull they can be without him. Henry, Vieira, Robert Pires, et al. just aren’t quite enough. And the team’s spirit had dissolved in Seoul’s Sheraton Walker Hill Hotel under the self-absorbed captain, Marcel Desailly.

The big question after the tournament was who would replace Desailly as captain. The answer turned out to be Desailly himself. The thirty-four-year-old, distinctly past it, was just too powerful to jettison in public. But France’s
new coach, Jacques Santini, did get in the habit of not picking him. The captain’s armband—an important piece of cloth on this team—descended not on Vieira, as everyone had expected, but on Zidane, a man who hates speeches and fuss and who, as Valdano told me, “speaks only with the ball.”

Yet as captain, Zidane reunited the French side. He chats with new players, making them feel welcome, and sometimes even addresses the team. People listen when he speaks.

This summer, now mostly from the left flank, he again leads an unfairly strong French side. But this may be the last time. Zidane used to talk about retiring from the national team this year, and from club soccer the next. Then, this winter, he suddenly extended his contract with Real Madrid until 2007, when he will be thirty-four. Now the French hope he might play the World Cup in Germany after all.

It is hard to believe. You often feel that Zidane’s physique has limits, that he is too delicate to keep carrying two such demanding teams, that one day that bent back will cave in. His talk of early retirement shows he feels age encroaching. Asked whether he will retire from
les Bleus
this summer, he replies: “I haven’t taken any decision. For the moment I am only thinking about the European championships.”

Just in case this turns out to be the last time, watch carefully.

May 2003

I
t was Dennis Bergkamp’s first match at Highbury, a friendly against Inter Milan in August 1995. He had just fled Inter, where he had been teased as the dressing-room geek, and that evening in London, Nicola Berti, Inter’s midfield player, continued the treatment. When Berti began trash-talking him again, Bergkamp jogged off. Berti followed. Bergkamp led him to Tony Adams, who ordered the Italian to leave the lad alone. Berti ran off, so humiliated that minutes later he cuffed a ball boy.

It was an early sign that Bergkamp was going to feel at home at Highbury. Eight years later, two days after his thirty-fourth birthday, perhaps about to collect his second FA Cup winner’s medal, he can reflect on a period that has defined his career. There has been no other player like the one Bergkamp became at Highbury.

After that Inter match, two Dutch journalists and I sneaked into Highbury’s marble halls. Bergkamp’s family was already there, waiting for their boy to finish changing. The father, a plumber, was standing with his hands folded behind his back, studying framed pictures of Arsenal greats.

He would have known most of them. Like many Dutchmen of his generation, Bergkamp Sr. is an Anglophile who named one son after Denis Law (the name became Dennis Nicolaas Maria Bergkamp, after an Amsterdam civil servant rejected the spelling
Denis
) and each summer crammed his boys into the car for a pilgrimage to England.

While we waited for Bergkamp to arrive, Glenn Helder, the Dutch winger, and Ian Wright appeared. Wright shook our hands and addressed us slowly and loudly, as you do with foreigners or morons. Then Helder said, “Ian, show these guys what I taught you.” Wright concentrated intensely and began bouncing on the marble and shouting in Dutch, “Bog off! Dirty monkey!” Helder looked on like a proud father. The Dutch newcomers felt welcome at Highbury.

Later that night, in the Highbury car park, Bergkamp recalled an article that had once appeared in Amsterdam’s local newspaper. Beneath the headline, “Does Dennis Bergkamp Like Girls?” it had identified him as the only Ajax player without a girlfriend. The article still bugged him. Bergkamp had never been at ease at Ajax. The club’s “pearls-and-poodles set” alienated the shy child from the Catholic family. Bergkamp was often on Ajax’s reserve and youth teams, was sometimes played at right-back, and was always on the verge of being kicked out.

Summoned to the first team at seventeen, his response was, “I don’t want to.” He wasn’t worried about the level of play. What scared him was that he did not know anybody on the first team. That debut season, 1986–1987, he played mostly at outside right, away from scary central defenders. On May 13, 1987 (sixteen years ago tomorrow), he came on as substitute
as Ajax beat Lokomotiv Leipzig 1–0 in the Cup Winners’ Cup final in Athens. Bergkamp was then still at school, taking his homework along on away trips.