Soccer Men (15 page)

Cannavaro was the tournament’s best gymnast, ahead of Miroslav Klose. He routinely outjumps much taller men, or clears by overhead volley. So agile is he that he can defend side-on, forcing the striker into a particular direction, because he can always stretch to tackle. He can even break the rule that says defenders should not go to the ground. Cannavaro can, because he rises instantly. On Sunday he performed three sliding tackles on Florent Malouda in just over a second, possibly a world record.

His battles with Thierry Henry were everything a World Cup should be: the best against the best. Henry managed a shot, and once actually dribbled past Cannavaro, but was eventually substituted, drained and scoreless, like dozens of Cannavaro’s opponents before him.

Cannavaro did not man-mark Henry. He and Materazzi had the flexibility to mark by zone. Cannavaro is both marker and libero: He probably had Malouda covered when Materazzi fouled him for France’s penalty. For that, Materazzi may have taken a pounding worse than anything Zinedine Zidane did to him.

Cannavaro watched the penalty shoot-out without smiling, his massive tattooed arms folded, Andrea Pirlo hugging him from behind. Goals are not his business. He has scored one in one hundred internationals. Italians don’t care. They admire defending. During Sunday’s game their fans applauded him more than any other player. We should do likewise, because if you can’t appreciate defending, this World Cup was rather empty.

September 2006

I
knew players like Dirk Kuyt even before he was born. As a kid I played against them in the dunes of his home village of Katwijk on the Dutch coast. I respected and feared the Kuyt type, but I never imagined Liverpool Football Club signing one. Yet last month the club bought the Dutchman for about $19 million. Today he hopes to start his first match for them, the Merseyside derby against Everton. The temptation is to say he won’t be worth $19 million, but then Kuyt has always been, as President Bush might say, “misunderestimated.”

On winter Saturday mornings around 1980, the year of Kuyt’s birth, my soccer team would travel to Katwijk in the backseats of our dads’ cars. Often our opponent would be Kuyt’s future club, Quick Boys. As we passed Katwijk’s churches, fast-food joints, and the bed-and-breakfasts with their German signs in the windows, sea gales would shake the car.

Quick Boys’ locker rooms were always packed, because Katwijk’s sailors and fishermen all played their soccer on Saturdays. Sundays were reserved for worshiping the Lord. Every local male seemed to play: Quick Boys currently have twenty men’s teams, and fifteen teams in the under-nine age group alone. Telling the men from the boys was often tricky, because many Katwijk children—raised on fish, milk, and the west wind—were already as big as Kuyt is now.

Our opponents tended to be albinos like Kuyt and only had a handful of surnames between them, often Kuyt. They didn’t bother much with ball
control, perhaps because the wind and the Lord took charge of that, but in my memory we always lost. Sometimes we were watched by hundreds of spectators. And Quick Boys wasn’t even the best club in Katwijk. Their rivals, FC Katwijk, later also became Dutch amateur champions. Having often watched the Quick Boys–Katwijk derby, Kuyt won’t be overawed by Everton-Liverpool.

Amateur soccer was such a big deal in Katwijk that the local stars seldom bothered joining professional clubs. Yet at eighteen Kuyt signed for FC Utrecht. Nobody expected much of the potbellied sailor’s son with Katwijkian ball control, but he almost instantly became a regular. In fact, the only thing that seemed to throw him at Utrecht was the godlessness of his new teammates. “In Katwijk certain things are taken for granted. I came to FC Utrecht and saw guys who lived with their partners, got a child, and only then got married,” he marveled. The Lord only knows what he will make of the Premiership.

In 2003 a bigger Dutch club, Feyenoord, reluctantly shelled out €1 million for Kuyt. Few expected him to cope with the higher level, but his unforeseen rise continued: Within a year he was Feyenoord’s best player. This was probably because Kuyt works harder at himself than does any other soccer player. He treats training sessions and matches as mere episodes in his packed working schedule. When not in the gym, or studying future opponents, he pays weekly visits to a mental coach, to a layer-on of hands, and to his personal physiotherapist.

None of this is intended to treat injuries. Kuyt never gets injured. He went five years and a month until this spring without missing a Dutch league match, eleven months longer than Frank Lampard’s record streak in England. Rather, Kuyt hires healers to perfect an already superhuman body, much as Pamela Anderson got breast implants. He gives an example: “Recently my physio got special soles installed in my soccer cleats. Tests showed I don’t stand completely straight on my feet, so that I can’t move my neck fully. Since I’ve been wearing those soles, my neck is free again.”

Besides injuries, Kuyt has also excluded loss of form. He is mentally so strong that he almost never plays badly. In each of the past four seasons, he scored at least twenty league goals.

Kuyt exudes the joy of a man in his prime whose every body part is in perfect working order. Most goalscorers save their energy for scoring. Kuyt gallops down wings and tackles on his goal line. A better defender than most defenders, he provides more assists than most wingers. His specialty is accelerating while receiving the ball, a horror for opponents.

Because he is never injured and always improving himself, he was able to advance inexorably from Quick Boys to Liverpool. This is an indictment of other soccer players. Kuyt’s rise implies that his colleagues, even those who aren’t drunks, are performing below their potential. If they all lived like Kuyt, professional soccer would be a better game.

“Doing your best isn’t a chore, is it?” he asks. “I must thank God on my bare knees that I became a soccer player. And I do.”

There is one thing Kuyt can’t learn. No Katwijker will ever develop perfect ball control. “I don’t have the technique of Robin van Persie,” he once admitted, “but of all the Dutch talents I do have by far the best mentality.” It has taken him far: Last month his deathly ill father, a tube emerging from his nose, presented him with the Dutch Player of the Year award at a gala evening.

But this summer’s World Cup suggested that even Kuyt’s mentality can’t take him all the way. On his first venture onto international soccer’s upper slopes, his running kept defenses busy, but in his only match as Holland’s first-choice center-forward, against Portugal, he failed.

On August 15 Glenn Roeder, manager of Newcastle, one of countless clubs hoping to sign him, watched Ireland-Holland in Dublin. Holland’s center-forward duly scored twice. Sadly, it wasn’t Kuyt, but the twenty-three-year-old debutant Klaas-Jan Huntelaar, scorer of more than fifty goals last season. Huntelaar is the latest to overtake Kuyt in the hierarchy of Dutch center-forwards.

It’s possible that Liverpool bought the wrong Dutch striker: that although Kuyt won’t flop at Anfield, because he never flops, he won’t quite conquer the place, either. However, Kuyt always proves doubters wrong. “My career is a straight line upwards,” he notes. At the very least he will teach his teammates something about being an athlete.

March 2007

I
t’s often said he looks like the average Brazilian. Romario is coffee-colored, only five foot six (to be known as
O Baixinho
(Shorty) in Brazil is a pretty extreme condition) and not obviously an athlete. At forty-one he is segueing into middle age. His legs are bowed, his calves skinny. Only the vast thighs and torso give a clue to his trade. Romario is the most remarkable goalscorer still playing soccer. He claims to have scored 992 goals. When he gets his 1,000th he will retire, and a certain type of player will have gone extinct.

Of course, he will finish in Rio de Janeiro, at Vasco da Gama, the club where he began in 1985. Born in a Rio slum and raised in a slightly nicer slum, Romario is the supreme
Carioca
, or citizen of Rio, who expresses his patriotism partly by buying his native city’s real estate. Outside Rio, his oddities are less appreciated. “In São Paulo,” growls a Paulista, “he is regarded practically as an Argentinean.” Romario is that characteristic Rio type, the
malandro
: an opportunist, a lover of fun, a rule breaker.

At twenty-two he left Rio to join PSV Eindhoven. A
malandro
and the Dutch workplace were not an ideal combination. Here was a man whose hobby was sleeping (fourteen hours a day); who said his teammates could not play soccer; who flew home to Rio when he felt like it, matches or not; who liked nightlife so much he was going “to keep going out until I am ninety years old.” A PSV physiotherapist was made responsible for getting him out of bed each morning. On the pitch Romario rarely moved yet averaged nearly a goal a game.

He treated his European years as an exile, a strictly moneymaking exercise: “In Holland I work; I live in Rio.” He failed to comprehend Dutch weather, or the natives’ habit of turning up for appointments, or the way they expected great players to obey rules. The one Dutch phenomenon he appreciated was the tall blonde girls.

Yet he always scored, and eventually Barcelona signed him. Even at a giant club he remained blasé. Guus Hiddink, once his manager at PSV,
remembers visiting Barcelona as coach of Valencia. Romario was about to kick off the match in front of one hundred spectators when he suddenly told the referee to hang on, jogged over to Valencia’s bench, and kissed his old boss on both cheeks. Hiddink mimes the kisses. To Romario the match was just décor, with him the only character. In an increasingly corporate sport, his selfishness was almost heroic.

Brazilian greats are judged at World Cups. Partly due to his weird personality, Romario played only an hour at the Cup of 1990. He announced that the next tournament, 1994, would be “Romario’s Cup.” Brazil’s coach, Carlos Alberto Parreira, who had previously banned him from the team, was persuaded to relent. “Romario came in a good mood,” Parreira told me years later. “He wanted to be what every soccer player wants: world champion. Romario is very good in the team. He plays the drums, he tells jokes, he’s not . . .”—Parreira tilted his nose in the air to show what Romario was not—“He’s a happy man.” That may be, yet Romario objected to sitting next to his striking partner, Bebeto, on the plane to the tournament, where his main sponsor was a beer brand.

“I can place the World Cup before the Brazilian as if it were a plate of food,” said the boy from the
favela
. He did. The most functional of players, Romario used his genius only to score. “If it had been a European player, he would have put it in the far corner,” observed Russia’s goalkeeper Dmitri Kharin that World Cup. “But Romario is a Brazilian, and he put it in the near corner.” His goal against Holland in the quarterfinal was finer still. A cross landed too far ahead of him, so he flicked himself three yards through the air and, while still dropping, virtually on top of the ball, hit a half-volley with the outside of his right boot into the inside corner of the net.

And that pretty much concluded his career in top-class soccer. He has spent the past thirteen years mostly in the decayed Brazilian league, with brief forays to places like Qatar, Adelaide, and Miami. One night I saw him playing for Flamengo in Rio’s almost-empty Maracana stadium, built for 200,000. Most of the fans who had shown up spent the match running up and down the track, following the ball. In this sort of ambience, Romario sometimes paid his teammates’ wages or forewent millions of dollars in unpaid salary. The match I saw he did nothing, except score.

By then, to his distress, he had missed the World Cup of 1998. He had been injured, and Brazil’s coaches thought he was trouble. The decision possibly cost them the trophy.

Every now and then Romario would announce his retirement but did nothing about it. Then he realized he was approaching Pele’s mark of 1,000 goals (Pele’s 1,000th remains an epic moment of Brazilian history). Local journalists in Eindhoven got phone calls from Romario, still speaking his own inimitable brand of Dutch, and wanting to know how many goals he had scored in forgotten preseason warm-ups against village teams.

His quest offends soccer’s collective ethos, and almost everyone disputes his count of 992. The Brazilian soccer magazine
Placar
gives him 891. Many Brazilians mock his pursuit of Pele (whom Romario once described as “mentally retarded”). But Romario deserves his moment. Goals are rarer now than they were in Pele’s day: 12 were scored in Pele’s two World Cup finals, none in Romario’s one. A great striker nowadays might score 40 goals in a season twice in his career. Even
Placar
’s count implies that Romario has been
averaging
that for twenty-two years.

That he got his goals mostly in Rio instead of for big money in Europe was his choice. “I’m difficult because I’m authentic,” he said.

If you hear a player say that today, it’s probably a Nike slogan.

April 2007

I
t was one of the images of last year’s World Cup, though few people saw it: bearded Italian midfielder Gennaro Gattuso cavorting around Berlin’s Olympic Stadium in skimpy white underpants. Italy had won the final, and Gattuso was celebrating in his favorite manner. Horrified FIFA officials soon
stopped him. But Gattuso had a right: It had been, for better or worse, a Gattusonian World Cup.

Underpants are seldom just underpants, and Gattuso’s symbolized his transformation from peasant into king. For years his role in soccer teams was as servant to the stars. On Tuesday, when Milan visits Manchester United for the Champions League semifinal, he will be the team’s spiritual leader. But more than that, the square-shaped Gattuso has become revered as an “antisuperstar”: the antidote to everything glossy in modern soccer.