Soccer Men (18 page)

Without Owen’s gift, England was threatening to miss qualification for Euro 2008. With him back from injury, the English could win the title. In his years of injuries Owen has often been written off, but he himself may believe that at twenty-seven he is better than the unravaged eighteen-year-old who stunned the world at the World Cup of 1998. “You come into your peak in your late twenties,” he told me when I met him five years ago. Whereas Owen 1.0 of 1998 was the product of nature, today’s Owen—Owen 2.0, if you like—is the result of a career plan.

Owen grew up the son of a professional player in the Welsh town of Hawarden. He boxed a bit and was an obsessive golfer, team captain at the Hawarden Cricket Club, a good rugby player, and a decent sprinter who also enjoyed snooker and darts. There are British towns where the entire population put together plays less sport than Owen did, because they’re too busy arguing in the pub about Manchester United. Owen has never read an entire book and only once seen an entire film: When he had a trial at Arsenal as a kid, the club took his group to the cinema, and out of courtesy Owen didn’t leave. But he has no outside interests.

Whereas other gifted kids dream of becoming professional players, Owen always knew he would be one. Even as a small kid he played like a pro, running into space instead of chasing the ball and, when he shot, picking his spot instead of blasting. Long before turning pro, he was planning how he would behave when he got there. English players tend to divide into two social types. Players of the first type are so thoughtless and inarticulate that they would struggle in any profession but soccer: Think Paul Gascoigne, Lee Bowyer, Jonathan Woodgate. Then there is a minority type that thinks hard about the game: Gary Lineker, Gareth Southgate, or Tony Adams after giving up alcohol.

Owen told me that as a boy he watched Lineker and Alan Shearer “to get tips off playing, but also tips off how to conduct yourself off the pitch as
well. If there was such a thing as someone copying exactly what they do and following in their footsteps, I don’t think you’d go far wrong with players like that.” His project—almost revolutionary in English soccer—involved not behaving like a half-wit.

It shows the instant you meet him. He enters the room—rapidly, of course—looks you in the eye, smiles, sticks out his hand, and says in his Welsh-Mersey lilt, “Hello, how are you?” An utterly banal sequence, except that few other English players could manage it. Owen may be the only England player with basic good manners.

Being both gifted and sensible, Owen progressed as rapidly as he moves. At seventeen, he made his Liverpool debut as a substitute, and when his team got a penalty, guess who was entrusted with it? At eighteen years and fifty-nine days, Owen became the youngest England player of the twentieth century.

This was weird. English soccer is run by the English working classes, who in their professions tend to follow the dictum that experience trumps talent. The best players traditionally had to prove their worth for years before being picked for England, after which they were given a berth on the team until years past their prime. In 1998, the notion of playing an eighteen-year-old in a World Cup therefore seemed heretical. England’s manager, Glenn Hoddle, tried to dismiss Owen as “not a natural goalscorer,” which raised the question of who on earth was. Owen began that World Cup on the bench beside another green youngster, a mere twenty-three-year-old named David Beckham.

Within a couple of games they were on the team. In St. Etienne, against Argentina, this produced an iconic moment of soccer history. A quarter of an hour into the game, somewhere in midfield, Beckham shoved the ball into Owen’s feet, whereupon the small boy with the big head set off running. I still remember the scene in the press stand. I was sitting among the British journalists, men who regard a World Cup chiefly as an opportunity to consume fourteen pints a day on expenses. When England scores they never cheer, though people do jolt awake and shout, “‘Oo gave the pass?”

But while Owen was running, the men around me wriggled their beer bellies out from behind their desks and began thumping their tables and
screaming, “Go on, my son!” It worked, because Owen kept going. And then he put the ball into the top corner. An identical run of his earlier had produced an England goal from a penalty, and so in just sixteen minutes Owen had become one of the world’s most dangerous strikers.

The goal registered not so much for its importance, or its technical accomplishment, as for the attitude it betrayed. World Cups are ruled by fear. Most players are on a mission not to screw up. Yet there was Owen, dribbling as if in his back garden in Hawarden. He had “balls,” said Diego Maradona.

I asked Owen whether he hadn’t been afraid to try that run. Didn’t he think, as a teenager playing Argentina in the World Cup, “What am I doing here?”

“No,” said Owen. “That was probably why you could succeed, and why a lot of youngsters burst onto the scene in any sport. It’s because they don’t have a fear factor.”

He bought an entire street in Hawarden for his family to live on, while he and his girlfriend moved into a nearby mansion, Lower Soughton Hall. Meanwhile, he had become a hero who transcended the usual partisanship of soccer. When he ran into the stand chasing a ball in Southampton’s little stadium soon after the World Cup, the opposition fans grasped at his legs as if he were a religious icon or a crate of beer. Later in 1998, I was in Valencia for a bad-tempered European tie during which two senior Liverpool players were sent off. When one of them abandoned the captain’s armband on the turf, Owen was quickest to pick it up. Liverpool won 1–2, and after the final whistle the crowd berated the visitors and their own players. Owen, though, sensed what was coming. He dawdled until he was the last player left on the pitch, and then it came: his ovation. He applauded back.

The boy had balls and Road Runner legs, but he also had a brain. There are great instinctive players and great thinking players, but Owen is both. “Since I was a kid I’ve always watched players and tried to pick points,” he told me. “But it’s also important to try to use your strengths, because that’s what got you there in the first place.” Owen was born with pace and what he calls “an ability to know where the ball is going to be.” But he also had the intelligence and application to work out how to improve his game. It’s a rare combination.

You see his intelligence off the field, too. Many times after England matches I have stood in the “mixed zone,” where journalists shout out questions to passing players. It’s mostly a sad scene. Paul Scholes, who could barely talk, used to trudge by with head bowed—probably more out of shyness than rudeness. With other players, it was rudeness. David Platt used to stop to chat with selected journalists about horse racing. When David Beckham became captain, he always stopped for a word. “I just hit it and it went in” is his usual account of a goal, though Beckham’s voice is so high-pitched that some words are audible only to certain breeds of dog.

Only Owen stops for a thoughtful analysis of his game. At the World Cup in Japan, he sometimes did so with a black garbage bag slung over his shoulder, so that he looked even more than usual like the boy next door. Owen seems immune to status. His partner is not a model but a girl he met in kindergarten, and life for him is not a series of confrontations in which you have to defeat all comers with your clothing, but a chance to play snooker, table tennis, or darts after training in your specially designed home. Or you could play golf. Whereas Beckham uses his clothes and hairstyles to draw the observer’s eye, Owen, who is arguably equally good-looking, and has done much more for England, tends to make himself look neutral.

Quite soon Owen began picking up small injuries. In recent years they got bigger. Since 2004 he has had four operations, the most serious one after tearing his knee ligaments with nobody even near him against Sweden at the last World Cup. In the last two seasons he barely played for Newcastle, his club. British journalists who watched him in the Premier League noticed long ago that he had lost his teenager’s pace. Too often they saw him disappoint against small sides. Many wrote off Owen.

That was to miss the two essential points about him. First, he has what you might call the opposite of nerves: The bigger the match, the better he plays. His goals generally come against teams like France, Argentina, Brazil, a hat trick against Germany, Brazil again, Argentina again, two late goals against Arsenal in an FA Cup final, saving England’s qualification against Russia, and so on. That is why international soccer, not club soccer, is his natural milieu. Playing for Liverpool, Real Madrid, and Newcastle, Owen has never won a league title or a Champions League, and he probably never will. We will remember him for World Cups.

The other essential point about Owen is that being intelligent, he can improve even as he slows down. In 2002 I asked him whether the older Owen was better than the teenager. “Yeah, definitely,” he said. “I’ve got a much better left foot than I had then. I can head the ball much better than I could then. I can drop off and hold the ball up much better than I did then. Results have proved that I have improved on them things.” To borrow a phrase from the
Guardian
journalist David Lacey: From a scorer of great goals, he has matured into a great scorer of goals. “He may be the top goalscorer in the world,” said England’s previous manager, Sven-Göran Eriksson.

When Owen’s body let him down again at the World Cup, he simply set to work at it. He paid for a helicopter to transport him between his mansion and Newcastle, where he spent his days doing exercises in the club’s swimming pool and gym. He knew he owed the club that had risked $29 million on him in 2005. Given his absenteeism so far, that currently works out at more than $1 million a match.

His haul of three goals against Israel and Russia last month suggests Newcastle’s investment is safe, even if he has already missed club matches with injuries this season. “Between my ears,” Owen explained after his return for England, “I’m strong. There might be a lot of people with more skill than me, but there are not many who are mentally stronger. Whether it comes to longterm injuries, lack of form, or criticism, I have thicker skin than anyone.”

Owen needs nine more goals to catch England’s all-time leading scorer, Bobby Charlton, who got forty-nine. If he stays fit, he will. There is no longer any great mystery about that. The only mystery is whether he can emulate Charlton’s feat of 1966 and finally carry England to their second-ever trophy.

*
With hindsight, both Owen and I were too optimistic about the benefits of maturity. My profile of him exemplifies the problem of interviewing soccer players: If you interview them, you have to quote what they say, and what they say often ends up driving the article. Owen said he had improved with age. At the time of the interview, in 2002, that view still seemed plausible, and so I made it the focus of the article. It turned out to be wrong.

February 2008

T
he young man with the big smile sitting opposite me is the official “World Player of the Year.” He looks more like an Edwardian poet. Willowy and fat-free, brown hair shiny as in a shampoo advertisement, with white middle-class skin that reveals he has never eaten a lousy meal in his life, Kaká could be the Brazilian Rupert Brooke.

His club, AC Milan, is the reigning European and world champion. Does he have moments on the field when he feels, “What I’m doing now is perfect”?

“Yes,” replies Kaká, twenty-five, in his American-tinged English. “Sometimes, everything that I want to do, I can do. These are good games, a perfect game.” When has he felt like that? “Ah, against Manchester, the semifinal of the Champions League. Both games, I could do everything that I thought.” Was there any particular moment of perfection? “The second goal in Old Trafford.”

Phil, AC Milan’s resident English teacher, sitting in on his pupil, recalls the scene: Kaká somehow contrives to get two of Manchester United’s defenders to bump into each other and fall over. What’s startling is Kaká’s composure: He runs with his head up, seeing everything, and when the time comes he gently slots the ball past the keeper.

We are at Milanello, Milan’s training ground in the Lombardian countryside near Lake Como, which may be the world’s nicest office. The air is so clear here that at ten yards you can see the pores in a man’s skin. The six training fields are so flat that you can lie on the ground and not see a single undulation. You sit in the bar, drinking perfect espressos for free, and every young man who passes, world champion or not, says, “
Buon giorno
.”

The players here are kept perfect by soccer’s best medical team. Just in case the Milan Lab needed any more oomph, last week it took on Microsoft as a partner. Before meeting Kaká, I asked the lab’s doctors about him. Jean Pierre Meersseman, head of the lab, shrugged: “What can you say? He’s number one. Nobody is faster than him; nobody has the acceleration he has.” Daniele Tognaccini, Milan’s chief athletics coach, dubbed Kaká “the kilometers man.” Though the Brazilian is a creator, he also covers more turf per match than any teammate except the worker Rino Gattuso.

Kaká has arrived only twenty minutes late for our meeting, which for a soccer player is early. He apologizes profusely for having missed me yesterday, has a stand-up read of the
Gazzetta dello Sport
newspaper, and then ponders the question of whether it’s fun being Kaká. “It’s a lot of pressure, responsibility. But these are good things: To have a big responsibility with Milan, it’s good. I can manage this pressure.” But when the season ends, can he finally exhale and relax? “I just relax when we win something. If we lose something, it’s difficult to relax.”