Soccer Men (3 page)

This goes on for a couple of hours, yet I find it interesting. First of all, Trautmann really is a legend, so nothing he says is dull. But also, the atmosphere at our table is calm and soothing. I assume that this is typical of team camps when everything is going well. The Werder president and Trautmann occasionally order rounds of beer, nobody looks around to see if he can see anyone more interesting (Jürgen Klinsmann, say), and every speaker is permitted time to hold forth.

Klopfleisch alone says little. The general opinion—which I think he shares—is that as a simple electrician, he should be grateful to be here at all.

When Trautmann doesn’t have anything more to say, the Werder president explains to me why the German camp is so calm: The Bayern players are behaving themselves. It was different in the past, he assures me. He can say that because his good friend Fritz Scherer has left. “Uli Hoeness—that’s the arrogance of Bayern in one man,” says the Werder president.

“Paul Breitner,” says Trautmann. The Werder president shivers as if he has food poisoning.

The Werder players are very serious characters, he says. Sometimes there’ll be a talk on religion in town, and a group of them will go along. Not the Jehovah’s Witnesses or anything like that. No, serious theological evenings. Not really Bayern’s thing, he thinks. The Werder president says that Werder and Bayern represent two sides of the German character.

“North and South?” I guess.

“I’m afraid I must correct you,” he says. “Werder is the Germany of the collective. No stars. Everyone works hard to build something together. The Germany of the 1950s, as it were.”

“And Bayern?”

“Bayern is the Germany of today. Too rich, spoiled, always quarreling, and disliked everywhere. And yet they usually win.”

That leads us to the great question: Why do Germans always win? Surely, these men must know.

Trautmann takes some more nuts. Klopfleisch and the Werder president look polite but uncomprehending. They don’t see my point. After all, Germany doesn’t always win. They didn’t win the last World Cup, for instance. No, things are not going well for Germany at the moment. The new generation doesn’t want to work, and . . .

I give up.

Have they had a nice time in England?

Oh, yes. They are all Anglophiles. There is a tranquillity about this country that Germany lacks.

“You know,” says the Werder president, “I grew up in East Berlin. Later I fled to the West. So the division of Germany determined my life. It was the same, of course, for Herr Klopfleisch. And Herr Trautmann became a legend as a result of being taken prisoner in the war. But in England nothing has changed for a hundred years. It’s the Old World. I like that so much. The war put an end to all that in Germany.”

I learned one thing during my time in Berlin: When it gets late and there is beer on the table and a foreigner present, German conversations turn to war.

“I am a simple man,” says Trautmann. He pauses. “This is what I have always remained, but I read my books, and what I read is this: The French, the Americans, the English, they all knew exactly what Hitler was going to do. And so as a simple man I ask myself: Why didn’t they do anything? If France had chased him out of the Rhineland in 1936 . . .”

At eleven o’clock he goes to bed. The Werder president follows, but first he puts our beers on his room bill. It’s easy when the German soccer federation is paying, but even so . . .

Klopfleisch and I have a last cup of coffee. He grumbles, “It’s always the same with these old Germans. If this, if that, then Hitler would never have happened, and they could sleep easily at night.”

Klopfleisch is bitter. The lives of these three men may have been determined by Hitler, but only Klopfleisch’s life was ruined. He was not allowed to go to university, and when he was kicked out of the GDR, he lost everything he had. He’s pleased that he can go to a tournament in the West with the national team, he says, but it means less to him than it would have in the days of the Wall.

Klopfleisch’s complaints are starting to bore me. He is not a legend. The legend has gone to bed, and so I leave too. “Good luck on Sunday,” I say, as if Germany needs it.

January 1999

W
hen Johan Cruijff was a young player and still rather naive, Dutch journalists used to tease him by asking him what was the last book he had read.

Invariably, he would cite the now-forgotten American novel
Knock on Any Door
. Sometimes the journalist would say: “But you said that last time!” and Cruijff would reply, “I’ve read it again. It’s a very good book.”

So it is ironic that Cruijff—voted European player of the century last week by the International Federation of Football History and Statistics—is responsible for the Dutch publishing sensation of this winter.

The book,
You Have to Shoot, or You Can’t Score, and Other Quotes from Johan Cruijff
, first appeared in October. It sold out instantly. It was reprinted twice in November, sold out again, and now sits once more in piles beside the tills in half the bookstores in Holland.

The quotes were assembled by Henk Davidse, who collected Cruijff interviews for decades and found rich material. Cruijff talked a lot. Even on the pitch, on the ball, with three men on him, he was always gesticulating and shouting advice to teammates. His whole life has been a conversation.

He talked about everything. The chapter headings include “On Guilders, Pesetas, and Dollars,” “On Tar and Nicotine,” “The Dutch Team: A Difficult Relationship,” and “On His Youth, Father Manus, Brother Henny, Wife Danny, the Children, and Health.”

And Cruijff said things that no one else did. “Even when he talked nonsense,” wrote Nico Scheepmaker in his biography
Cruijff, Hendrik Johannes, 1947–1984, Fenomeen
, “it was always interesting nonsense.”

Cruijff understood soccer better than anyone, but he also thought he understood everything better than anyone. He told a Chicago taxi driver the quickest way into town, advised Ian Woosnam to change his swing, and before having heart bypass surgery debated the method of operation with his surgeon.

He not only said new things but also said them in his own words. Being a genius who left school at the age of twelve, he often found that his thoughts ran ahead of his vocabulary. In Holland in recent months, various learned essays have appeared on the topic of Cruijff’s Dutch. Its main characteristics are his frequent use of the word
you
to mean
I
(“That was the worst thing, that you always saw everything better”), his outdated Amsterdam working-class formulations (
ken
instead of
kan
for
can
), and his penchant for apparently random words (“Them on the right is goat’s cheese”). Cruijff himself is oblivious to these defects. “Talking,” he muses in the book, “if I could do everything as well as talking . . .”

His Spanish is more flawed than his Dutch, but in a different way. He relies too much on the word
claro
(meaning “of course”), pronounced in an Amsterdam accent with a shrug of the shoulders, and on the self-invented phrase
en el este momento
(meaning “now”), used as a delaying tactic.

In fact, his best language may be English, which he learned as a child hanging around Ajax’s English coaches Keith Spurgeon and Vic Buckingham. He still makes the odd mistake, though. “Why should I gone back when everything they are doing with soccer in Holland is wrong now?” he once asked the
Washington Post
. But shining through the errors, always, are remarkable formulations.

Like many great philosophers, Cruijff has mastered the apparent paradox. Thus: “Chance is logical.”

“Italians can’t beat you, but you can lose to them.”

“Before I make a mistake, I don’t make that mistake.”

And, on turning fifty in 1997: “Really I haven’t lived fifty years, but one hundred.”

Cruijff now feels himself to be an old man, and this is the sadness that underlies the book, the reason it was published now. Davidse is celebrating a mind that no longer exists. “The tooth of time has done its work,” Cruijff said in 1996, shortly before being sacked from his last job as coach of Barcelona.

Instead of having original thoughts, he now spends his time taking his grandchildren to the zoo and commentating on Dutch television, often continuing to speak after the microphone has been turned off, because he has never understood how TV works.

Davidse’s book is part of Holland’s attempt to thank him at last. As a player, Cruijff was often maligned as greedy, and at Ajax he was stripped of the captaincy by his teammates. Fans used to shout “Nose!” at him.

There was delight in 1979 when it turned out he had lost all his money to a French Russian con man called Basilevitch. This winter, the tens of thousands of Dutchmen dropping into bookstores are, in a quiet way, saying good-bye and sorry. As Cruijff might tell them: “You only start to see it when you get it.”

March 1999

B
loody mist, eh?” says Bruce Grobbelaar, jumping out of his car just in time for training. “You can’t see a golf ball on the fairways.” Behind him Table Mountain is indeed shrouded in the stuff, and across the bay from the training ground Robben Island is barely visible, either. The former Liverpool keeper has landed in Cape Town, where he now coaches the Seven Stars.

A Grobbelaar training session goes something like this: Grobbelaar spins a ball on his finger, frowning in concentration while the players stretch and run laps. Grobbelaar places a ball on an orange post and kicks it into the distance while the players pass to one another. Grobbelaar performs the kickoff for two five-a-side games simultaneously, by punting two balls out of his hands at the same time. Grobbelaar watches the five-a-sides, saying “Goal” when appropriate. When a shot goes high over the bar he says, “Boom!” At the end, Grobbelaar selects five players to run short sprints and do push-ups as punishments for unspecified sins.

“Whole team must run!” some players protest, but Grobbelaar ignores them. Twenty-five years ago, one recalls, he was a corporal in the Rhodesian army.

“He’s still got a way to go as a coach,” one Seven Stars player concedes. Afterward, Grobbelaar chucks me and two of his players in his car, drops them at the supermarket—they have no cars—and drives me into Cape Town for a night out. The city, he says, is one of the six best in the world, along
with Vancouver, Perth, London, and Paris. “The sixth one I have not been to yet,” he adds, lifting that trademark Zorro mustache for the trademark toothy grin beneath the trademark bald head. At forty-one, with only the merest hint of a beer belly, he is still unmistakably Bruce Grobbelaar, and he is stopped in Cape Town all the time by local Liverpool fans.

The drive into the city is an experience. While reversing at high speed, Grobbelaar can swing the car five inches to his left and then immediately back again to save a side mirror. He can read street signs from nearly a hundred yards. As we drive down the waterfront in the dark, he entertains himself counting the prostitutes: thirty-three, he says. “If my eyesight fails, I don’t think I’d be half the man that I am.” He was a child prodigy at baseball and cricket, too, better, he says, as a teenage wicketkeeper than David Houghton, who went on to an international career with Zimbabwe.

We sit down to fish and a lot of wine in the Dias Tavern, a Portuguese bar that is showing Spurs beat Leeds, and as Spur’s manager George Graham mistakenly celebrates David Ginola’s drive against the post, Grobbelaar roars with laughter. “That’ll be one for
Bloopers
!” Grobbelaar would love to be managing an English side himself, living with his wife and daughters in Lymington, Hampshire. The problem, he says, is the damage he suffered from being tried on charges of throwing soccer matches. Although he walked free in 1997 and is now suing the
Sun
, the newspaper that accused him, he cannot find an English club that will have him. “Your name has been tainted with the stigma,” he grumbles, emphasizing every word like a true white South African.

And without any prompting, he recalls how the saga began, one day in November 1994, when he arrived at Heathrow to catch a plane to Zimbabwe and was confronted by two
Sun
journalists who told him they had videotapes of him purportedly telling his former business partner, Chris Vincent, about match fixing. This merely compounded Grobbelaar’s problems, because he knew that the
News of the World
was about to run a sex story about him. “I had given Vincent a false account of sexual allegations with other people,” he explains. He flew his wife and daughters to meet him in Zimbabwe, hoping to shield them from the sex story, but a lawyer told his wife about it on the airplane, and at the Harare airport she walked straight past him. Later that day he had to play a World Cup qualifier against Zaire. It was, he says, hard to motivate himself.