Soccer Men (4 page)

He is still not over the trial. Recently, he dreamed that he was sitting in a cell and waiting again for the jury’s verdict, but this time, in the dream, he was found guilty. In real life, Grobbelaar, who had previously lost his money setting up a safari park with Vincent, lost more in the case, together, he believes, with a portion of his reputation. He does not spend a lot of time worrying about it, chiefly because he never expected to live to be forty-one. In the Rhodesian war, he explains, “you went out and survived that day. And the rest is bonus.” He fought the war against the black guerrillas who would later lead Zimbabwe. Is it not surprising, then, that he is now the most popular white man in the country?

“Listen,” he says, “even my houseboy’s son joined the other side. We met in my house during the war. I said, ‘If I see you in the bush, I will kill you.’ He said, ‘Yes, but I will kill you too.’ I said, ‘Okay, we will see who comes first.’ I didn’t see him, but he was killed in the war. His younger brother, Gordon, told me.’”

In the war, because of his eyesight, Grobbelaar worked as a tracker, gauging when and where guerrillas had passed from the state of their footprints and food remains. It was a job normally done by black hunters. Although Grobbelaar speaks no language fluently, in the war he picked up some of the Zimbabwean languages—Shona, Ndebele, and Nyanja—to go with his English and Afrikaans.

When English clubs rejected him, he decided to start his coaching career in Zimbabwe. Last year he briefly acted as caretaker-manager of the national team, sending himself on for the last twenty minutes of a game against Tunisia in November, and he spent months trying to negotiate a job as assistant coach. But the Zimbabwean dollar kept plunging, and in the end the country could not pay him enough. As one official at the Zimbabwean FA asked me, “Born in Durban, grew up here, then went to Canada, spent fourteen years at Liverpool—is he a local man?” In fact, Grobbelaar is a local man in many places.

He throws me into his car again, and as we shoot down the highway, overtaking on both sides, he points to the Cape Castle and says, “That’s where my grandfather was born. His father was a fusilier in the British army, and the castle was a British stronghold in the Boer War.” The birth in the castle, Grobbelaar says, entitled him to a work permit when he joined Liverpool.

In June, Seven Stars will disappear, merging with local rivals Spurs to form Ajax Cape Town, a feeder club of which Ajax Amsterdam will own 51 percent. In the short term, therefore, Grobbelaar plans to win some matches with Seven Stars, playing with a back four. Then, when the club is safe from relegation, he will start them playing the Ajax system with three defenders. Next, his plan is to become head coach of Ajax Cape Town. Then, back to Europe. And the ultimate goal? Grobbelaar is not a man for coyness. “My ambition,” he says, “is to take the reins at Liverpool.”

He tells me that the training methods I saw in action earlier that evening were learned at Anfield from Bob Paisley, who in turn had learned them from Bill Shankly. Not that Grobbelaar is sentimental about Liverpool. He played in the games at Heysel and Hillsborough, and still has nightmares about them, as well as about the war. “Even today. You are lying down by yourself and thinking about your career, and the three things you think of are Heysel, Hillsborough, and the war.”

We end the evening in Grobbelaar’s apartment, which he has borrowed from a friend, and sit by the pool listening to the crickets and drinking whiskey. It is the time of night to philosophize. Twenty years ago, says Grobbelaar, his then girlfriend, a Rhodesian woman, became pregnant, and just before he could propose to her, he discovered that the father was his best friend. What, he muses, if he had married her? “I would never have gone to Liverpool. I’d have been somewhere in Africa now. Probably Bulawayo. Running my own business. With five children.” Would that have been a good thing? “Yes,” he says, “because I would never have met that crazy arsehole Vincent, who nailed me.” But he doesn’t mean it.

March 1999

T
he last time Edgar Davids and I talked, the subject was fashion. “You!” he said. “You’re badly dressed!” Surely, I replied, he could not be referring to me. And in his best black American English he shouted: “Damn, yes!”

The Juventus midfielder, who faces Manchester United in the Champions League semifinal next month, is as important to his side as Roy Keane is to United. He is also paranoid, aggressive, and occasionally violent.

When Davids played youth soccer at Ajax, he was sent off so often that a club official took him to Milan and Juventus to show him how good life was for players who made it big. He also devoted a lot of energy to beating opponents by putting the ball through their legs. “Masturbation,” his coach Louis van Gaal called it.

Around the same time, Davids strode up to tennis player Richard Krajicek in an Amsterdam bar and said, “I bet you don’t know who I am.” Krajicek confirmed that he did not.

“My name is Edgar Davids,” said Davids. “In a few years’ time I’ll be playing for Holland and driving a big car. You’ll be hearing more from me.” Then he stalked off again.

This anger within has made him the player he is today. Left out of Holland’s squad for the World Cup of 1994, he spent the tournament on Amsterdam playgrounds practicing what he saw on television. Davids scorns players like Danny Blind who collect soccer trivia; he himself collects tricks, and in big games he can suddenly produce a ten-yard backflip on the turn or swivel a full circle through two opponents.

He was part of the Ajax team that won the Champions League in 1995, and when they lost the ’96 final to Juventus, Davids missed the decisive penalty. All the while he remained a difficult character, living in a mental world populated almost exclusively by true mates (the other black players at Ajax), jerks (almost everyone else he knew), and heroes (people he read about in books).

An autodidact, Davids was obsessed with basketball players and rappers. His biggest hero was Dennis Rodman of the Chicago Bulls, whose autobiography,
Bad as I Wanna Be
, he knew by heart. Davids yearned to appear in an advertisement wearing nothing but a pair of sports socks, in imitation of a Rodman pose.

This era culminated at Euro 96 when he walked out of the Dutch training camp in St. Albans, advising the coach, Guus Hiddink, to remove his head from other players’ backsides. It was, though he did not acknowledge it, a quote from Rodman.

Then he began a vendetta against Dutch journalists. At press conferences he would seek out foreign reporters and talk in fluent Italian or English until a Dutchman tried to listen in, whereupon he would instantly shut up.

His personality adulterated his soccer. He no longer tried nutmegs, but he did like to stand around with his foot on the ball, pretending to be the Boss. Johan Cruijff said he dribbled too much.

In 1996, Davids left Ajax for Milan. Things began well, with George Weah nicknaming him Big E Small in honor of the rap artist, but later he broke a leg and ended up on the bench. In December 1997, Milan let him go to Juventus for a transfer fee of just $5 million and their good riddance. During transfer talks he turned up at the Milanello training ground with a Juve shirt under his arm.

In Turin, his lurch to sanity began. As a little black boy growing up in Amsterdam-North he had thought of Juventus as the ultimate, or, as he would put it, “cool,” club. Suddenly, he found himself among the heroes from his books. He was not about to run with the ball when it was clear even to him that Zinedine Zidane and Alessandro del Piero could do it better. So he played in their service, tackling, intercepting, passing cleanly, and showing once in a while that he could do more than that.

And by the time he reached his third Champions League final, against Real Madrid last May, he too had become a hero. Juventus lost, but he was excellent. They won Serie A. The jerks who had “dissed” him in the past were sorry now.

Adriano Galliani, vice chairman of Milan, joked, “I shall give orders for Davids to be brought back to Milan.” Hiddink recalled him to the Dutch team. Davids started the World Cup on the bench and ended it as his country’s best
player, a tackler for whom there is no such thing as a fifty-fifty ball. Now he is also the Dutch vice captain.

Last week Davids turned twenty-six. If Juventus overcomes Manchester United in May, he will play his fourth Champions League final in five years. He will not relax—he can never relax—but by now he must know that he has made it.

December 1999

M
onday, December 20, 1999, was a busy day for Rivaldo. He awoke in the Princesa Sofia Hotel around the corner from the Barcelona stadium, because his family had already left for a vacation in Brazil and he didn’t want to be alone in the big house.

He had to be at the club at nine o’clock. Louis van Gaal, Barcelona’s manager, wanted to analyze the match of the previous evening, a 2–1 victory over Atletico Madrid. The Brazilian player had been substituted after seventy-two minutes.

After the match analysis was finished, the shy Rivaldo asked for permission to speak. Listen, he said in his Portuguese-tinted Spanish, I have respect for the coach and for everybody here, but I won’t play outside-left anymore.

A light training session followed, after which Rivaldo appeared before the press. Twenty journalists, still ignorant of his speech, interrogated him about the vote for European Player of the Year. The prize has been awarded by the magazine
France Football
since 1956, and past winners include Stanley Matthews, Raymond Kopa, and Franz Beckenbauer. Whoever wins it becomes a legend.

No comment, said Rivaldo. The result of the vote isn’t known yet. “Everybody knows it’s you,” pleaded the journalists. Rivaldo said nothing. Magazines like
World Soccer
and
Onze
had already made him their Player of the Year, but the only prize that really counts is
France Football
’s Golden Ball.

Then he drove to the airport to collect handball player Iñaki, the sonin-law of the king of Spain. That afternoon they were going to do something for charity. Rivaldo and his agent, Manuel Auset (“I’m not his agent. I’m his friend”), don’t want me to say anything about that. Rivaldo doesn’t do these things for public relations.

And then, three hours late, dressed in black, the tall Brazilian finally appears on the nineteenth floor of the Princesa Sofia. Iñaki was delayed, and the charity event ran over schedule, says Manuel, a brisk little Spanish lawyer. Rivaldo sits down, groans when he sees my long list of questions, but in the end, on this day of days, agrees to tell his story.

 

“No. Today I am. Today I have to do so many things. I am almost always well rested.”

“I don’t think so. The greatest pressure I experienced in Brazil, at Corinthians and Palmeiras. The pressure in Brazil is a little complicated. They threaten your family, they damage your car, and it’s a little complicated. If you were to have the results at Palmeiras that we’ve been having at Barcelona recently, you wouldn’t be able to walk down the street.”

“Yes, I do. If I could choose a club in Brazil, I’d choose Palmeiras.”

You’re from Recife. Do you plan to return there later?
I think: a house in Recife and a house in São Paulo. São Paulo for work and Recife to relax, with the beach.

“No, I don’t think so, eh?”

You are a player who plays by instinct, and Barcelona has a thinking coach. That’s the way it is, isn’t it?
(When I ask the question I don’t know anything about Rivaldo’s speech of that morning.)

“No, he’s a coach I respect very much and a coach who looks at tactics. He likes it when players have to do something in his system, in his
tactica.
It’s different in Brazil. There people don’t talk about tactics, and that means freedom. But you have to have it in you to take that responsibility. If you have the quality to do more than other players, the coach will give you freedom. So that you can beat three, four, five stars to score. A spectacular goal, an amazing goal, a beautiful goal.

“Here it’s a bit complicated, it’s more tactical. It’s a bit like the
mister
[the Spanish slang for “coach”] says one thing, and the player does the other. I’d like to be more comfortable, to have more pleasure. Because you can’t enjoy so much, I try to enjoy when I can.”

“I have played on the wing for a while, and now I want to play in the center again. Not with the shirt number 10, but as a number 10. Here, well, here I’ve never played in the center. For years I have been doing things for the team, and I do nothing for myself. I want to enjoy more, to play in my own position. For me, for the team, for everybody.”

“Yes. I, the family, the children—we are all happy with the club and the city.”

“Yes. I think that is bad for a soccer player. If you are thirty-four or thirty-five, it is a bit complicated. We are not machines.”

Several magazines have already voted you their Player of the Year.
(I don’t mention
France Football
, but in retrospect it is clear Rivaldo’s answer refers to that.)