Soccer Men (6 page)

Matthäus wants us all to go and get something to drink for ourselves. I take charge of the task. I grab bottles of water from the fridge in the room and try to open them. Inevitably, the bottles turn out to be Kuper-resistant. Finally, someone manages to open a couple of cans of Coke. Matthäus makes sure everyone has a bottle, open or not.

We take our seats around him in a big U. Matthäus checks our tape recorders. Only when he is sure that they all work are we allowed to begin.

But first let’s go back to March 21, 1961, the day Matthäus was born in Herzogenaurach. Not much had ever happened in the thousand-year existence of the tiny town near Nuremberg. It hadn’t even been bombed in the war.

On March 21, 1961, Herzogenaurach had barely twenty thousand inhabitants and was known for just two things: Adidas and Puma. Both companies were headquartered there. In the 1920s, just when many of the locals had lost their jobs, Herzogenaurach was saved by the rise of sport.

In March 1961 most locals still worked in the sector. Heinz Matthäus was a janitor at Puma. Katharina, his wife, sewed the leather panels of balls at home. It was the era when Germans were working hard and starting to get rich. In the Matthäus home, people worked. Early in life, Matthäus got his own paper route—the start of a lifelong fascination with media.

Heinz, who sometimes had a glass too many, was a strict father. His son would later recall, “If something went wrong, I’d get a thick ear.” The smallest boy in his school class joined FC Herzogenaurach, the Puma factory club. When his team lost, he cried.

Our first question this evening is why on earth Matthäus is going to play in New York. After all, against Holland on Wednesday he’ll win his 144th cap (the world record if you don’t count certain Africans, which FIFA doesn’t),
while the New York–New Jersey MetroStars are like Hartlepool United. The American media proudly call them “the world’s worst soccer team.”

Matthäus speaks quickly, fluently, in clichés. Perhaps he hasn’t won more caps than any other player, but of all the players who have ever lived, he’s surely spoken the most words to journalists. Matthäus rattles off dozens of reasons to move to New York. Man, he thought, New York, it’s a big city, an interesting city; you can learn something there. Really, we should all go there. America is the land of opportunity, and in New York he can go out for dinner without the whole restaurant checking out how good he is with a knife and fork.

There are other motives he doesn’t mention. In the course of the past twenty years, Matthäus has gradually worked out why everyone in Germany always laughs at him. There are many reasons for that too, and one is his Franz Beckenbauer complex.

A century ago, the mental hospitals of Europe were full of men who thought they were the German Kaiser. They cultivated their mustaches, let one arm hang limply as if paralyzed, and ordered their regiments into battle.

Matthäus, too, has always wanted to be the Kaiser. Nobody laughs at Beckenbauer. Beckenbauer speaks English. Beckenbauer is a man of the world. And Beckenbauer spent five years of his playing career in New York. Matthäus wants to be Beckenbauer.

One of us asks whether Matthäus, in moving to New York, has Beckenbauer in mind.

No, says Matthäus.

And it’s partly true: It’s also about Maren. Maren is the gorgeous twenty-two-year-old daughter of sports doctor Hans-Wilhelm Müller-Wohlfahrt. Matthäus has known Maren since she was seven. Now she’s his girlfriend, and Maren wants to live in New York. Maren is a cultivated woman who wants to study theater in New York with Lee Strasberg. She also wants to see Woody Allen play the clarinet in the Carlyle Hotel on Monday nights. That’s not the sort of thing that would occur to Matthäus. He might go and see Pamela Anderson play the clarinet in the Carlyle Hotel. But now he’s in love. In the past, this is news that he would have instantly shared with us seven journalists. He once let the German television channel RTL make a documentary about his failed marriage to Lolita. He’d already let a TV crew
film him on his wedding day—“out of sheer loneliness,” as someone pointed out. The entire German nation laughed, so he won’t do that again.

He tells us that David Beckham must avoid the mistakes that he, Matthäus, made. “Beckham must keep his private life out of the media. There’ll always be something in the papers, but he has to keep his curtains closed. Why are Beckham’s five Ferraris always in the paper? He can have ten Ferraris—I’m happy for him—but they shouldn’t be in the paper. How do they say it in English?
My house is my castle?
”

Nowadays Matthäus’s house is his castle. That is, he only tells his secrets to
Bild
, the biggest tabloid newspaper in continental Europe. That’s how we know that he’s going to live in the Trump Tower at 721 Fifth Avenue, which is a good seventy minutes drive to training in New Jersey because New Yorkers clog up their streets with yellow taxis.

 

In Munich the streets are empty. One spring evening in 2000, my friend Philipp and I stroll along the boulevards of the Bavarian capital. Occasionally, a BMW sails by at eighty miles an hour. Otherwise, you don’t feel you’re in Germany at all. Munich is full of elegant women, eighteenth-century palaces where you can still imagine the carriages waiting outside the front gate, and delicious Italian restaurants stuffed with local soccer players. Only the many parks hint at the holes made by bombs.

Earlier that evening in Munich, I got into a taxi driven by an obese blonde woman, who told me that she’d driven Matthäus around for a day shortly before he left for New York. His main task was to try on shoes: His many injuries had swollen his right foot one size bigger than his left. The driver didn’t think New York would suit Lothar. He’s a Bavarian nature person, she explains.

Oh, yes, laughs Philipp, who is from Cologne, when I tell him the story. A Bavarian nature person! Philipp knows Matthäus. Matthäus isn’t the sort of man to rise at five in the morning, pull on his hiking boots, and go off and climb a mountain. But Matthäus is the sort of nature person that Bavarians imagine nature people to be: a Bavarian with sunglasses on his head and a sweater slung over his shoulders who gets into his sports car and drives his beautiful girlfriend to a beer garden, where they drink wheat beer in sight
of a mountain. Then the Bavarian nature person thinks, like the clerk in a Heinrich Heine story, “How beautiful nature in general is!”

Munich has become Matthäus’s hometown. He left Herzogenaurach for good when he was eighteen, after getting a diploma as a painter and decorator. He was given a modest contract at Borussia Mönchengladbach. Without soccer, he’d have laid carpets.

The young Matthäus rose fast: In May 1980, sitting in the German national team’s bus, he heard that he’d been picked for that summer’s European championship. He burst into tears. “Why?” asked veteran defender Bernard Dietz. Matthäus explained that he and his girlfriend had already booked their summer vacation.

In 1984 he signed for Bayern Munich. He spent a total of twelve years there and became the best player in the world. Had he left it at that, there would now be a statue of him in every town in Germany.

“And yet the last two or three years I no longer hear those jeers and whistles,” he reflects in the Atlantic room. “I think that now I’ve become a sort of role model for people in other professions, too.” He tells us about the letter he got recently from a man in his fifties, who like many Germans of his age couldn’t find work. At a job interview, the question of the man’s age had been raised yet again. “Look at Lothar Matthäus,” the man had replied. “He’s proving that age has nothing to do with performance.” The man had gotten the job.

Matthäus says, “Bixente Lizarazu has said that when he’s thirty-eight, he hopes to be able to play like I do now. It’s nice to read something like that.” But it wasn’t always like that: At a Bayern practice a couple of years ago, Lizarazu gave Matthäus a thick ear.

Matthäus’s troubles began early. At a very young age, he developed a gift for articulating dumb and irritating thoughts. At the European championships of 1980, Ribbeck, then a sort of jumped-up equipment manager, had said, “Even when we’re talking about the meal plan, he quacks something.” At the time Matthäus still had no status on the team. He won his first cap during the tournament, against Holland, and almost immediately gave away a penalty. Afterward, the German captain, Karl-Heinz Rummenigge, told the press, “You can’t be that stupid.”

Rummenigge was then the
Chef
(boss) of the German team. The German team almost always has a
Chef
: a man who tells the coach what the lineup will be, punishes dissidents, and makes the financial decisions. In the 1950s Germany’s manager Sepp Herberger used to say, “Fritz Walter
ist mein Chef
.” But the German obsession with
Chefs
derives from somebody else: It comes from Franz Beckenbauer.

It’s hard for non-Germans to fathom the extent to which Beckenbauer towers over German soccer. He’s the Kaiser, but with more power than the nickname implies. The son of a Munich postal worker, conceived in the final months of war, he is the sort of person who would have become a
Chef
even if he had been an accountant or a machine operator at BMW.

When West Germany lost to East Germany at the World Cup of 1974, Beckenbauer decided the lineup needed to be changed. He had a chat with his pal Gerd Müller, who had a soccer brain but no visible personality. Then Beckenbauer gave the new lineup to the coach, Helmut Schön, because it was Schön’s job to fill in the team sheet. Bernd Hölzenbein and Rainer Bonhof replaced Heinz Flohe and Bernd Cullmann. In the final Hölzenbein won the German penalty, and Bonhof gave the cross for Müller’s winning goal.

Later, when Beckenbauer coached Germany, his official title was
Der Teamchef.
Ever since Beckenbauer, every German national team has had to have a
Chef
or
Chefs.

Matthäus, in the grip of his personal Kaiser complex, always wanted to be
Chef.
When he tells us about his international career, the main thing he talks about is his changing status. “Whereas under [manager] Jupp Derwall I was the fifth wheel on the wage, under Franz Beckenbauer I became a regular,” he says in fluent tabloidese. Matthäus usually calls him “Franz Beckenbauer,” in full, perhaps from uncertainty over whether they are on a first-name basis.

“My breakthrough was the World Cup ’86. But I think it was a mistake of Franz Beckenbauer to have me mark Maradona in the final. I concentrated on Maradona, but we neglected our own game. After the 2–0 we changed that: I think that Karl-Heinz Förster took over Maradona, so that I could attack. We made it 2–2, then made a stupid mistake, and lost.”

The point is that Matthäus had become Germany’s
Chef.
The transfer of power officially took place on June 17, 1986, in the final minutes of the
game against Morocco, when the Germans were given a free kick. Rummenigge was getting ready to take it when Matthäus shoved him aside and scored. After that Beckenbauer, the coach, sometimes had a word with Matthäus about the lineup.

But the problem with being
Chef
is that other people want to be
Chef
, too. Rudi Völler did. He and Matthäus would sometimes fire balls at each other in practice. Later, when Jürgen Klinsmann’s game improved, he wanted to be
Chef
, too. Eventually, Germany had enough
Chefs
to open a restaurant.

Even at Bayern, Matthäus was always having to fight to stay
Chef.
Sometimes he leaked nasty things about his rivals to the press.
Bild
once reported that the other Bayern players called Klinsmann “Flipper,” after a performing dolphin then on television, because his ball control was so poor. The newspaper also announced that Matthäus had placed a bet on the limited number of goals that Flipper would score that season. (Matthäus won the bet.)

The power struggles were bitter. Here are a few of the things the other
Chefs
said about Matthäus:

When I ask Matthäus about all his rows, he tries to act the Kaiser.
Ach
, he says, there are tensions in every group. There are tensions in every family. Everywhere there is a certain hierarchy. It’s probably the same at your work, too, he says. You surely have a
Chef
and a secretary, who both do their jobs. And you need them both, don’t you?

We all nod obediently, whether we have secretaries or not. Matthäus has sidestepped the question, given the standard answer, has spoken as if he should be playing for the Washington Diplomats. And then he says, “But it’s logical that the
Chef
has more to say to you than to the secretary!” And his buckteeth shape into a huge cheeky grin.

It’s not just the other
Chefs
who are always attacking Matthäus. The rest of the German population does, too. Foreigners tend to think that all Germans
are just Germans, but in reality there are several different kinds of Germans. There are old Germans and young Germans,
Ossis
and
Wessis
, respectable citizens and alternative types, the Cultivated and the Uncultivated, and they tend not to get on. “You Germans really don’t get on!” I once commented to a table full of fellow students at the Technical University of West Berlin. They laughed uneasily, because they didn’t get on.

You can categorize a German by his attitude to Lothar Matthäus. Cultivated Germans despise Matthäus because he is Uncultivated: He turns his
k
’s into
g
’s, his
t
’s into
d
’s, and he has almost no grasp of the conjunctive tense!

Alternative types despise Matthäus because they despise most Germans. Haters of Bayern Munich (possibly the most significant single group in German society) despise him because he is Bayern. And Bayern fans aren’t too keen on him, either, because he spent twelve years pissing in his own tent.