Step Across This Line (14 page)

1. WE ARE THE WORLD

In 1994, when the soccer World Cup was about to be played across the length and breadth of a largely indifferent America, perhaps the main concern of those few U.S. citizens who knew it was happening was that the alien phenomenon of soccer hooliganism might be about to arrive in the States. Fortunately the England team failed to make the finals, and so the feared English hooligans stayed home. Fortunately for the hooligans, I suspect, for, as I heard an American comedian explaining on British television, the World Cup matches were to be played in some of the toughest neighborhoods of some of the toughest cities in the world. “I tell you what,” he suggested. “Why don’t you bring your hooligans, and we’ll bring ours.”

Four years later, the 1998 World Cup was staged in and won by France, and as it happened I watched the entire tournament in America, on ESPN and Univision. The dullness of the ESPN coverage, with its commentators desperately misapplying the terminology of America’s ball games to soccer, suggested that America’s lack of interest in the rest of the world’s favorite game was as great as ever. Even when the USA team was defeated by Iran—Iran!—there was no more than a brief blip of attention before the Yankees, McGwire, and Sosa regained center stage.

Over on the Spanish-language Univision channel, however—“Góóóóóóóóóóóóól!!!!!!”—things were very different. Here was all the excitement and color missing from the ESPN commentary. And as it was on television, so it was also in real life; for wherever in polyglot America you stumbled over clumps of French men and women, or Brazilians, Colombians, Mexicans, Croatians, Germans, even Brits, for example in the many-nationed bars of Queens, the tournament and its passions were to be found there also, blazing as fiercely as anywhere else on earth.

The poor performances of the USA team were no doubt due, in part, to the crushing uninterest of the American mainstream but could also, I thought, be ascribed to the fact that the team seemed to be made up of college kids. For while college teams successfully supply fresh talent, year after year, to the NFL and NBA, soccer is not a college sport. Soccer is the people’s game, played with empty tin cans in the back streets of Brazilian cities. Soccer is working-class self-expression. If the United States is to have a first-rate soccer team, its administrators must look away from the colleges and into the heart of the minority communities who could be found crowding around their televisions in those summer weeks, sharing in the world’s excitement over the world championship of
o jogo bonito,
the Beautiful Game.

How to convey to America the idea of beauty as applied to a ball game it knows and cares so little about? How to explain the links that exist between soccer teams and national character? For all soccer fans know what it means to play like Brazilians (that is, with flair, flamboyance, and intoxicating rhythm), or like Germans (with great discipline, unwearying physical strength, and iron determination) or Italians (defensively, but with devastating bursts of counterattacking play).

This essay seeks to answer such questions by avoiding them. It seeks to find common ground between those who, like me, love soccer, and those to whom it feels like an alien irrelevance. It sets out not to describe the arcana of the game itself but to explore a related condition that crosses all sporting boundaries: that of being a fan.

A fan doesn’t just tune in once every four years to cheer his country’s team at the time of the World Cup. The true soccer fan is the club fan, for whom continuity is everything, and so is loyalty in times of adversity, and small gratifications offer great emotional rewards. Which is why, one rainy Sunday afternoon in March, I set out for Wembley Stadium, London, to watch my favorite club, Tottenham Hotspur, take on Leicester City in the final of the Worthington Cup.

There are three major competitions in English soccer each season, one played in leagues—the elite Premiership and the three lower divisions of the Football League—and two on a knockout basis (i.e., whoever loses is eliminated): the ancient and glamorous Football Association Challenge Cup (the “FA Cup”), and the johnny-come-lately, cheap-and-cheerful League Cup, which has metamorphosed, in this era of sponsorship, into the Milk Cup, the Coca-Cola Cup, and now the Worthington Cup. (At least milk, Coke, and Worthington beer are all things you can pour into cups. Cricket, also a much-sponsored sport, has had its Cups sponsored by the manufacturers of cigarettes and razor blades.)

In spite of the third-out-of-three status of the Worthington Cup, the chance to watch one’s team play at Wembley lifts the heart and quickens the pulse. Wembley is the hallowed heart of the English game, the turf on which the England team won its only World Cup way back in 1966. I’ve been a Spurs fan since the early 1960s, but I’ve never made it to Wembley to watch them in a final until now.

What’s more, the nineties have been lean years for this once-great soccer club. But now, here we are in a cup final again. A win may herald the beginning of a new golden era. I make my way to the great stadium, full of hope.

2. FIRST LOVE

I came to London in January 1961 as a boy of thirteen and a half, on my way to boarding school and accompanied by my father. It was a cold month, with blue skies by day and green fogs by night. We stayed at a huge barracks of a hotel, the Cumberland at Marble Arch, and soon after we settled in, my father asked if I would like to see a professional soccer game.

In Bombay, where I had grown up, there was no soccer to speak of; the local sports were cricket and field hockey. The only part of India where soccer was taken seriously was Bengal, and although the fame of the Mohun Bagan team of Calcutta had reached my ears, I had never seen the game played.

The first game my father took me to see was a friendly match between the North London club, Arsenal, and the Spanish champions, Real Madrid. I did not then know that the visitors were rated as perhaps the greatest club side ever seen anywhere. Or that they had just won the European Cup, the annual tournament held to determine the champion of all Europe’s national champions, five years running (an achievement that nobody before or since has matched). Or that among their players were two of the game’s all-time immortals, the Hungarian Ferenc Puskas, “the little general” who masterminded his national side’s humiliating drubbings of the England team, and the Argentinian center-forward Alfredo di Stefano. Other Real players—the flying winger Gento, the defensive colossus Santamaria—were rated almost as highly as the two superstars.

This is the way I remember the game:
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in the first half, Real Madrid tore the Arsenal apart. The London club was and is renowned for its tough defensive style of play—“Boring Arsenal” is a label they were stuck with for years—but Real went through them almost at will, and at the halftime break led 3–0. Then, because this was after all just a friendly game with nothing riding on it, Real took off their star players and replaced them for the second half with a bunch of kids. Arsenal stubbornly kept all their first-team players on the field and the game ended up tied, 3–3; but not even the most die-hard Arsenal fans at the game could pretend that the result accurately reflected the quality of the two teams. On the way back to the hotel my father asked me for my views. “I didn’t think much of that English team,” I told him, “but I liked that Spanish side. Can you find out if there’s an English team that plays like Real Madrid?” Unknown to me, I had asked for the near-impossible; as if, in Michael Jordan’s airborne heyday, I had asked, “Can you find out if there’s a team that plays like the Chicago Bulls?” My father, almost as much an innocent in these matters as myself, said, “I’ll ask at the front desk.” What he learned from that long-forgotten hotel clerk changed my life, because a few days later we went to watch the other famous club of North London, Tottenham Hotspur, and I lost my heart.

There were still many things I didn’t know. I didn’t know that between Tottenham and Arsenal, the Spurs and the Gunners, there was a long rivalry and a deep mutual loathing. I didn’t know that the Spurs tradition was of cavalier attacking play, and that if Arsenal were jeered for their negativity (it was said that their fans would sing in celebration of a scoreless draw), then the leaky Spurs defense was also a traditional butt of ridicule for soccer fans everywhere. I didn’t even know the words to the Spurs’ version of “Glory, Glory, Hallelujah.” (“Poor old Arsenal lies a-moldering in the grave / while the Spurs go marching on! on! on!”)

Most of all I didn’t know that under their manager, the taciturn Yorkshireman Bill Nicholson—“Billy Nick”—and their loquacious Irish captain, Danny Blanchflower, Tottenham had become the greatest team to emerge in Britain since the “Busby Babes” of Manchester United perished in the Munich air disaster of 1958. The hotel clerk had been right. This team could have given Real Madrid a fright. These were the Super Spurs in their greatest year, on their way to capturing British soccer’s Holy Grail, the League and Cup Double; that is to say, victory in a single season both in the First Division of the Football League and in the country’s premier knockout competition, the FA Cup.

I don’t remember who Spurs thrashed that day, but I do recall understanding that I had in some profound and unalterable way been changed by my visit to this bleak northern borough of a city in which I was still a complete stranger. The boy who left the Spurs’ stadium at White Hart Lane after the final whistle was no longer a spectator. He had become a fan.

Bill Brown, Peter Baker, Ron Henry, Danny Blanchflower, Maurice Norman, Dave Mackay, Cliff Jones, John White, Bobby Smith, Les Allen, Terry Dyson. To this day I can recite the names of the first team without needing to look them up. I can even do most of the reserves. Johnny Hollowbread, Mel Hopkins, Tony Marchi, Terry Medwin, Eddie Clayton, Frank Saul . . . Sorry. Sorry. I’ll stop.

I can remember, too, the horror with which I greeted the series of mishaps that broke the side up. I felt them as personal tragedies: Blanchflower’s knee injury, Norman’s broken leg, Mackay breaking the same leg
twice,
and above all the death of John White, killed by lightning while sheltering under a tree on a golf course. White’s nickname at Spurs had been the Ghost.

Spurs did the Double in the 1960–61 season, narrowly missed repeating the feat in 1961–62, and in the following thirty-seven years they have often been “a good Cup side,” winning many British and European knockout trophies, but they have never won a League Championship again. This is what it means to be a fan: to wait for a miracle, enduring decades of disillusion, and yet to have no choice in the matter of allegiance. Each weekend, I turn to the sports pages, and my eye automatically seeks out the Spurs’ result. If they have won, the weekend feels richer. If they have lost, a black cloud settles. It’s pathetic. It’s an addiction. It’s monogamous, till-death-us-do-part love.

In that glorious 1960–61 season, however, Blanchflower’s Tottenham did, just that once, take the First Division championship by storm. Then, on the first Saturday in May, they went down the road to Wembley for the Cup Final, the Double’s second leg. They won the game 2–0, even though they didn’t play well on the day, as even their manager, Bill Nicholson, later admitted. They were, in fact, lucky to win.

The team they beat was Leicester City.

3. GOALKEEPERS

The 1999 Worthington Cup Final would turn out to be a tale of two opposing goalkeepers. The Spurs goalie, Ian Walker, had only recently regained his first-team place after a slump in form, and many of us still worried about his vulnerability. Leicester, on the other hand, had the U.S. international keeper, Kasey Keller, in goal. Walker and Keller would make one bad mistake apiece at crucial moments of the match. One of them got away with it. The other’s fumble decided the game.

Goalkeepers aren’t like other players, perhaps because they are allowed to handle the ball within the delineated confines of the “penalty area,” perhaps because they are the last line of their team’s defense, but mainly because, for goalkeepers, there is no middle register of performance; each time they play, they know they will come off the field either as heroes or as clowns.

A good goalkeeper must be brave enough to dive at the feet of an opponent arriving at speed. He must command the area around his goal and exude an air of swift decisiveness. He must know when to catch the ball and when to punch it, and whenever high crosses are aimed into the penalty area from the wings, he must, if he can, rise above the throng of players and make the ball his own.

In spite of (or because of) the goalie’s vital importance, English soccer has goalkeeper jokes the way rock ’n’ roll has drummer jokes. There was once a goalie nicknamed Dracula, because he was afraid of crosses. Also a goalie nicknamed Cinderella, because he was always late for the ball.

The keeper in the “Super Spurs” Double side was the Scottish international, Bill Brown. He was gaunt and unsmiling and brilliant and had an old-fashioned short-back-and-sides haircut, and nobody ever cracked a joke about him.

One day in the mid-1960s, however, Billy Nick splashed out 30,000 pounds, then a world-record transfer fee for a goalkeeper, to bring a huge raw Irish kid the short distance from the little Watford Football Club to mighty Spurs. His name was Pat Jennings, and he wore his hair fashionably long and wavy, with sideburns. The Spurs faithful distrusted him at once.

He did his time in the reserve side but soon enough got his turn in goal. The home fans gave him a hard time that day until, at a crucial moment, he flew across his goalmouth to save a shot that was heading at high velocity for the far top corner, and not only made the save but
caught the flying ball cleanly in a single outstretched hand.

We looked at one another, aghast, with the same question in all our eyes:
exactly how big are this guy’s paws?
After that save, Jennings had no more trouble with the Spurs crowd, who took him to their hearts until, many seasons later, the management did an unthinkable thing. Deciding that Pat—our by now beloved Pat, Ireland’s international keeper as well as ours, Pat who was regularly rated as the finest in the world!—was over the hill, they transferred him to Arsenal. To Arsenal, of all clubs, where he went on to enjoy year after year of triumph! Even now, it’s hard to put into words the outrage I felt. The outrage I still feel. I can only say what Spurs fans said to each other in those days, furiously, mirthlessly, often adding, as intensifiers, a series of unrepeatable expletives: “It’s a joke.”
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