Soccer Men (13 page)

Does he regret anything? “Certainly not. If I didn’t take the course I’d taken, I wouldn’t have married the person I have, and I wouldn’t have these two lovely kids.”

What does he advise Adu? “He’s really got to treat every game as if it was his last and put everything into it.”

Will is fairly typical of Golden Ball winners of the Under-17 World Cup. Other laureates include Philip Osundo of Nigeria, William de Oliveira of Brazil, and Oman’s Mohammed Al Kathiri, none of whom I had ever heard of. Another, the Ghanaian Nii Lamptey, hailed at fifteen as the new Pele, is now twenty-eight and playing out an unhappy career in the United Arab Emirates. The adult Lamptey turned out to be the wrong shape for soccer.

The only Under-17 Golden Ball winner to enjoy much subsequent success is the American Landon Donovan, who impressed at the last World Cup, but, at age twenty-one, he remains with the San Jose Earthquakes. Cesc Fabregas, the Spaniard who won the award this summer, is now a sixteen-year-old at Arsenal, hundreds of miles from home.

On Wednesday Adu, who despite being so young played brilliantly at the Under-17 World Cup, was presented to the press at New York’s Madison Square Garden. A video loop showed him scoring cartoonlike goals at the tournament: a stocky figure endlessly dribbling through entire defenses, a sort of black Maradona.

More surprising though, was Adu the man. Probably the world’s best soccer player of his age, he is undoubtedly the world’s most mature person of his age. Before the television cameras he gave a long, fluent speech without notes in which he thanked everyone, but particularly his mother. She brought Adu and his brother to the United States from Ghana after winning a green card in a lottery six years ago. She did it to give the boys a better education. In Potomac, Maryland, she worked seventy hours a week at two jobs. This was the American dream, pure.

Beaming at the tearful woman in the front row, Adu said, “We’ve been through some tough times, Mom, and here’s your son, standing right here, smiling back at you. Thanks a lot, Mom. I love you.” There wasn’t a dry eye in the press conference.

Adu spoke with more articulacy than I have heard from any adult England player. He revealed that he still makes his bed and takes out the garbage. He scorned the idea of hiring a cleaning lady, even now that he has signed a contract with Nike worth $1 million over four years, and will earn similar amounts playing for DC United, his local professional team—until he is eighteen.

“Be humble” is his mantra. “‘Normal’ is like me,” he elaborated. “Always smiling, playing video games, talking trash back and forth with my friends. There are more important things in life than soccer.”

Clearly, he may not make it, but Adu is exactly what U.S. soccer needs to compete with the country’s bigger sports. Americans are getting a little tired of their athletes going on strike, shooting limousine drivers, and blowing their fortunes on defense lawyers. Finding heroes in American sports can be hard.

The day after the press conference, the United States picked Adu for the Under-20 World Cup, which kicks off in the United Arab Emirates on Thursday. Perhaps Lamptey will be watching.

June 2004

L
ong time no see!” calls out Johnny Rep, as Bernd and his wife walk into the Hong Kong restaurant in Rotterdam. It will turn out later that the two former players have in fact seen each other once or twice since they met thirty years earlier in the World Cup final of 1974, including one encounter in Ivory Coast. But tonight Rep’s opening gambit falls flat, because Hölzenbein doesn’t understand Dutch, and Rep speaks barely a word of German.

The two men don’t have a natural click. The German looks like a member of the board of Deutsche Bank: red tie, dark suit, and bald head, even if there’s something angelic about his rosy cheeks and round face. You see at once that this is a man who takes himself seriously. The cheery Rep isn’t like that. This could be a long evening.

The day before, the Hölzenbeins drove to Rotterdam from Frankfurt in just three hours (or so Hölzenbein claims). Then Hölzenbein went missing for a while. This afternoon I finally tracked him down in the lobby of our hotel. It turned that like almost every other German or Dutchman who was already alive in 1974, he had been locked into a room by Dutch state television and interrogated about the World Cup final. The Dutch are hitting the game’s thirtieth anniversary hard. The interviewer knew the answers to every question already, and had even told Hölzenbein what the Germans had had for breakfast on the morning of July 7, 1974. “If that’s what you say, I’m sure that’s right,” the flabbergasted Hölzenbein had replied.

He’d also been asked about Jan van Beveren, the great Dutch goalkeeper who in true Dutch 1970s tradition had boycotted the national team and so
had missed the World Cup of 1974. Later, Van Beveren and Hölzenbein played together for the Fort Lauderdale Strikers.

“Van Beveren’s become a stamp dealer in Dallas,” I tell him.

Now Hölzenbein is even more flabbergasted. “You must have heard that from the guy who interviewed me, because he told me the same thing!”

“I knew it already,” I say nonchalantly.

You can see Hölzenbein thinking: “What on earth is going on here?”

In the Hong Kong restaurant we order several dishes to share—which creates a little bit of a bond—and for an hour hardly talk about the final at all. Hölzenbein does reveal, thirty years too late, that the German team revolved around Gerd Müller. The aim was to get the tubby striker the ball as fast as possible. Hölzenbein says, “Müller would turn and go ‘Boom.’ That wasn’t a secret.” Yet it was Müller who scored the winning goal in the final.

Otherwise, though, there is just polite chatter about modern soccer, chatter that doesn’t really interest anyone at table, except perhaps the soccer-mad Mrs. Hölzenbein. “Sometimes she’ll go to a match while I’ll stay home,” says Hölzenbein.

Rep seldom watches games, either. Contemporary soccer barely interests him. He lives on the chilly Dutch vacation island of Texel, where he coaches a team in the fourth division of the amateur league, about as low as you can go down the Dutch soccer pyramid. Hölzenbein doesn’t work for a club at all, though he is Frankfurt’s “city ambassador” for the coming German World Cup of 2006.

He grows animated only when he seizes an opportunity to pull a photograph out of his wallet. “Look!” On the picture, taken at the Helsinki airport, Hölzenbein is standing next to German chancellor Gerhard Schröder. The chancellor, a former amateur center-forward, is grinning, and Hölzenbein is staring solemnly into the lens. Behind them on the tarmac is Schröder’s private jet. Perhaps the chancellor carries the same snap around in his wallet and sometimes shows it to Tony Blair: “Look! This is me with Hölzenbein. And my private jet.”

The picture was taken in Helsinki, where Schröder and Hölzenbein were stopping over on the way back from the World Cup final in Japan in 2002. Hölzenbein had been invited to the match as a representative of the German world champions of 1974. On the plane he and the chancellor had spoken
“very intensively” about soccer. Schröder had asked if Hölzenbein’s tumble in the box in ’74—which produced Germany’s equalizing goal from the penalty spot—had really been a foul.

After dinner it’s just a short totter from the Hong Kong to Rotterdam’s Goethe-Institut. This evening, the German cultural center is hosting a panel about the final of ’74. My German colleague Christoph and I are the moderators. As we leave the restaurant, we warn Hölzenbein that the Dutch audience will want to talk only about his famous “dive.” In Dutch soccer terminology, a dive is a
Schwalbe
—the German word for “swallow,” as in the diving bird. Because the Dutch regard diving as an authentically German pursuit, they feel it’s appropriate to describe it with a German word. We hope Hölzenbein doesn’t find the topic of the famous penalty too boring.

“No,” he sighs. “Not anymore.”

The chief dignitaries tonight are sitting in the audience: the German ambassador, the mayor of Rotterdam, the global number two of the Goethe-Institut. These are men who went to college and are now doing better than their contemporaries who wasted their youth playing World Cup finals. First the dignitaries are allowed to give speeches. Then Rep, Hölzenbein, Christoph, and I take our places at an overlit table at the front of the hall.

After Hölzenbein has elaborately denied that it was a
Schwalbe
, Rep says he always turns off the television anyway when scenes from the final come on. Pointing at Hölzenbein: “Then you see him tripping over his own feet again.” There’s laughter, but not from Hölzenbein, who doesn’t understand what Rep is saying. Rep continues, “No, I’m sick to death of it. In the final I could have scored a hat trick, because I missed several chances. Also in ’78, [in the final] against Argentina, I had a header that just shaved the post. I still sometimes dream of it.”

It’s a nice quote, but I’m not sure it’s true: Rep is such an obliging man (that’s why he has driven all the way from Texel to be here today) that he will say whatever we want to hear.

I ask Rep if he ever did a
Schwalbe
himself.

“What do you think?” he asks.

“Yes?” I guess.

“Against Scotland in 1978 I let myself fall in the penalty area.”

“So you got Holland to a World Cup final with a
Schwalbe
?”

“No, I got Holland to a World Cup final with that stunning second goal against Scotland.”

Then, gesturing with his thumb at the
Schwalbe
king: “He’d done it in the previous match as well! He was brilliant at that.” Even Hölzenbein laughs a little now.

Then Hölzenbein tells the old story of how the German coach Helmut Schön told his players to look the Dutch in the eye in the tunnel before kickoff.

Rep says, “And still we were 1–0 up after the first minute.”

The audience takes the final very seriously, but the players just seem to want to tell jokes. Winning the World Cup must have been the highlight of Hölzenbein’s career, I suggest. Perhaps even the highlight of his life?

Hölzenbein doesn’t think so: “In the World Cup team the big figures in the hierarchy were Beckenbauer, Müller, Overath. I myself was younger, less important.” (There is barely a player on earth who can say of himself, even decades later, “I myself wasn’t as good.”) “But at Eintracht Frankfurt I was captain, and I must say that winning the UEFA Cup as captain was almost as important to me as winning the World Cup.”

Look, he says, for Germans the world championship of 1954 towers over the victory of 1974. And he feels the same way. “Just like everyone else I saw the final of ’54, as a small boy, on the only TV set in a radius of perhaps ten kilometers. Those players were my idols. I devoured the books of Fritz Walter [Germany’s star of 1954]. 1954 was a symbol of resurgence. 1974 was less important. And as for 1990, you don’t even remember who was in the team.”

Although the audience wants to ask only about 1974, Hölzenbein has a story about the Netherlands that he’s determined to share. In 1966, he says, he came over to play in a youth tournament in The Hague. He and another German boy, who also later became an international, stayed with a local family. Twenty-five years later they were still in touch with the family. And it was during that very same tournament that Eintracht scouted Hölzenbein.

The audience is eager to get back to 1974, but Hölzenbein has other Dutch stories he wants to tell. In 1967 he returned to the Netherlands, this
time with his girlfriend, the future Mrs. Hölzenbein, and he remembers that the hotel assigned them separate rooms. He had always thought that the Netherlands was so liberal.

Gradually, it’s becoming apparent that neither player can understand why everyone in the hall is so interested in the World Cup final. “Now there’s even someone writing a book about it!” marvels Rep.

Can Hölzenbein still remember July 7, 1974, or has it been driven out of his head by thirty years of talking about it? Can he still recall the moment when he saw Wim Jansen’s raised leg advance toward him in the penalty area, or does he only know what he keeps saying about it and what he occasionally sees on television?

“I can’t really remember it anymore,” admits Hölzenbein. In his head, the World Cup final has been replaced by “the World Cup final.”

So far this evening we have avoided mentioning the war. But it is the underlying reason we’re gathered here. It is because of the war that Dutch fans care most about matches against Germany. The reverse is not true of German fans. In 1974, they weren’t particularly interested in Holland. They could hardly treat every match against Holland, England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, the United States, France, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Iceland, Poland, the Czech Republic, Serbia, Greece, Belorussia, Ukraine, Russia, Canada, Australia, or New Zealand as particularly significant.

I ask Rep whether he had particular feelings about Germans in 1974.

“That bike, eh?” he says.

He is referring to the Greatest Bike Theft in History: the commandeering of all Dutch bicycles by the German wartime occupiers. The dignitaries titter. Rep was probably joking.

“They should give us our bikes back,” he continues. “But otherwise the war wasn’t a big thing in my mind.”

It was for certain other Dutch players, I say, men whose families had experienced the war very closely.

Rep says, “I think so. Because they really did want to beat Germany. After the final there were a few crying in the changing room.”

But was the war never mentioned in the Dutch team’s hotel in Hiltrup?

“Never,” says Rep.