Soccer Men (23 page)

May 2009

W
hen a teenage waif named “Jopie” Cruijff began training with Ajax’s first team, many of the senior players had already known him for years. Cruijff had grown up a few hundred yards down the road from the club’s little stadium, in Amsterdam-East. He had been hanging around the locker room with the first team since he was four. Nonetheless, he surprised his new teammates. It wasn’t just his brilliance they noticed; it was his mouth. Even while on the ball, the kid never stopped lecturing, telling senior internationals where to run. Maddeningly, he generally turned out to be right.

Jopie Cruijff would become more than just a great soccer player. Unlike Pele and Maradona, he also became a great thinker about soccer. It’s as if he were the lightbulb and Edison all at once. It’s impossible to identify one man who “invented” British soccer, or Brazilian soccer. They just accreted over time. However, Cruijff—together with Rinus Michels, his coach at Ajax—invented Dutch soccer. The game played today by Holland and Barcelona is a modified version of what the two men came up with in Amsterdam in the mid-1960s. Only now are the Dutch finally liberating themselves from Cruijff’s style and, above all, from his bizarre personality.

Johan Cruijff (his real name, although foreigners prefer “Cruyff”) was born on April 25, 1947. His father, Manus, a grocer, supplied Ajax with fruit. Cruijff practically grew up at the club. He learned his excellent English—which is probably more correct than his Dutch or Spanish—from eating warm English lunches at the homes of Ajax’s English managers of the 1950s, Keith Spurgeon and Vic Buckingham. “I didn’t have a very long education,” he told me when I interviewed him in Barcelona in 2000, “so I learned everything in practice. English too.”

He was just a kid when Manus boasted that one day he would be worth 100,000 guilders. Manus’s death when Cruijff was twelve was probably the formative event of his life. Decades later, he’d still sometimes sit up at night in the family kitchen in Barcelona chatting to his father’s spirit. A fatherless boy in a locker room full of men, Cruijff always had to be tougher than anyone
else. He was. There are reports of him cheating at Monopoly to beat his own beloved children.

On Cruijff’s debut, Ajax lost 3–1 at a club called GVAV. The newspaper reports mostly misspelled his name. After that the seventeen-year-old didn’t play any more away games for a while. His mother, who cleaned Ajax’s locker rooms, ruled that he could play only at home, as that was supposedly safer. Ajax in those days was a little semiprofessional outfit, merely the neighborhood team of Amsterdam-East. But two months after Cruijff’s debut, on January 22, 1965, a gym teacher for deaf children named Rinus Michels drove his secondhand Skoda through the gates of De Meer to start work as a coach. Michels had a crazy idea: He was going to turn Ajax into a top international club. The teenage waif he encountered was equally ambitious. Within six years they had done it.

The style that they invented is now known as “total football.” “We never called it that. That came from outside, from the English,” Ajax’s outside-right Sjaak Swart told me. It was a game of rapid one-touch passing and players endlessly swapping positions in search of space. Every player had to think like a playmaker. Even the keeper was regarded as the man who started attacks, a sort of outfield player who happened to wear gloves. Wingers and overlapping fullbacks kept the field wide. Cruijff could go where he liked, conducting the orchestra with constant improvisation. The world first noticed in 1966, when Ajax beat Liverpool 5–1 on a night so shrouded with mist that hardly anyone saw the game.

Cruijff and Michels were lucky, of course. By some demographic fluke, half the young men in Amsterdam-East seemed to be world-class soccer players. A slow bohemian smoker named Piet Keizer became a fabulous outside-left. Kuki Krol, an Amsterdam Resistance hero, produced a willowy defender named Ruud. And one of the few Jews in the neighborhood to survive the war, a man named Swart, used to take his son Sjakie to Ajax on the back of his bike.

But Cruijff was the most original player in all of Amsterdam-East. His great Dutch biographer, Nico Scheepmaker, would later remark that whereas other great players were merely two-footed, Cruijff was “four-footed”: Hardly anyone had kicked with the outside of his feet before Cruijff did. Cruijff was also astonishing quick for a chain smoker—“If they time normally with me,
they’re always just too late,” was one of his early bon mots—but he preferred to emphasize his quickness of thought. Speed, he explained, was mostly a matter of knowing when to start running.

To Cruijff, soccer was “a game you play with your head.” He was a man who came from Mars and said, “This is how people have always done it, but they were wrong.” He rethought everything from scratch, without caring about tradition. Perhaps his greatest goal ever was a case in point. Ajax was playing a friendly against an amateur side, and there were no television cameras, but what seems to have happened is that Cruijff was advancing alone on the goal when the keeper came out to confront him. Cruijff turned and began running back with the ball toward his own half. The keeper pursued him until the halfway line, where he realized that Cruijff no longer had the ball. At some point he had backheeled it into the net without breaking stride.

Cruijff took responsibility not only for his own performance, but for everybody else’s too. He was forever pointing, a coach on the field. Michels had told him, “If a teammate makes a mistake, you should have prevented that mistake.” Frank Rijkaard, later a teammate of Cruijff’s and opponent of Maradona’s, said that Maradona could win a match by himself, but didn’t have Cruijff’s gift of changing the team’s tactics to win it.

As a leader, Cruijff was a child of his time. Like his contemporary Franz Beckenbauer, or the students in the streets of Paris in 1968, he was a postwar baby boomer impatient to seize power. The boomers wanted to reinvent the world. They didn’t do deference. Before Cruijff, Dutch soccer players had knocked on the chairman’s door to hear what they would be paid. Cruijff shocked Ajax by bringing his father-in-law, Cor Coster, in with him to do his pay talks.

Cruijff drove everybody at Ajax crazy. He never stopped talking, in that working-class Amsterdam accent, with his very own grammar, his penchant for apparently random words (“Them on the right is goat’s cheese”), and the shrugs of shoulders that sealed arguments. He once said about his playing career, talking about himself in the second person as usual, “That was the worst thing, that you always saw everything better. It meant that you were always talking, always correcting.”

His personality was so outsize that Michels hired not one but two psychologists to understand him. Cruijff, always open to new thinking in soccer,
was happy to talk to them. One shrink, Dolf Grunwald, blamed everything on Cruijff’s father fixation. “Really [Cruijff] denies all authority because he—subconsciously—compares everyone to his F. [Father].... If he can stop seeing in Michels the man who is not as good as his f. [father], we’ll have moved on a lot.” (Grunwald died in 2004, but Dutch author Menno de Galan obtained his notes.)

Grunwald said that when teammates attacked Cruijff, he became “more nervous and talkative.” But when Cruijff felt accepted, he calmed down. “Then his attitude changes too: soft voice, sits down, hangs or lies, talks less, somewhat damp eyes.”

After Grunwald fell out of favor with Michels, Cruijff was sent to Ajax’s other shrink, Roelf Zeven, where he lay on the sofa and talked incessantly about his father-in-law, Coster. Here was the missing link in Freud’s work: the father-in-law fixation.

All the talking may have helped. From 1971 to 1973, Cruijff’s Ajax won three straight European Cups. A neighborhood team from a country that had never done anything in soccer before, whose stadium would have been small for the English second division, and whose players earned no more than successful shopkeepers had reinvented soccer.

Then Ajax blew themselves up. Cruijff’s departure was instigated by the player power that he himself had created. In 1973 the players gathered in a countryside hotel to elect their captain. The majority voted for Keizer, against the incumbent Cruijff. He fled to Barcelona, whereupon Ajax’s team collapsed. Cruijff himself would never win another international prize as a player.

The transfer fee Barcelona paid for Cruijff was so big—5 million guilders—that the Spanish state wouldn’t countenance it. Finally, Barça got him into Spain by officially registering him as a piece of agricultural machinery. Cruijff scored twice on his debut, and that season, 1973–1974, Barcelona won its first title in fourteen years. Immediately afterward he rushed off to the World Cup in West Germany.

The Dutch team that summer was largely his creation. It was Cruijff, the captain, who had told midfielder Arie Haan that he would play the tournament as libero. (“Are you crazy?” Haan had replied. It proved to be a brilliant idea.) It was Cruijff who had groomed Holland’s striker, Johnny Rep, as a
youngster at Ajax, sometimes screaming at the bench during games, “Rep must warm up!”

The tournament wasn’t Cruijff’s best month in soccer, but it was the month that most people saw him and the style he had invented. For many foreigners, the Cruijff they know is the Cruijff of his only World Cup.

Cruijff notionally spent the tournament at center-forward, but he was always everywhere. Sometimes he’d sprint down the left wing and cross with the outside of his right foot. Sometimes he’d drop into midfield and leave opposing center-backs marking air. Sometimes he’d drop back just to scream instructions. Arsène Wenger tells the story of Cruijff telling two of Holland’s midfielders to swap positions and then returning fifteen minutes later to tell them to swap again. To Wenger, this showed how hard it was to replicate the fluidity of “total football” if you didn’t have Cruijff himself.

Holland hammered Brazil in the semis, but after that everything went wrong. Several days before the final, the West German tabloid
Bild
published a story headlined “Cruyff, Champagne, Naked Girls, and a Cool Bath.” It claimed that several Dutch players had held a nocturnal party with half-clad
Mädchen
in their hotel pool. Cruijff spent much of the night before the final on the phone to his wife, Danny, promising her the article was a lie. It was a terrible moment for a man who had spent his adult life building the secure family he had lost at age twelve; Cruijff was no George Best. That phone call, says his brother Henny, is why he played “like a dishrag” in the final. None of it would have happened if their father hadn’t died so early, added Henny.

Admittedly, Cruijff wasn’t a dishrag in the first minute of the final. Dropping back to libero he picked up the ball, ran across half the pitch, and got himself fouled just outside the German area. Referee Jack Taylor, an English butcher, wrongly gave Holland a penalty. But thereafter, Cruijff mostly hung around in his own half, allowing Berti “the Terrier” Vogts to mark him out of the game. In fact, Vogts had more scoring chances than Cruijff did. Holland lost 2–1. At the reception afterward, Cruijff buttonholed the Dutch queen Juliana and asked her to cut taxes.

Cruijff’s next four years at Barcelona were mostly depressing. He got kicked a lot, won no big prizes, and suffered from stress. “If you’re not enjoying [soccer], you can’t bear the pressure,” he said later. In 1978, at only
thirty-one, he retired. He refused even to play in the World Cup in Argentina. Many foreigners wrongly believe he was boycotting the Argentine military regime. Rather, haunted by the “swimming pool incident” of 1974, Cruijff stayed home for “family reasons.”

A Dutch television broadcaster tried to change his mind with a campaign called “Pull Cruijff Over the Line” (with a theme song by “Father Abraham” of Smurf-song fame). Cruijff briefly mused about playing on the condition that he could take his wife. Nothing came of it. And so David Winner argues in
Brilliant Orange
that the “swimming pool incident” determined the outcome of two World Cups: 1974 and 1978, which Holland again lost in the final.

In October 1978 Cruijff played his farewell match: a friendly with Ajax against Bayern Munich, which Ajax lost 0–8. And that would have been the end of Cruijff the player, but for a pig farm. In Barcelona, Cruijff and his wife, Danny, had met a French Russian opportunist named Michel Basilevitch. “The most handsome man in the world,” Danny Cruijff called him. Basilevitch, who drove a leased Rolls-Royce, persuaded them to put the bulk of their money in a pig farm. The Cruijffs lost millions of dollars. Next thing anyone knew, Cruijff had returned to soccer, in the United States, with the Los Angeles Aztecs and later the Washington Diplomats.

Though he loved money with the passion of a man who had grown up without it, he hadn’t come just for the cash. He enjoyed the anonymity of the United States—he could go shopping without being bothered—and he fell in love with soccer again. As ever, there were irritations. In Washington, he drove his British coach, Gordon Bradley, and his British teammates crazy with his fancy ideas about soccer. Once, after Bradley had given a team talk and left the locker room, Cruijff got up, wiped the blackboard clean, and said, “Of course, we’re going to do it completely differently.” One of the British players, Bobby Stokes, said that when the “Dips” bought Cruijff they should also have bought a year’s worth of cotton wool to block the other players’ ears. At one point Cruijff grew so despairing of his teammates that he announced he would limit himself to only scoring goals, and did.

The American years provided perhaps the most characteristic Cruijff story: Cruijff and the Florida bus driver. Pieter van Os, in his Dutch book on Cruijff’s American years, interviewed several eyewitnesses to construct a full
account. What seems to have happened is that just after the Dips landed in Florida for a training camp, the bus driver got them lost. Cruijff had never been to the place before. However, he immediately went to the front of the bus and, standing beside the driver, dictated the correct route. Apparently, he often used to direct taxi drivers in cities he didn’t know. Maddeningly, he usually turned out to be right.