Soccer Men (5 page)

“It’s very important for me, because of everything that has happened in my life, all the difficulties I have overcome. And now, I have to be very proud of this prize, very happy. I have to go on with what I do, to keep the will to work. I think.”

“Yes, I think so. I used to try a bit to be a copy of Zico, tried to acquire his calm. Zidane is a very calm player. Luis Figo I like too: a player with very good feints, who has great speed. And Ronaldo, who is always near goal,
who scores a lot and has great speed. So what I lack, I think, is speed. In a race over long distance, I have speed. In the sprint, not so much.”

Now he has to be photographed in the gear of his sponsor, Mizuno. His Nokia phone keeps ringing, so he gives the thing to Manuel. Everyone is calling to congratulate him, because various media are reporting that he has won the Golden Ball. Manuel reads Rivaldo the telephone numbers that appear on the screen. I’m not here, says Rivaldo, who is posing with a ball that unfortunately is flat. “Is he now officially Player of the Year?” I ask Manuel. “Well, I don’t know,” says Manuel. “We haven’t heard anything.”

“Call
France Football
,” Rivaldo suggests. Good idea. Manuel enters the number, and the telephone rings for a long time. Finally, somebody in Paris answers.

“Vincent!” says Manuel. Rivaldo goes and stands next to him and listens in. Vincent confirms that Rivaldo is the European Player of the Year. We congratulate Rivaldo.

“Thank you,” says Rivaldo. He takes the phone from Manuel and walks onto the roof terrace. Alone he looks across the city toward the dark mountains. Directly in front of him is a branch of El Corte Ingles, a Spanish department store. The clock on the outside wall of the store states that the time is 7:23 p.m. and the temperature 10.5 degrees Celsius. From now on Rivaldo is officially a legend, a player who forty years from now will still be discussed in taxis in Montevideo and Damascus.

“Did you already know he’d won?” asks Mark Kaiway of Mizuno.

“Yes,” Manuel grins. “He had to pose for a photograph with the Golden Ball.”

“Has he celebrated yet?” I ask.

“Celebrated? He hasn’t even had his lunch today! He’s just been busy.”

Rivaldo gives the phone back to Manuel and resumes posing. Manuel shows me the thing. The screen constantly reports that three callers are waiting. When one of them hangs up, a new one appears immediately.

Then Rivaldo has to sit for an hour in a small, dark, hot room under a barrage of television lights. It’s like a scene from the Marx Brothers: a roomful of people having themselves photographed with Rivaldo, getting his autograph, kissing him. At about nine o’clock Rivaldo finally reaches the hotel lobby, where he skillfully feints his way past a group of journalists. He has
almost made it to his Mercedes SUV when the hotel concierge tackles him. Rivaldo is imprisoned in his hug. The journalists catch up. Rivaldo struggles into his Mercedes, but they go and stand in front of it. The standoff lasts minutes, but then he is finally allowed to drive to his empty house. In the bath he’ll have a chance to think about the day.

The next day Van Gaal kicks him out of the Barcelona squad. It’s a bit complicated.

February 2000

A
confused old man remarks to another spectator, “Do you know, that could be Ruud Gullit’s brother.”

“It is Ruud Gullit,” the spectator replies.

“Are you kidding me?” demands the old man.

“It’s true. He plays for the AFC fifth team now.”

The old man takes another look at the large, dreadlocked sweeper in the red shirt and exclaims: “He was on the Dutch team!”

We are in a sports park just outside Amsterdam, two miles down the highway from the Ajax stadium, on a glorious, still winter’s Saturday. In the canteen beside the ground old men play cards and ignore the soccer. OSDO thirdstring versus AFC fifth-string has drawn twenty spectators, most of them the toddler offspring of the players. The toddlers join in the warming up.

They have caught Gullit on a bad day. Even as the Felliniesque figure performs his unmistakable broad-shouldered jog onto the muddy pitch, his team is falling apart: Before the game can start, the woman referee dispatches several AFCers to find shin pads.

The AFC coach, a bad-tempered man with a cell phone, confides that, because of vacations, he has had to call up reinforcements from lower teams. Granted, his sweeper is the European Player of the Year from 1987, still only thirty-seven years old and not given to Maradonaesque dietary excesses. But having Gullit on your park’s side is apparently a mixed blessing.

“AFC 5 is not AFC 5 anymore,” one player told me. “Now the boys are nervous in the changing room. No one dares to sit next to him.”

The former manager of Chelsea and Newcastle, and probable future manager of Fulham, made his AFC debut in September, soon after getting kicked out of St. James’s Park. A couple of his friends, fifth-team regulars, got him to play in a friendly against ABN-Amro sixth XI, which had been threatening to field a ringer named Marco van Basten.

That game kicked off with Gullit but without his former teammate at Holland and Milan, who had fallen asleep on the sofa at home. However, woken by a phone call, Van Basten tore to the ground, where he was immediately brought on as a substitute. Eleven seconds later he had scored. He got another later, but Gullit’s team won 6–2.

Gullit also scored twice, enjoyed the game, and decided to join AFC. He paid the membership fee of nearly two hundred dollars a year, high by Dutch standards, because this is a chic club. Chelsea, the last team he played for, consented to the transfer.

And so he became the sweeper of AFC fifths, much to the delight of a friend of mine who plays for the AFC fourth team and had always known that he was a better player than Gullit.

He could be right. Against OSDO, the AFC defense marshaled by Gullit concedes two goals in the first five minutes. Gullit, who for several games had maintained an uncharacteristic silence, has recently begun expressing his views.

“Inside! Inside! Inside!” he tells one of his defenders. Then, sighing: “I said inside.” One of his enduring themes is that his teammates must learn to mark opponents on the inside.

It is to no avail. The AFC defense is what Johan Cruijff would call “goat’s cheese,” and when an OSDO forward next sweeps into the penalty area, an exasperated Gullit stands aside and lets him score.

“The cream has gone,” comments the confused old man.

It would be wrong to say that Gullit is playing, as he would phrase it, “like a turd.” Several times he sweeps a fifty-yard pass onto his outside-left’s left toe, an eerie sight in this setting. “Good ball!” the AFC coach shouts reflexively.

However, the winger can never control the ball. Several times Gullit overhits. If you had to guess which of today’s players had played sixty-five times for Holland, you would probably pick one of the OSDO forwards.

A spectator tells his son that Ruud Gullit is playing. “Does he play for OSDO?” the boy asks.

The father is shocked. “Ruud Gullit, who played in Italy and for the Dutch team! You know him, don’t you?”

“Yeah, yeah, you’re kidding me,” says the boy.

Finally, AFC get a cross into the box, and Gullit, hurtling in, almost heads it into the top corner. Except that he misses the ball. The coach turns to me, beaming hugely, “It almost makes you think of old times!”

OSDO makes it 4–0. By now AFC has begun the running commentary of mutual criticism traditional in a losing Dutch soccer team.

“Goddammit! What was that?” shouts a forward.

“Well, do something up front!” suggests a defender.

“Referee, that man always has his flag up!” says another forward.

Gullit tries to be positive. He does not want to destroy anyone’s confidence for life. After an AFC shot sails twenty yards over the bar, and some OSDO players joke about going home early, he laughs and shouts, “They’re getting tired!”

Halftime comes with the score 5–0, and an OSDO striker walks up to shake Gullit’s hand. “I was thanking him for all the pleasure he’s given me,” forty-year-old Thieu Heuijerjans reveals later. “That man meant so much for Dutch soccer.”

Heuijerjans and Gullit walk off arm in arm, chatting. Like Cruijff, Van Basten, and Rinus Michels, Gullit has become a very nice guy by the simple expedient of retiring from top-class soccer.

Walking back out for the second half, he throws a glance at the men playing cards in the canteen. They don’t look back. They should have, though, because in the second half AFC is transformed. Is it creatine? In any case, the outside-right Alfons soon creates a goal with a brilliant solo run.

“Alfie!” bellows Gullit. “He is fit! He is sharp!”

AFC wins a penalty. Not Gullit, but Guido, the center-forward, takes it. He scores.

Then Guido makes it 5–3. Gradually, however, the AFC revival stalls. As the end approaches, the OSDO players’ wives start singing the club song: “OSDO is our club / We have won!”

Then, with only a minute to go, a cross from Guido reaches Ruud Gullit alone in front of an empty goal. This is his moment. But he is caught flatfooted. He tries to jump, cannot get off the ground, and as he contorts his body the ball sails over his head. Ruud Gullit has become a parks soccer player.

The referee ends the game. AFC has lost 5–3, and Ruud goes around shaking hands. He congratulates the referee at length, and to no one in particular he exclaims, “The second half was better!”

He pops into the canteen afterward wearing a gray woolen Italianate coat: the Best Dressed Man in Britain 1996. He has a drink with his teammates (not alcohol, never alcohol) and after five minutes says good-bye and is off in his “people carrier” (the new thing among continental players, who are emerging from the Sports Car Age), which has what looks like a small boat strapped to the roof. From the canteen there is nary a backward glance.

It is not that the Amsterdammers have forgotten Gullit. They just don’t go in for idols. This is a town where if you spotted Jesus Christ having a drink with Nelson Mandela at the next café table, it would be uncool to notice. Rembrandt was declared bankrupt here, Spinoza expelled from the synagogue, Cruijff nicknamed the Money Wolf, and when John Lennon and Yoko Ono left town after their bed-in for peace at the Hilton, they had to return their honorary white bicycles to the local hippies. So nobody mobs Gullit. An Amsterdammer himself, he says he likes that about the place.

He could easily slip into former celebritydom. He is no longer even the most famous Ruud in Holland, having been outstripped by the brilliant young goalscorer Ruud van Nistelrooy (who should command the biggest transfer fee in Europe this summer) and Ruud, the character in the real-life soap opera
Big Brother
, who vomited on national television.

He probably shouldn’t go to Fulham.

June 2000

Y
ou know what?” suggests Lothar Matthäus. “Let’s go ‘round the room one more time, and everyone can ask a question about his own country.” We all shake our heads. We already know everything we need to know about Matthäus.

It’s a Monday evening in February 2000, and seven journalists from around Europe are sitting in the Atlantic meeting room of a neo-Stalinist hotel outside Amsterdam. Matthäus, who is preparing for a Holland-Germany friendly, has summoned us here. In seventeen days the best German player of his era will end his European career at the age of thirty-nine, to go off and have some fun in New York.

Our interview was supposed to start at eight o’clock, but at eight a line of German players trudges into the Atlantic for a tactical talk. At the back of the group is a small middle-aged man with a big head, who waves at us and makes funny faces. This is Lothar Matthäus.

One crucial attribute that every aspiring soccer journalist needs is what Germans call
Sitzfleisch
: sitting flesh. We spend an hour and a half getting bored in the hotel bar. At half past nine the German group trudges out of the Atlantic. We trudge in, but are immediately ordered out again by Oliver Bierhoff. Germany’s captain is having a sort of after-party with Matthäus and the German coach, Erich Ribbeck, an elegant man who would have been better suited as ambassador to Washington than in his current job. We go back to the bar.

At about ten—though by this time, nobody’s keeping track anymore—Bierhoff emerges from the Atlantic. When he sees us he raises his eyebrows in the manner of Roger Moore and says, “An interview with Lothar. Always interesting.” Then Bierhoff reaches for his cell—his
Handy
, Germans call it—and starts speaking Italian. He’s a cultivated man, Bierhoff. His father was a big fish in an energy company. The child Bierhoff took guitar and tennis lessons, studied corporate economics, and in his first few seasons as a professional player earned less than his dad. Not like Matthäus at all.

Gingerly, we reenter the Atlantic. Now Matthäus is listening with fake humility to the German press officer, but we are allowed to hang around until the press officer disappears. It’s ten o’clock, players’ bedtime, but Matthäus motions us to sit down and relax.

“Interesting team talk?” asks the journalist from Germany’s legendary soccer magazine
Kicker.

“As you see,” says Matthäus, gesturing to the hotel notebooks that are still lying on the tables. They are full of talentless doodles. Don’t give up the day job, guys.