Soccer Men (7 page)

The Dutch don’t like him, either. “Matthäus = Hitler,” said a banner at a Holland-Germany game in 1989. Tonight, two nights before what will surely be his last Holland-Germany (although with Matthäus you can never be sure), a Dutch journalist asks why he has such a bad image in Holland. “I’d rather ask the Dutch themselves,” replies Matthäus, obliging as ever, “because it’s a mystery to me. The Dutch people I know personally, whether they are fans or people from the hotel or journalists, are always very positive.”

I have to tell him, “It’s because for Dutch people, you
are
Germany. You are the country. You are the team.”

I mean a lot by it: white shirt with Prussian eagle, dives, hard work, winning, a certain ugliness (although Matthäus is popular with German women). The Dutch see Matthäus as the embodiment of everything they dislike about Germany, everything they don’t want to be themselves.

“Matthäus = Hitler” is too strong. Really, the banner meant to say, “Matthäus = A German.”

I don’t tell him all this, because I remember Paul Simon’s story about running into the legendary baseball player Joe DiMaggio in a New York restaurant. In “Mrs. Robinson,” Simon had sung:

When he saw DiMaggio in the restaurant, he worried that the old man would be angry with him. It turned out DiMaggio wasn’t. He liked the song. But he didn’t understand it. The lyrics made no sense, he told Simon. Everyone knew where he was. People saw him on television commercials every day, he pointed out.

DiMaggio had taken the song literally, whereas Simon had meant it metaphorically. Simon had meant to say that the DiMaggio-type hero had disappeared from American life. In the restaurant, Simon realized that sportsmen can’t think about themselves as metaphors. They think they really exist.

That’s why I just tell Matthäus, “You are the country. You are the team.” He looks at me with wide eyes: “So every whistle is a nice compliment to me? Really I should feel honored.”

It was a Dutchman who gave Matthäus the most awkward moment of his public life. Not Ruud Gullit, but the man who filmed Matthäus with a video camera at the Oktoberfest in Munich in 1993.

“They forgot you with Adolf!” Matthäus yelled at the Dutchman, forgetting the video camera for a moment. It wasn’t the first incident in the course of a public speaking career that has veered from racism to sexism and back again. Once, at a German airport, he called out to a passing women’s basketball team that “our black guy” (Adolfo Valencia, his teammate at Bayern) “has one this long.”

Inside the German team, only Klinsmann would object to this sort of thing. But most Germans outside soccer have a low tolerance for public racism. The German musician who registered in an Israeli hotel under the name Adolf Hitler was instantly expelled from the Berlin Philharmonic. However, Matthäus was one of the world’s best players,
Chef
of the German team, and so he couldn’t be expelled.

Yet most Germans—even
Bild
readers—hate Nazi-type jokes. They cringe when English or Dutch people make them. To most Germans, Hitler is still real. It bothers them that their best player, running from microphone to microphone, might blurt out something dumb about Nazis at any moment.

Matthäus isn’t a Nazi. Nobody who knows him thinks he has anything against black people. But he is a naughty boy who is attracted to taboos, just as he feels the urge to say mean things about Klinsmann in
Bild
(“He thinks too much”).

I had assumed that Matthäus would have his fair share of national pride—perhaps because he was captain of Germany, perhaps because he reads
Bild
. In the Atlantic room I ask him if his heart beats faster when he hears the German national anthem, the way Italians feel about their anthem.

He jokes, “It’s only because of the rhythm of the Italian anthem that it makes your heart beat faster.”

But isn’t he proud to represent Germany?

“It’s an honor to represent a whole country, such a big country where so many people play soccer. I don’t feel more than that.”

I guess Germans born in 1961 aren’t big on nationalism.

Now Matthäus is waving about one of our tape recorders. “Look, this one’s full. Do you have another tape?” He changes it himself.

The Italian journalist asks Matthäus for his Greatest This, Best That. Best international: against Yugoslavia at the World Cup 1990. Best opponent: Maradona. Favorite club in childhood: Borussia Mönchengladbach. Biggest mistake: his public squabble with Berti Vogts and Jürgen Klinsmann. “We were old enough. We should have talked to each other.”

The squabble lasted years. Vogts and Klinsmann got irritated during the 1994 World Cup when they realized that every conversation in the locker room was appearing in
Bild.
They may have been relieved when Matthäus was seriously injured after that World Cup. He was then already thirty-three and surely nearing the end. Just to be sure, the internationals from Bayern and Dortmund, led by Klinsmann and Matthias Sammer, reportedly agreed that he would never play for Germany again.

Matthäus missed Euro 96. On July 21, 1996, he wrote in his (published) diary, “Today the European champions have arrived. Helmer, Ziege, Babbel, Kahn, Strunz and Scholl. There was a big hello at Munich airport. And sincere congratulations from me. European champion, for all of them it’s the highlight of their careers.”

Translation: None of them has been world champion.

His diary covers the season after Euro 96 and is the main source for anyone wanting to write the definitive story of Lothar Matthäus. “I believe,” he writes in the foreword, “that this diary gives an insight into my thoughts.” It does. I learned at school that every literary work has a theme.
Mein Tagebuch
(My Diary) has two: cell phones and the German tabloid press.

The diary is itself written in the style of a tabloid newspaper. Day 1: “Friday, July 12: Franz-Josef-Strauss airport in Munich. It’s ten a.m. The loudspeakers announce ‘Last call for LH 410 through Düsseldorf to New York.’”

This may be because the book was ghosted by
Bild
journalist Ulrich Kühne-Hellmessen. But I suspect that is more or less how Matthäus dictated it.

The greatest influence on his thinking seems to be the German press. On Wednesday, August 14, he writes: “
Bild, TZ, AZ
[the three Munich tabloids], the
Süddeutsche,
the
Merkur, Kicker
and
Sport-Bild—
for me these are more or less required reading.”

Seven publications! Later he reveals that he buys the Italian sports daily
La Gazzetta dello Sport
as often as possible. Matthäus is like an academic keeping up with the literature of his field.

In his defense, whereas normal people say things to each other—“talking,” as it’s known—all communication at Bayern Munich is done through the media. Matthäus learns from the newspapers that Mehmet Scholl’s wife has left him, that Karl-Heinz Rummenigge is considering selling Scholl, and that Klinsmann wants a transfer.

It’s noticeable how nasty everyone at Bayern is. The funniest character in the diary, besides Matthäus himself, is Beckenbauer. The Bayern president is constantly popping up to say something mean, in words dutifully recorded by Matthäus.

Wednesday, August 21: “After the final whistle Franz Beckenbauer enters the changing-room as usual, and says: You can be very pleased you didn’t lose.”

Tuesday, September 10 (after a defeat to Valencia on Beckenbauer’s birthday): “Franz stands up, and says just one sentence: I didn’t get the present I had in mind. He sits down again and the dinner is opened.”

Friday, March 14: “At a certain point Franz bursts out: You are a shit team.”

But cell phones get almost as much attention. In fact, whereas the most common word in many books is
the
or
is
, in
Mein Tagebuch
it is
Handy
(cell phone).

Here’s the entry for Sunday July 28: “We have the new Bayern-
Handys.
All my friends already have my number. But now that I’m in Zurich I notice: the
Handy
has not yet been authorised, I cannot yet be reached. Kreuzer and Helmer were smarter, brought their old
Handys
with them. Now I have to let myself be teased.”

Later that day, at Zurich’s airport, his eye falls on the Swiss tabloid
Blick
, which has put his wife, Lolita, on the front page. There are photos of her vacation on the Maldives beneath the headline, “Because of Lothar I Had to Let My TV Career Go.”

All year, the themes of the diary remain constant:

Thursday, October 3: “I have settled in the Limmer Hof, our training camp. I always think positive. So I must make the best of this situation too. The best thing: my
Handy
works here, so each one of my friends can reach me.”

Monday, October 21: “In the Swiss Air plane there’s a copy of
Blick
. There are three pictures in it of Lolita, in the cockpit of a private plane. And there’s an interview:
Lothar knows that I fly. But it’s none of his business. We’re now each going our own way.”

Saturday, January 4, 1997 (when he runs into Matthias Sammer in a restaurant in Kitzbühel): “I go up to him, congratulate him with his European Player of the Year. Tell him his
Handy
number off by heart, that’s how often I called him. Now I know why I couldn’t reach him:
Handys
can’t get reception in Going.”

Friday, March 14 (after a crisis meeting at Bayern in which his teammates have accused him of leaking everything to the press): “Of course I know that my contact with journalists offers points of attack. Still, I’ve been around long enough to know what I can pass on and what not. Often enough at breakfast, the egg stuck in my throat as I read which secrets had got out. I lie in bed and cannot sleep. The accusations have really hurt me. It’s one of the greatest disappointments of my life. I stare at the ceiling and think. Then it becomes clear to me: tomorrow against Schalke I won’t be captain anymore.”

Reading
Mein Tagebuch,
you look into the soul of Lothar Matthäus. And what you find is this: he is a
Bild
reader.

Nonetheless, Vogts, the German coach, called him up for the World Cup of 1998, on the condition that he’d occasionally keep his mouth shut.

I spent a week of that World Cup staying with six German journalists in a villa in the Riviera village of Saint Paul de Vence. The villa had a barbecue, a big garden, and a pool, in which we played water polo at midnight. It was a good villa.

The German team’s hotel was three minutes away. One evening Jürgen Klinsmann came to sit in our garden. He drank our beer and said that in the
future he’d come around every evening, because our villa was so much nicer than the team hotel. We never saw him again.

A couple of nights later, defender Christian Wörns came to sit in our garden. He drank our beer and told us that the atmosphere on the team really wasn’t so bad. That was because Matthäus had stopped making trouble.

Why had he stopped? we asked.

“I think,” mused Wörns, reclining in his deck chair in shorts and bath slippers, beer bottle in his hand, “that if everyone keeps beating up on you, you learn to shut up.”

It’s true that by 1998, Matthäus wasn’t Germany’s
Chef
anymore. Klinsmann and Bierhoff were the
Chefs
, while the team had enough old blokes like Jürgen Kohler and Thomas Helmer to beat up on him when necessary.

But after that World Cup, only Bierhoff was still there. Matthäus was allowed to keep playing, and in February 1999, on the night that Germany lost 3–0 to the United States, the phone rang in his Florida hotel room. It was Erich Ribbeck, asking him to come to his room and explain how Germany should play. Matthäus had become the
Chef
again.

 

In the Atlantic room it’s half past eleven. Matthäus is still bursting with energy, but we’re dropping from exhaustion. Because he was an important player, we manage one last question: “What kind of player were you?”

Matthäus likes the question. He thinks about it. Tonight is his night. “Today I’m saying everything. I’m putting it all out there,” he’s told us.

“I certainly wasn’t a Maradona,” says the man who in 1990 became World, European, and German Player of the Year, as well as World and European Sportsman of the Year. “I was a very fast player. If I saw space, I used it. If I beat someone, he didn’t catch me again. I was a player who came with a run-up. What Maradona saw in a small space, I saw over long distances.

“I’m small, but for instance I’m good with my head. Yes, what made me strong is that I could do all sorts of things. I always had a weak left foot, but when I was twenty-eight Trapattoni taught me to play with my left.”

Matthäus rewinds a tape and makes sure everything is on it. Then it’s time to say farewell. When it’s my turn, he puts both his hands on my shoulders, practically hugs me. I tell him I’m going to be in New York in a couple of months. “Come ’round!” says Lothar. I promise I will.

In New York I’m too busy to meet Matthäus, but I do want to see him play. The MetroStars are playing the Kansas City Wizards in Giants Stadium. I get into a taxi at Times Square. Then I get into another. It turns out that Lothar isn’t the only New Yorker who barely speaks English. “Giants Stadium,” the Indian taxi drivers repeat the unfamiliar words. They’ve never heard of the place. Finally, I find an Indian who is willing to let me guide him.

In Giants Stadium there are eight thousand spectators. On the field I spot a small midfielder with a big head who is charging around the field—as they say in New York—like a crazy. Every time a teammate touches the ball, he throws up his arms and screams with rage.

The MetroStars score. Matthäus’s teammates are pleased and cheer. On the big screen two 1930s comedians dance around a table. But the goal only makes Matthäus angrier.