“We go down there and they’ve got twenty-five thousand screaming fans in the stadium at six thirty a.m. for an eleven o’clock game,” he said, recalling the match the previous Sunday in Costa Rica. “Here, we schedule a game in California, where there are a lot of Costa Ricans. Why not play it in St. Louis or Tampa or Portland?”
“I’m not saying that cost us the game,” Thompson quickly added. “But when the game starts, the crowd does get you into the game. Look how hard it is for the visiting team to win in Boston Garden. I’m just sick of seeing it, game after game, in our own country.”
In the rubble of that disaster at El Camino College, the federation learned a lesson: do not schedule qualifying matches in Spanish-speaking regions where Costa Ricans (or Hondurans, Guatemalans, Panamanians, Salvadorans, or Mexicans) can march over the hill, honking their horns.
By the mid-1980s, the imbalance in the stands was hardly the main reason that the United States was not ready. The United States was hurtling past 300 million residents, with millions of children and adults registered as players, but it had not yet produced resourceful athletes who knew how to fire on goal and toss the odd elbow when the ref wasn’t looking. American men were only starting to realize they had to duck the well-meaning college programs and seek out professional programs overseas.
The Costa Rican fans vanished back over the hill. The American players went their separate ways. The 1986 World Cup would go on, next door.
5
THE KID COMES BACK
MEXICO, 1986
Lunatics hear voices from God; so do geniuses. It is rarely a good thing when national leaders or generals attribute their actions to a celestial whisper or guiding nudge from on high. What about a stumpy forward with No. 10 on his back?
The 1986 World Cup is best remembered for Diego Maradona’s punched goal, which he immediately attributed to the “Hand of God.” In later years, he would deliver the phrase with a knowing smirk, meaning he did what he had to do—gangster talk, well within the norm of sport or life itself.
That overt piece of cheating overshadowed what Maradona did in the same match four minutes later—a ramble through the hedgerows of the English defense, one of the great runs in the history of the sport. But we remember the blatant heist in broad daylight.
El Pibe de Oro, the Golden Kid, came into 1986 carrying the memory of being pushed around by Gentile and the Italians in Spain in 1982, and of later being waved off the field in disgrace after kicking a Brazilian player in the groin. He had been shamed in the city where he was about to play, yet he suggested that the humiliation was God’s plan. What is the difference between Joan of Arc and a self-involved goal scorer?
After assisting on all three goals in Argentina’s opening victory in 1986 over South Korea, which fouled him eleven times, Maradona looked ahead to the next match. “God will want me to make a goal against Italy,” he proclaimed. And then he did just that.
This was his position: his parents struggled to get from the backwater to a more promising slum of Buenos Aires. “I can talk about poverty because I lived it,” he told Guillermo Blanco of El Gráfico, the major Argentine soccer magazine, in 1982. “Because my father worked much harder than I do and earned the bare necessity so that we wouldn’t starve. That is why I can say that poverty is something ugly. One wants a whole lot of things and yet one can only dream about them.”
He saw his success as a gift from on high because he was privileged.
“Sure, I am,” he went on. “But only because God has wanted it to be so. Because God makes me play well. That is why I always make the sign of the cross when I walk out on the pitch. I feel I would be betraying him if I didn’t do that.”
The goat of 1982 had scored thirty-eight goals in fifty-eight matches in his first two seasons at Barcelona, but he was often injured and squabbled with management. His gross lifestyle, in one of Barcelona’s most favored hillside neighborhoods, turned off the patrons of his club. In Buenos Aires he was considered one of the cabecitas, an outsider. In proud Barcelona he was labeled a Sudaca, somebody from South America. It was not a compliment.
In 1984, Barça unloaded him to Napoli for an estimated $12 million—the highest transfer price ever, at the time—and he found a psychological home in that tough old city with strains from Sicily and Greece and goodness knows where else.
Napoli, which had never won the championship, soon jumped in attendance from twelfth place to eighth and then to third. “More important, Maradona brought a great spirit that drives his teammates,” said Corrado Ferlaino, the club owner at the time. “He always wants to win. A great actor is never afraid. That is what makes great theater.”
Given his mixed roots in rural Argentina, Maradona was openly labeled a terrone in Italy, a word that means “hillbilly” or “redneck.” That stigma fit his outsider attitude, in a city whose urban symbol was the scugnizzo, the bad boy who smokes and loiters and looks for his main chance. The scugnizzi of Naples walked through traffic, sold Marlboro cigarettes relabeled as Maradona brand, two for the price of one. When a Maradona associate inquired about perhaps being paid for the use of that golden name, he was told this was how it went down in Naples, home of the Camorra, the regional version of the Mafia. The suggestion was: Maradona should be proud of this tribute to him.
In return, Diego Armando got to indulge his impulses and appetites in Naples. Now he was back for another World Cup.
* * *
The World Cup almost did not take place in Mexico. On September 19, 1985, an 8.0 earthquake struck Mexico City, which is essentially built in the basin of the former Lake Texcoco. Aztecs once glided in canoes where their ancestors now travel in the thick, oily air of auto traffic, and the ground is unstable. An estimated ten thousand people died and another thirty thousand were left homeless, and for a time there was the question whether it was fair to expect this stricken region to hold the World Cup. However, by the spring of 1986, with rubble visible all over the sprawling city, Mexico was proudly displaying the slogan Estamos Preparados—We Are Prepared.
The World Cup offers a glimpse into the tortured soul of the host nation. I had a sense of that in 1982, when La Selección was eliminated. Sometimes, the home team has an edge because of familiar surroundings and time zones and language and friendly fans. Through the first nineteen World Cups, the host team has won six times, with England’s victory in 1966 probably the most obvious home-nation advantage. Mexico had played in eight of the first twelve World Cups, with a rather mediocre record—three victories, four draws, seventeen losses, reaching the quarterfinals only as the host team in 1970.
Known as El Tri from its tricolored flag, the Mexican team was depending on Hugo Sánchez, the first Mexican to make it big in Europe. In the 1985–86 season, Sánchez had scored twenty-two goals for Real Madrid, earning a reported $1 million salary, and was featured in a soft-drink commercial like one in the United States in which a boy offered a bottle of Coca-Cola to a dejected football player, “Mean Joe” Greene.
A few days before the opening match, I walked over to the National Museum of Anthropology, one of the great places in the world, to see an exhibit about pre-Columbian ball games, in which villages or tribes tried to toss a ball through a hoop, high above the ground. The Aztecs called it tlachtli, the Maya called it pokyah, the Zapotecs called it taladzi. Sometimes the winning captain was sacrificed, sometimes the losing captain. Tough crowd, the ancestors of the 110,000 fans in Azteca Stadium.
At the museum, a waitress was telling a few Brazilian visitors about her fond memories of the 1970 World Cup finals, when Pelé scored the first goal and Brazil beat Italy, 4–1, for the championship. Mexicans greeted Brazilians as if they themselves had played in that final; Brazilians bring that out in people.
Now Mexico was host again. I had been to the country four or five times, including when I covered the first trip of Pope John Paul II in 1979. I love Mexico’s history, with Christianity thinly layered above the pre-Columbian culture, flavored by im
migration from many parts of the world. While modern cars move along the Reforma, women squat on the side of the road making tortillas the way women did before Cortés. I was staying in the Polanco district, where streets are named for philosophers and playwrights—Boulevard Miguel de Cervantes, Calle Moliere, even Avenida Presidente Masaryk, after the first president of Czechoslovakia.
Mexico’s international feel extended to its head coach, Bora Milutinović, a Serb who had played and coached all over the world and had married a Mexican woman, whom he charmingly called Pancho. With his mop of hair that made him resemble the Fifth Beatle, Bora called everybody “my friend” in five or six different languages.
Estamos preparados. Very young-looking soldiers with large automatic weapons patrolled the gates and barbed-wire fences around Azteca for the opening match, between the defending champion, Italy, and Bulgaria. The mood was bristling inside, too. When President Miguel de la Madrid was introduced, some spectators began whistling. In my hometown of New York, politicians are sometimes heckled when they show up at a ball game, but this reception sounded downright venomous. The Times’ local bureau manager, sitting next to me, was aghast. “We never do that,” she said.
Shades of the first round in 1982: Italy scored, then surrendered a goal in the eighty-fifth minute and drew with Bulgaria, 1–1.
“There is a big difference between sea level and here,” Gaetano Scirea, the great Italian sweeper, said afterward.
The air was not only thin; it was polluted, particularly in the midday heat. FIFA had scheduled matches at noon and 4:00 p.m. for the benefit of European television seven time zones or more to the east. The rarefied air at 7,347 feet put pressure on human lungs and made the balls veer, leading to long-range goals.
“You cannot expect long running or long passing,” said Enzo Bearzot, the Italian coach, who was back for another term. “You cannot expect the players to cover so much space, so we play with shorter passes. The Brazilians are good at it, but of course their players are better.”
How to prepare for the thin air? Some teams had trained at high altitude before coming to Mexico. Other people just showed up, cold turkey, like me. I went jogging in Chapultepec Park immediately, just to show the bad air who was boss. Not a good move, as I later realized.
The Mexican players, theoretically acclimated to the thin, gritty air, beat Belgium, 2–1, on the fourth day of competition, with the help of a goal by Sánchez, who then kicked the ball into the stands to celebrate and was given a yellow card.
Azteca was rocking again for El Tri four days later against Paraguay, at least until Sánchez was given another yellow card in the seventy-fifth minute, meaning he would miss the third game. Then Julio César Romero, formerly of the defunct Cosmos, scored a tying goal for Paraguay in the eighty-fifth minute.
Still, there was a chance for Sánchez to win this match before he began his one-game suspension. In the final minute, he was jostled by a defender and took a histrionic tumble, convincing referee George Courtney of England that such misery must be compensated.
The setting was straight out of the classic American baseball poem, “Casey at the Bat,” as the pride of Mexico stepped up with the hopes of the nation upon him. He delivered a fairly soft kick to his left but the Paraguayan keeper, Roberto Fernández, lunged to his right and flicked the ball away. Mighty Sánchez had struck out, and Mexico had to settle for a 1–1 draw.
Afterward, Fernández said: “I have seen movies of Sánchez, and I have noticed that he always kicks to his left. I was lucky.” Technology was making its mark.
As we left the stadium, Mexicans were packing the overpasses on the freeway, waving banners, but the mood seemed to have been cut in half by the miss by Sánchez, as well as his having to sit out the third match.
The absence of Sánchez turned out not to matter, as Mexico beat Iraq, 1–0. Sánchez was back for the round of 16 against Bulgaria—again in Azteca because the organizers wanted to fill the place whenever possible. Mexico triumphed, 2–0, to set up a quarterfinal against West Germany in Monterrey, a vastly higher level of opponent, a fact of life as any World Cup progresses.
The fans bustled when a West German player was sent off in the sixty-fifth minute and again in the sixty-ninth when Milutinović sent in the new national favorite, Francisco Javier Cruz, who was known as Abuelo—Grandpa—for his elderly appearance. Abuelo quickly plopped in a goal, only to have it annulled by an offside call. After 120 scoreless minutes, the game went to a shoot-out. Toni Schumacher stopped the second and third Mexican kicks, with Sánchez never getting to shoot. The party mood was over.
* * *
The debacle in California in 1985 meant that once again there was no American team to follow in the 1986 World Cup. That meant I could choose matches all over Mexico.
On June 2, I drove to Toluca with Sue Mott, a colleague from England, to interview the team from Iraq. It was the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, but the players were excused from fasting during the day in order to maintain their strength. We were introduced to Raad Hammoudi, a keeper who played for the Police Sport Club in the national amateur league. He quickly informed us he was not a police officer but rather owned a clothing factory employing nearly one hundred people.
Iraq had been at war with Iran for six years, and Hammoudi told us in excellent English that the team had no problem preparing: “We say, ‘The war is on the border, it is far from Baghdad, and we are sportsmen, so we must play football.’ We go to the hospitals and meet with the soldiers.”
Hammoudi gave us souvenirs—keychains with the likeness of their leader, a bloke named Saddam Hussein. I often wonder what I did with mine.
The next day, I flew up to Monterrey on hooligan patrol. I had not come across English fans in 1982 because they were frolicking in distant corners of Spain, but I was well aware that England was considered—considered itself—the headwater of the world’s great sport. (Never mind the ball games played by pre-Columbian people across this very land.)
The English had been playing soccer in leagues since the late nineteenth century, but there were traces of it going back centuries to the pastime of kicking a head or two from the local cemetery on Shrove Tuesday. Historians have recently determined that a young prince apparently took part in the ruffian’s sport in the early sixteenth century and may have owned the first handmade soccer shoes with cleats. Henry VIII, the first footballer with traction, may have been the spiritual ancestor to such worthies as Vinnie Jones, the Wimbledon defender known for grabbing opponents’ testicles; John Terry, bar brawler and cheap-shot artist; and Wayne Rooney, gambler and carouser.
English fans were justifiably proud of other parts of the patrimony, including the codification of the sport and its exportation by sailors and settlers to South America, where teams named Newell’s Old Boys and Racing Club and Arsenal de Sarandí are all staples of the Argentine first division to this day.
But by 1986, English crowds were synonymous with mayhem and death. On May 11, 1985, a fire swept through the ancient stadium at Bradford City, killing fifty-six fans. Eighteen days later, fans of Juventus and Liverpool were caught in a ghastly crush before the finals of the European Cup in Heysel Stadium in Brussels, and thirty-nine fans, mostly from Juventus, were killed and hundreds were injured. After that, authorities belatedly began upgrading stadiums, and Interpol and other law agencies kept known hooligans from traveling.
Mexico was prepared. The newspaper El Sol ran a front-page headline: “Los Animales Atacan”—no translation needed—but many residents treated the visitors politely, even inviting a few of them home for a roast goat dinner. According to the newspapers, some teenaged girls found English fans rather cute. Some of the visitors took off their shirts and fried their pale skins—and a few even took off their pants, for which they were fined. Local authorities, as good hosts, offered guided tours of jails where they planned to stash troublemakers; after that, the lads cut down on extravagances.
On the day I went to see England play in Mo
nterrey, their opponent was a distracted Portugal team. The Portuguese players had been threatening to strike over an alleged failure to pay their salaries or bonuses, which has been known to happen at the World Cup. The Portuguese seemed to be on a labor slowdown early in the match, ceding a goal to England, but rallied for a 1–1 draw.
On June 5, I drove out to Puebla de los Angeles, past the twin volcanoes Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl, which loom over the main highway in the rugged area known as Paseo de Cortés. Awaiting me were a couple of volcanic teams—Italy and Argentina, two combatants in that classic Group of Death four years earlier. At a press conference at the Italian hotel, I spotted huge cartons of foodstuffs lined up in the hallways. “Pasta, a little spaghetti. Cheese, Parmesan. Olive oil, naturally. And mineral water. You can’t do without that,” said the gregarious Enzo Bearzot. The Italians also brought a cook. No wine? Actually, Signor Bearzot insisted, his players did not care for wine or beer.
Diego Maradona, who had said that God planned a goal for him against Italy, was marked on this day by Salvatore Bagni, a teammate of his at Napoli. Bagni did not kick Maradona the way Claudio Gentile had done four years earlier, but Bagni did keep one hand on his pal at all times—shirt, shorts, hair, whatever, just to keep him close. Maradona was now four years older and did not whine about the tactics. Undoubtedly, this was because he knew what heroics his maker had in store for him.
Italy took a lead on a penalty kick in the seventh minute, after the ref called a very marginal hand ball against Argentina.
In the thirty-fourth minute, Maradona dribbled past his buddy Bagni and was alertly picked up by Scirea, who forced Maradona far to the left, to an almost impossible angle. Maradona somehow pushed off on his right leg and shot with his left foot at almost a right angle, past Scirea and the keeper, Giovanni Galli, to tie the match.
After the match ended at 1–1, I watched Maradona hugging the Italian players, including Bagni; Bruno Conti, the modest-sized winger from Roma; and Scirea, who had hounded him so successfully for all but one split second. The affection was obvious. I was still learning that nasty club matches created a guild-member loyalty when players met after World Cup matches, exchanging sweaty jerseys on the field.
Eight World Cups Page 6