The three players from Kearny, New Jersey, with overseas roots were the core of the team—John Harkes, Tony Meola, and Tab Ramos. Other talented players included Eric Wynalda, who had scored twenty-one goals in sixty-one games for Saarbrücken in Germany; Marcelo Balboa, the solid defender whose father had played in Argentina before migrating to the United States; Alexi Lalas, a fast-talking defender who had spent part of his childhood in Greece, his father’s homeland; Hugo Pérez, with his roots in El Salvador, who had been left off the 1990 squad but was picked for 1994; and Roy Wegerle, born in South Africa, who had moved to Florida for college and then played for clubs in England.
The U.S. federation, always on the lookout for players with claims to American citizenship, found Earnie Stewart, the son of an American airman who married a Dutch woman and stayed. Stewart was a regular in the Dutch league but had never played for the Dutch national team at the international level, so he was eligible to join the U.S. team.
The scouts found another prospect in Germany—a steady midfielder named Thomas Dooley, whose father had been an American soldier. Dooley could not speak English when he was recruited for the U.S. team. I remember seeing him in the gift shop of a Washington hotel the day of his first friendly with his new nation; he was having trouble buying postcards and stamps. A born leader and communicator, Dooley was chatting in English within weeks.
Then there was Fernando Clavijo, who had come to America from Uruguay to support his family and play in the semipro leagues in his spare time. While waiting for his papers to be sorted out, Clavijo had been working at a restaurant in the eastern reaches of New York City, down on his hands and knees, cleaning a carpet, when he spotted the plain black shoes and cuffed slacks of law-enforcement agents. To Clavijo’s great fortune, his boss escorted him to a table, whisked off his white apron, and handed him a bottle of wine, making him look like a customer. While the feds chased other aliens out the back door or through bathroom windows, Clavijo sipped away, in the affluent glow of suburbia. When the feds left, his knees were not functioning perfectly, but he was otherwise safe. His boss helped him get a green card, and Clavijo was later discovered by the federation.
By 1994, Clavijo was the conduit for the new American coach—the peripatetic Bora Milutinović, the Serb who had coached Mexico in 1986 and Costa Rica in 1990. In hotel lobbies or airport corridors, Bora was the center of the cluster of fans and reporters, calling everybody “my friend.”
Bora was inscrutable in many languages. I sometimes charted his sentences as they veered from one language to another: My good friend, vamos a ver what kind of giocatori we have here because je suis un étrangère, you know?
The players did not claim to understand Bora and looked to Clavijo to decipher the linguistic peregrinations.
* * *
In the first indoor match ever held in the World Cup, the Americans got into trouble when a free kick handcuffed Meola for a Swiss goal in the thirty-ninth minute. But soon the upgraded level of professionalism kicked in. By now, many of the American players had been in tough games in the better leagues in Europe and could react under pressure the way Paul Caligiuri (still starting for the United States) had done in Trinidad in 1989.
Rather than let the half run out and head for the locker room, John Harkes made something happen. He had scored vital goals in three seasons for Sheffield Wednesday, acquiring a swagger as well as reigniting the latent Scottish accent he had inherited from his parents. Harkes made a run upfield, eluding defenders until a Swiss player decided to dump him rather than let him advance. The tactical foul earned a free kick.
Tab Ramos, who played for Real Betis in Spain, and Harkes both hovered near the dead ball. In the group-dynamics negotiations that often take place before free kicks, they acknowledged that Eric Wynalda, the scorer for Saarbrücken, should take the kick.
“Too far for me,” Ramos said later.
Wynalda, using the experience from playing overseas, spotted the Swiss keeper shading slightly toward his own left. Wynalda put the ball into the far opposite corner, nudging the underside of the crossbar, tying the match in the forty-fourth minute. Later, the Swiss players would admit that the goal just before halftime deflated them. The 1–1 draw held up for the first point by the United States in the World Cup since the great victory over England in 1950. But Harkes and some of the others were upset that they had missed a chance to score again and perhaps dominate their group.
After Wynalda scored, the stale air in the dome combined with his allergies to make him sick to his stomach, and he had to come out in the fifty-eighth minute. The segments of grass held up, but there was a torpor to the indoor atmosphere.
Back home in New York, the magical spring in Madison Square Garden was lasting much too long for me. The Times needed me to fly to Houston the next morning to cover the conclusion of the NBA Finals—the Knicks against the Rockets. A columnist always wants to be told, Big guy, we need you at the big event, but I would have preferred not to have this intrusion on the World Cup.
I was quietly hoping the Knicks would close out the series in game six so I could cover the U.S.-Colombia match at the Rose Bowl three days later. Instead, Hakeem Olajuwon blocked John Starks’s final shot to preserve a two-point victory for Houston. Now I was mad at the Knicks for making me miss the soccer match.
On June 22, Chris Brienza, a Knicks PR staff member and soccer buff, and I found a spare TV set in the labyrinth of the Houston arena, and we watched the first fifteen or twenty minutes of the match, until the basketball game started. Then we went to work and watched Starks shoot two-for-eighteen as the Knicks lost the game and the series. I thereby missed all the scoring in the 2–1 U.S. victory, including an own goal by a Colombian defender, Andrés Escobar, in the thirty-fifth minute.
I caught up with the own goal later, on television replay. The mistake could not be blamed on the new rule banning back passes to the keeper. Harkes made the goal happen by crossing the ball toward Earnie Stewart, who was coming in from the right. The keeper (no longer René Higuita of the happy feet but Oscar Cordoba) had wandered out to his left to combat Stewart, leaving the goalmouth open, and Escobar, the solid captain, desperately slid to intercept the ball but arrived a fraction of a second late, shunting it into the goal. Stewart scored in the fifty-second minute, and Colombia scored late.
Colombia had been the overwhelming favorite in this match; now it was out of contention because of the loss. But something worse would happen. Two weeks later, on July 2, Escobar was shot dead outside a nightclub back home in Medellín. There were rumors that major drug dealers had bet heavily on the national team and were angry at their losses. A driver for one syndicate was convicted and sentenced to forty-three years in prison but was released after eleven. To this day, fans carry photos of Andrés Escobar to matches of his former team.
With the Knicks gone, I caught up with the third U.S. match, a 1–0 loss to Romania in the Rose Bowl. With four points, the United States qualified for the knockout round, but Harkes was given a yellow card for yapping at officials during the usual scuffling before a free kick. Because he already had a yellow card, Harkes was ineligible for the next match, in the round of 16.
Sixteen years later, while broadcasting from the World Cup in South Africa, Harkes would refer to dumb yellow cards incurred by a Uruguayan (Luis Suárez) and German (Thomas Müller), forcing them to miss semifinal games. He knew the feeling.
* * *
The United States had eight days before their round of 16 match. This gave me a chance to catch up on everything else that had happened in the first round.
Some sites were within commuting distance in the northeast corridor, but others were scattered around this huge country, cutting down on the feeling of community I had felt in Spain and Italy. For years afterward, people raved about the orange glow of Dutch fans and other zealots who congregated in downtown Orlando. I never got there.
Just as in Mexico in 1986, many matches were scheduled at midday in the blazing h
eat, sacrificing the health and durability of the players for the convenience of fans in Europe.
The match between Germany and South Korea on June 27 at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas began at 4 p.m. with the temperature at 100 degrees. Germany took a 3–0 lead after thirty-seven minutes, with two goals from Klinsmann. On one of the longest days of the year, the sun was not going anywhere, and neither were the Koreans, who are known for their tenacity and combativeness. They scored twice in the second half as Germany threw in two substitutes and managed to hang on for a 3–2 victory.
Germany then staggered through a 3–2 victory over Belgium in the round of 16 but succumbed to Bulgaria, 2–1, in a noon match in New Jersey in the quarterfinals, on a goal in the seventy-eighth minute. In my opinion, they never recovered from the heat and the Koreans.
I never caught up with Greece, coached by the former U.S. national coach Alkis Panagoulias, who had led the American team in that fatal qualifying match against Costa Rica in 1985. Nine years later, Panagoulias finally got to coach in the World Cup.
Months before the World Cup, Panagoulias had invited me to lunch in the old Greek neighborhood of Astoria, Queens—at the landmark Uncle George’s Greek Taverna, open twenty-four hours. When he showed up, the place went nuts. Panagoulias is here! Panagoulias is here! People flocked to his table, chattering about the old days, chattering about Greece’s chances. Once again I could feel the strength of soccer in New York’s ethnic outposts. But in the tournament, Greece never scored against Nigeria or Bulgaria or Argentina and was eliminated.
Diego Maradona was back for his fourth World Cup, having worn out his welcome with Napoli and other enablers, having tested positive for cocaine in 1991 and been banned for fifteen months, but each time he was allowed to stumble back into the limelight. FIFA wanted Maradona to play in the 1994 World Cup because it believed that Americans needed his celebrity to be induced to buy tickets to this strange event. In 1992, Blatter had brokered a chance for Maradona to join Sevilla, so he could get back into shape for the World Cup.
“That night I explain that Maradona is like a member of a family,” Blatter later told the journalist Jimmy Burns, adding, “He has failed his family and been punished for it. But he has served his punishment. The same family must now do everything possible to bring him back into the fold.” Blatter also put out a public statement that he expected the prodigal son to “stop making insulting comments against football leaders whether at club, federation or international level.” Presumably, Blatter was referring to himself.
Maradona came to the United States with his weight down, but he was still a mess. Having been introduced to body-building drugs as a prodigy in Argentina, he had taken to so-called recreational drugs at an early age. His appetites knew no limit. He played eighty-three minutes and scored a goal in beating Greece, 4–0, and played ninety minutes in Argentina’s 2–1 victory over Nigeria. But on June 29, while preparing for Argentina’s match against Bulgaria, he was told that he had tested positive for a “cocktail” of five illegal drugs, including ephedrine, and was out of the tournament.
When he heard the news, Maradona broke down in tears, wailing that he had worked so hard to get his body in shape, and now somebody must have made a terrible mistake. Then he was gone, his life a whirlwind of heart problems, medical treatment, and drug rehabilitation in Cuba, a friendship with Fidel Castro, inflammatory statements about the United States, tangled relationships with his wife, girlfriends, and children in and out of marriage.
The World Cup went on without him, quite easily. On July 3, I flew back to the West Coast and covered a racehorse match between Romania and Argentina in the heat of the midday sun at the Rose Bowl. Showtime! Argentina won, 3–2, without its seedy star.
* * *
It was hard to feel at one with the World Cup while trekking through airports and hotels in this vast land. However, some days were memorable. The next morning I flew to the Bay Area for U.S.-Brazil on the Fourth of July, my fifty-fifth birthday. The match was at Stanford University’s football stadium on the idyllic campus, a festive celebration of the holiday as well as the Yanks and Brazilians. The Stanford rowing club was selling souvenir T-shirts, white with red lettering. Nearly twenty years later, mine is a bit frayed around the collar, but then again so am I.
The lettering says:
STANFORD
WORLD SOCCER
BRASIL VS. U.S.A.
Below that is a soccer ball and crossed flag poles bearing the American stars and stripes and the mystical Brazilian globe and the words:
ORDEM E PROGESSO
July 4th, 1994
Stanford Stadium
Stanford, California
USA
The one word it does not contain is FIFA, which suggests that Sepp Blatter could still sue somebody for royalties, maybe even me for wearing it.
I love the Brazilian flag. Everybody loves the Brazilians. At least they did until Leonardo of Brazil coldcocked Tab Ramos.
In the forty-third minute, Ramos grabbed Leonardo’s jersey as they tangled near the sideline, just another skirmish in a sport full of them. Perhaps frustrated by the Americans’ early aggression, Leonardo drove his right elbow into Ramos’s face, putting him out of the match with a broken bone in the eye socket.
The vicious shot earned Leonardo a red card. (Ramos was also given a yellow card for grabbing Leonardo’s shirt.) Leonardo, who had a fine reputation, went to the hospital that evening to tell Ramos he did not intend to hurt him, and Ramos accepted the gesture. A heady, inventive two-way player, probably the best on the American squad, Ramos was never quite the same after that.
In the second half, playing a man down, Brazil remembered its roots in ball movement, widening the field, keeping possession. The twin engines, Romário and Bebeto, began coming at the U.S. goal until in the seventy-second minute Bebeto gained a few inches on Alexi Lalas and drilled a goal from a wide angle. Brazil hung on for a 1–0 victory, and the U.S. players knew they had missed an opportunity to do better in front of a supportive crowd of 84,147 fans.
That night I headed to the San Francisco airport for the flight to Boston. In the airport, I spotted Bob Ryan of the Boston Globe, one of the few major American sports columnists to take the World Cup seriously. I don’t think Ryan was a soccer buff, but as a curious journalist he knew a good story in his homeland and put himself on the red-eye to cover it from coast to coast.
A few hours later we reconvened in Foxboro Stadium, the home of the New England Patriots, for a match between the latest great African hope, Nigeria, and the diva of any World Cup opera, Italy.
* * *
The Azzurri were doing what they do best. They were suffering.
The coach this time around was Arrigo Sacchi, who had once been a shoe salesman and had never played professional soccer. Because Sacchi had worked his way up from the lowest leagues, his every move was suspect in the Italian mind, which only added to his introverted manner. He was proud of hailing from the same region, Emilia-Romagna, as the director Federico Fellini and maintained a distracting half smile, as if he knew some inner truth that nobody else did—the odd captain of a listing ship that may or may not reach shore.
“I am never afraid of being unpopular or else I wouldn’t have done ninety-nine percent of everything I have done,” Sacchi once said.
The Italian ball handler, Roberto Baggio, was also introverted. He had played on the 1990 national squad and then moved from Fiorentina to Juventus. Born in the northeast region of Veneto, the slender, ascetic-looking Baggio wore a ponytail that earned him the nickname Il Codino—the Ponytail. Sometimes he was even called Il Divin Codino.
Baggio was a convert to Buddhism, and his mother once said she prayed for his conversion back to Catholicism. He tended to keep to himself. On the field he was capable of sudden acts of genius, popping up in open spaces, controlling the ball, changing the course of a match.
After my first few World Cups, I had come to believe that coaches—whether former sta
rs or outsiders like Sacchi—tend to be wary of shifty little artists like Baggio, even though they are capable of creating goals from nowhere. The reason is simple: geniuses render their teachers slightly less relevant.
This odd couple, Sacchi and Baggio, had been yoked together in a desperate moment in November 1993. Italy, with all that talent, went into the final qualifying match needing at least a draw against Portugal to qualify for the Stati Uniti.
Having experienced American anxiety about qualifying for the two previous World Cups, I wanted to witness the process in a major soccer country—la paura di sbagliare, as Andrea Bocelli sings in a ballad, the fear of screwing up. I convinced my editors to approve the trip by arguing that the Meadowlands, the stadium in New Jersey that had spooked Sepp Blatter, was projected to be the home for Italy because of the three million Italian Americans in the New York metropolitan region.
When I arrived in Milan, La Gazzetta and the other papers were stirring memories of 1958, when Italy came down to the final qualifier against Northern Ireland, in Belfast, and was upset, 2–1. The Azzurri had not missed a World Cup since, but you never knew.
All week long, Sacchi had been insisting that Italy would not play defensively, but the fans would have been fine with pulling the sturdy catenaccio across the portals and getting out of there with a draw.
With anxiety hanging over marshy northern Italy like late-autumn clouds, I took the trolley from the Duomo, gliding through curving Renaissance streets toward the stadium on the edge of town. A few older chichi ladies on the tram took on a pained expression as they regarded the fans, boisterous from nerves. One mistake could ruin four years.
On my way into the stadium known as San Siro, I ran into Alan Rothenberg, the president of the American federation.
“No country is more important than Italy,” Rothenberg said. “To me, it’s a matter of the excitement the fans will bring.” He did not mention the tickets he was hoping to sell in New Jersey. Rothenberg had been given a blue Forza Italia scarf that he discreetly tucked in his pocket—you always want to appear neutral—but he confided that he would keep his hand on the scarf for the entire match, like a Greek clutching worry beads on a bumpy flight.
Eight World Cups Page 12