Eight World Cups

by George Vecsey

  “Don’t root; they’ll kill you,” Marianne warned, knowing my affinity for the Azzurri. Was it that obvious? I was controlling my arms and facial gestures, but my legs were twitching under the table.

  Kill me? They were already doing a good job, what with their cigarettes—including the press rooms of the World Cup. I could never understand how a nation that cares so much about good food and elegant clothing could stink up the air. I did not pursue that dialogue with the patrons, however.

  I studied the faces and physiques of the French players during warmups, particularly Zidane, so cool, so graceful, so lethal. And on the Italian bench was the Zizou of Italy, Roberto Baggio, man of a thousand soap opera episodes. Many of the starting twenty-two players were from Serie A in Italy and seemed so respectful of one another’s talents that they were afraid to make a mistake.

  In the sixty-seventh minute, Cesare Maldini sent in Baggio.

  “Watch the game change,” I whispered to Marianne.

  For the first time all day, the ball swung from side to side with purpose, five or six touches in a row. The French patrons grew quiet, feeling that the balance had shifted, but the match was still scoreless after ninety minutes.

  With thirty minutes of overtime ahead, I owed it to Marianne to get her out of this smoky pit, so we rushed back to chambre 32 with the view of a church tower and a functional television set.

  Early in overtime, Baggio made a run down the right side and caught a pass on the outside of his right foot. Turning to his left, in full stride, he unloaded a moderately hard shot that whistled just wide to the left. My legs kicked into the air; had I performed this act in that smoky café, I would have been dispatched to the guillotine. I could not help myself. This was not a rejection of our wonderful host country; it was a feeling for one club over another. Can a fan love two teams? Or more?

  With a minute to go, Gianluca Pagliuca stopped a crafty shot by Youri Djorkaeff, the Kalmyk-Polish-Armenian-French artist who played for Inter of Milan. The 120 minutes had produced no goals. I was exhausted.

  Having covered Italy’s losses in shoot-outs in 1990 in Naples and 1994 in the Rose Bowl, I knew what was coming next. Baggio and Zidane both made their shots, with Baggio putting his index finger to his lips in some obscure little salute while jogging off the field. In the fifth round, the steady French defender Blanc made his shot, and the match was over. The home team had won.

  In the streets of Aix, les citoyens were honking horns and cheering, the way the borough of Brooklyn had done on that October afternoon in 1955 when the Dodgers finally won a World Series.

  I looked it up: five of the first fifteen home teams had won the World Cup—Uruguay in 1930, Italy in 1934, England in 1966, West Germany in 1974, and Argentina in 1978. I think it used to be easier in a more rudimentary age because the host teams benefited from familiar surroundings and time zones and also because there was not as much depth in world soccer. Despite the ambiguity of Jean-Marie Le Pen, this diverse team was going to the semifinal.

  I drove down to Marseille for the Netherlands-Argentina quarterfinal, on July 4, my birthday. I’ve been in Europe often on my birthday, but I made it a practice never to tell anybody. It’s always a sweet day in England, with pubs serving hamburgers and hot dogs, and at Wimbledon, the military band plays American favorites. There was no trace of Independence Day in Marseille, the origin of the French national anthem, which would be heard on its national day ten days later.

  I’d like to tell you about the goal Patrick Kluivert scored for the Netherlands in the twelfth minute, but I missed it. We reporters were seated low in the stands, near the VIP section, which was great, except that some rich patrons sneaked their chauffeurs into the aisle next to us. As the Dutch surged forward, one idiot driver stepped directly in front of me, and I saw only his loutish shoulders as the stadium erupted.

  Argentina tied the match in the seventeenth minute and went up a man in the seventy-sixth because of a red card, but they gave back their advantage in the eighty-seventh minute when Ariel Ortega, one of the more accomplished Argentine floppers, hooked his foot onto the leg of Jaap Stam, the burly Dutch defender, and writhed on the ground, trying to work the ref. After Edwin van der Sar, the tall Dutch goalie, ran over to warn the ref not to fall for the histrionics, Ortega jumped up and butted the jaw of van der Sar, who went sprawling. Who would not? The Mexican referee, Arturo Brizio Carter, got it right, waving a red card at Ortega—another No. 10 leaving a World Cup in shame.

  That expulsion opened the match for the opportunistic Dutch. In the ninetieth minute, Frank de Boer lofted a parabolic pass to fleet Dennis Bergkamp, fifteen yards from the goal, and Bergkamp faked the goalie into the Mediterranean for the goal that sent the Dutch through to the semifinals. The Argentines trudged off, presumably to enroll in better acting classes.

  * * *

  On July 7, I drove back to Marseille for the semifinal, Brazil against the Netherlands. Ever since I started covering the World Cup, I had been waiting for Total Football to triumph once again. Kluivert tied the score at 1–1 in the ninetieth minute, but Taffarel—Brazil’s keepers are never highly regarded—saved two penalty kicks in the shoot-out, and the Brazilians were into the final.

  We flew home—that is to say, Paris—the next day, in time to watch the France-Croatia semifinal from Saint-Denis. This was Croatia’s first appearance in the World Cup since the nation broke away from the disintegrating Yugoslavia. I had seen Croatian fans early in the tournament, tough guys wearing red-and-white checkerboard T-shirts, eyeing the airy decadence on the Métro. The Croatian team was tough, also, having pulverized Germany, 3–0, in a nasty quarterfinal, one of the rare times a German team seemed to lose heart late in a match. Now Croatia was taking on the host team.

  France’s Lilian Thuram, one of those players who seemed somewhat less French in the eyes of M. Le Pen, was not used to playing at outside back, and allowed Davor Šuker to slip past him for a goal in the forty-sixth minute.

  Thuram, who rarely shot, much less scored, then scored twice, once in the forty-seventh minute and once in the seventieth minute—the only two international goals of his long career, as it turned out—and France still had the lead with only fourteen minutes remaining.

  Lining up for a free kick, Slava Bilić, a wily Croatian who played in the English league, grappled with Laurent Blanc, the French defender. Blanc waved a handful of knuckles in the general vicinity of Bilić, who immediately staggered backward, as if punched by an invisible Maradona-esque hand from the sky. Bilić, who played in a band in England when he was not playing defense, had a highly developed stage presence. He clutched his chest, his eyes, his throat, searching for the source of his inner pain, and José María García-Aranda, the fascinated Spanish referee, was taken in by the histrionics and waved a red card at Blanc.

  Where exactly did Bilić get hit? “He hit me somewhere around here,” Bilić told interviewers, gesturing in the general direction of his chin. “It’s hard to remember,” he added. He could not come up with any welts or cuts or gashes or bruises, but Bilić insisted, “He hit me; I reacted. That’s part of the game, to react.”

  Once waved, the red card automatically put Blanc out for the next match, too.

  When the match was over, Bilić sidled up to Blanc and said he was sorry the ref had shown a red card; he had not intended things to go that far.

  “I guess I should have hit him right there,” Blanc said.

  Too late. France was going to the final, courtesy of its 2–1 victory, but Blanc would have to sit it out. FIFA had no process to review Bilić’s writhing, and the sideline officials were useless. Bilić pretty much admitted he had faked the injury. Sepp Blatter said he was sorry, but what could he do?

  For the first time since 1978, the home team was in the final. French fans were abandoning the Gallic shrug, halfway to the ecstatic state of American college football fans on a Saturday morning in Tuscaloosa, Lincoln, or South Bend.

  My guess was that M. Le P
en was liking Zidane better each match. After missing two matches for attacking the Saudi player, Zidane had elevated the French squad by distributing the ball, always a threat to score, although he had not yet done so.

  “A genius,” Aimé Jacquet had said of Zidane earlier. “Since going to Italy, he’s had to be at his best every weekend and has taken on a new dimension. He’s well aware now of what he’s capable of, and we’re hoping that he can give back to our team what our team has invested in him. With him, we can win the World Cup.”

  Going into the final, Jacquet reaffirmed his earlier promise: “On July 13, I will say good-bye after having done a victory lap the night before in the Stade de France; after the French team has been crowned champion.”

  * * *

  The World Cup had a glamorous final—the defending champions from Brazil against France, the first time a home team had reached the final since Argentina won in 1978. The final had two stars from Serie A, the best league in the world: Ronaldo from Inter Milan against Zidane from Juventus.

  The final turned out to have more suspense before the match than during it. When the lineups were distributed an hour or so before kickoff, Ronaldo was not starting.

  Ronaldo—pronounced “Honaldo” in the Brazilian version of Portuguese—was merely the leading star in the world, still only twenty-one years old, a large and nimble striker who could pounce with the quickness of a smaller man. When his name was listed among the reserves, the huge open-air press box began to quiver.

  If this were the Super Bowl, and a star quarterback was not in the starting lineup, the NFL would surely offer some minimal explanation, perhaps even vaguely truthful. In the States, good reporters can gain the trust of executives or coaches or players or public-relations officials to provide some inside information, but as far as I could see, soccer did not have those avenues. We began hearing rumors of Ronaldo having some kind of seizure or reaction to medication, but there was no way to trace it back to any source.

  Shortly before game time, a flurry of paper produced a new lineup—Ronaldo was starting, after all. No explanation from FIFA.

  From the time I was a child, I had heard the stirring anthem “La Marseillaise,” with its lyrics exhorting sacrifice and victory. Now I was standing in a stadium, with many people in the crowd singing lustily:

  Aux armes, citoyens!

  Formez vos bataillons!

  Sometimes a reporter should look around and think, “Wow, look where I am.” That was one of those times.

  Ronaldo was not nearly so energized. The whippet of the first six matches, with his gap-toothed smile, was gone. He was on the field but not necessarily on this planet. He floated ethereally, as mysterious as the globe on the Brazilian flag, a distant object, devoid of life.

  Instead, all the energy in the stadium was in the feet of France’s No. 10, Zidane, as he glided purposefully from space to space, his balding head a target, a player at the peak of his career, at precisely the right time.

  In these electronic times, there is a YouTube video called “Zidane * All in the Touch,” which enhances the memory of what Zidane did that day—improv ballet, on grass, in public. Don’t look at the ball, look at the feet. Zidane performs the adage, the arabesque, the avant, and the pirouette, controlling the ball against world-level defenders like Aldair and Roberto Carlos. This is an artist playing the most virtuoso final we may ever see.

  At twenty-seven minutes, Emmanuel Petit’s perfect corner kick soared toward Zidane, who outleaped Leonardo for the soft header to put France ahead—his first goal of the tournament.

  Still in the first half, Ronaldo low-bridged Fabien Barthez, the keeper, and both went down. Barthez was surprisingly solicitous of Ronaldo, who expended all his energy on one questionable sortie.

  In the first minute of injury time in the first half, Zidane found another pocket to guide another header into the net.

  The entire Brazilian team seemed to be sleepwalking. Mario Zagallo, the combative forward on two World Cup champions, who had coached the champions of 1970 and was an assistant on the 1994 champions, was back coaching. Zagallo later said that he had been thinking of taking out Ronaldo, but he did not, even when down, 2–0, at halftime. Ronaldo made one or two runs and had one shot on goal, but suffered a mental whiteout and pushed the ball directly to the French keeper rather than at Didier Deschamps, the midfielder guarding the corner.

  It was the only chance of the afternoon for Ronaldo, who played the entire game, even when Brazil had a one-man advantage for the final twenty-two minutes after Marcel Desailly went out with his second yellow card. In the closing seconds, France made a leisurely counterattack, with Petit running down a lovely through ball to make it 3–0, tying the record for the largest margin in a final.

  The French fans celebrated in most un-French delirium, waving flags, chanting, cheering, with tricolors painted on their faces, but très chic.

  Underneath the stands, reporters screamed at Zagallo for details about Ronaldo, accusing Brazil and FIFA of a cover-up. Left on his own by FIFA and his own federation, the old coach bolted from the room. This was the true face of FIFA, then and now. The money was in the till. Why explain?

  The two billion viewers finished that day with no idea what had befallen the best scorer of the time. Did Ronaldo have a psychic or medical breakdown? Was there a concern he would test positive for something?

  The next day, the Brazilian team doctor, Lidio Toledo, said that Ronaldo had suffered a stress-related episode, whatever that meant. And a few days after that, members of the medical team that had treated Ronaldo at the hospital earlier on Sunday told Le Monde that the player seemed to be suffering from severe fatigue, weariness, and stress. One doctor said that it was possible Ronaldo had had an epileptic fit, but the staff did not have enough time to diagnose his problem because he left the hospital to play in the final.

  Officials of Inter, who had a huge amount of money invested in Ronaldo, criticized the Brazilian team for allowing Ronaldo to play under such conditions.

  Six weeks later, on August 21, quotes attributed to Ronaldo were issued. “What happened was that before the game, I went to eat, then I went back to my room because I was feeling tired and wanted to rest and I went to sleep,” he said. “When I woke up, I felt pain in my body. I felt really bad. Then I went back to eat, and the doctors told me that I had had this problem.”

  What kind of problem? It was not hard for Brazilian fans to work up a conspiracy theory that the player had been slipped something dangerous by gambling or rooting interests.

  Eleven years later, Ronaldo apparently spoke at greater length in an unsigned interview posted on the Web site ronaldohome.com.

  Ronaldo said that on the morning of the match, in the team hotel, he had a “seizure,” lasting thirty to forty seconds. When he woke up, ten friends were around him. Team officials told him he was out of the match, but he went to the hospital, “which was all OK.” Then, he said he went directly to the stadium bearing results of the medical exam and told Zagallo, his coach, that he wanted to play and he claimed Zagallo told him, “You will play.”

  He claimed he played “reasonably well” but said he was “labeled as a villain”—even by some teammates—because Brazil lost. “This was rubbish as if there was any risk, I would be the first to jump out,” he said, adding that he has a checkup every year and has never had those symptoms again. Ronaldo said he takes Voltaren because of tendinitis in his knee, but said that the drug was not the reason for his “seizure.”

  Interesting story, but not necessarily medically true, according to one doctor I know who obviously had no contact with Ronaldo, but who said that Voltaren is not likely to produce convulsions or seizures. More likely, somebody had given Ronaldo lidocaine, an anesthetic used to dull pain before a big game. If the lidocaine hit the wrong spot near a big muscle, it could produce convulsions or a seizure, he said.

  Why would team doctors do that? Team doctors are paid to get a player back on the field. That’s the
ir job.

  Could France have mounted such a disciplined attack if it had to worry about the big feller being awake on offense? We will never know.

  The way France looked that day, perhaps nobody could have beaten them. The French squad peaked at the right time. The nation cheered, and Jacquet followed his promise and resigned. He went out a champion.

  * * *

  After the match, we wrote our stories of French perfection and Brazilian sleepwalking, and it was time to get back to Paris.

  Five reporters commandeered a taxi outside the stadium. The driver was old and calm, apparently Arab, smiling proudly as he negotiated his taxi through the Quartier Arabe, where thousands of jubiliant people of Algerian and other North African ancestries chanted “Zee-dahn! Zee-dahn!” and rocked the cab back and forth. We opened the windows and applauded and gave high-fives and chanted “Zee-dahn!” and the driver edged his way past the shimmering presence of Sacré Coeur, and glided downhill into central Paris.

  Back at our flat, Marianne described her perfect vantage point, ten rows high, near Zidane’s two graceful headers, the ticket courtesy of a friend. We opened the windows and listened to the chants and thousands of footsteps as Parisians instinctively took the path of ancient French crowds. In the past, they had flocked to riot and throw paving stones (aux barricades!) or watch the executions by guillotine in the Place de la Concorde, at the base of the Champs-Élysées. Now they congregated on the ancient streets, chanting “Zee-dahn! Zee-dahn!” to honor the superstar, born in Marseille, who had won a championship for France.

  12

  AMERICANS WIN WORLD CUP—AGAIN

  UNITED STATES, 1999

  The world was back in the Rose Bowl. But instead of Dunga and Baggio taking the final penalty shots, it was Sun Wen and Brandi Chastain.

  Those charismatic Olympic champions of 1996 were mostly back in 1999, with a sense of teamwork that came from within. That team had leaders everywhere, including Joy Fawcett, the great defender who was now the mother of two young daughters.