In the fall of 1997, my friend Massimo Lopes Pegna, the American correspondent for La Gazzetta dello Sport, told me about the café that was a truce zone for fans of all Italian squads. In their usual state of ansia, the Azzurri still needed at least a draw against Russia in the final match of 1997 to avoid the disgrace of not qualifying for 1998.
On a cold Saturday in November, this match was a godsend to Pino DiBartolo, the proprietor of L’Angolo café—the Italian word for “corner”—in Greenwich Village. Pino was legally not allowed to charge admission for watching the match on the modest television set propped high above the bar. However, Pino could charge a reasonable amount for a sandwich and a drink. The place was packed when I arrived, with mostly Italian spoken, but some English and Russian, too. Pino reserved a seat at the bar alongside some journalist friends who made things easier for me by speaking English, even to one another. The seat nearest the television was reserved for a fervent fan named Maurizio, who contorted himself into corkscrew positions whenever the ball took an ominous turn.
Fear and anguish filled the air. Even the Americans had already qualified, six days earlier, by beating Canada, 3–0. If the United States had been eliminated, most sports editors would have delightedly printed the score with the knowledge that they would not have to think about soccer for another four years. For Italy, the honor of the nation was at stake.
We peered up at the tiny set, noting that coach Cesare Maldini had started a willowy assortment of defensive-minded players. For more than a half, the two teams jostled each other without scoring, disaster only one mistake away. Then Italy counterattacked, and Demetrio Albertini caught up with the ball in full stride and blasted a left-footed shot past the keeper—shades of Paul Caligiuri in Trinidad.
In L’Angolo, most of the fans celebrated. In far-off Naples, the Italian defenders went into some version of catenaccio, and at 4:36 p.m. New York time, Italy clinched a 1–0 victory to ensure the berth in France. The television revealed a banner in Italian reading, Another Caesar Is Going to France.
As the patrons vanished into the bleak November afternoon, I remained to file my column via laptop. I loved L’Angolo even more now that it was mostly empty, revealing faded cushions on ancient wicker chairs, scuffed tables, blinds askew over dusty windows, with Pino bringing another strong espresso.
I had never been a regular at any bar or café since college. As a young reporter, I had been jealous of my pals in Manhattan who hung out in the Lion’s Head in Greenwich Village (a young actress named Jessica Lange waited tables there in 1973), but I always felt I was on a one-night pass.
The Village had been a beacon since one snowy night in college, when I wandered into a bookstore to check out the Cavalier poets, the incense, the girls working in the shop. A few years later, my wife and I would drive to the Village, and our firstborn would gurgle and smile as we drank coffee at midnight. She was six months old and knew it was cool.
The Village. Bobby Zimmerman from Minnesota had found it. Now I was rediscovering it, via L’Angolo. I quickly got to know Riccardo Romani, a freelance writer, and Sandro Simone, who worked for an Italian television channel, both of whom had played soccer in Italy as teenagers. And always there was Pino, a small and bespectacled native of Castellammare, Sicily, plying me with succulent arancini, the orange-flavored rice balls he claimed had been flown directly from Palermo, but even if they were made in Bensonhurst, they were delicious.
Epic days in L’Angolo: the 1999 Champions League final, when the Bayern Munich coach subbed out Lothar Matthaüs to preserve a lead as the German fans groaned. Never take out your best player. Sure enough, Manchester United scored twice late, and Massimo and I had to go on suicide patrol, convincing the Bayern fans not to throw themselves under the crosstown bus.
L’Angolo was great for meeting writer pals and soccer mates, great for interviewing or being interviewed. Home. People said Steve Nash, the great point guard, who had a flat downtown, would slip into L’Angolo to watch a match, but I never saw him because I was always at the World Cup.
And if there hadn’t been arancini and soccer, I still would have gone there to chat with Paola, the waitress, who was tall and beautiful and smart (and quite a team handball player, it turned out).
I imagined bringing my grandchildren, introducing them to Pino, making them speak a few words of Italian and learn to love rice balls. I could grow old there, like the wicker chairs.
There were warning signs. The city passed rules against smoking in public places, a blessing to our health but a disaster to Pino. People come in, they have one beer and go outside to smoke, and maybe they find something else to do. Landlords raised the rent on corner properties in the Village. You can never have enough Starbucks. Or nail shops.
Con Edison, with its ancient slogan of Dig We Must for a Better New York, began an excavation directly in front of L’Angolo. Jackhammers drowned out the games. The big dig lasted so long we assumed archaeologists were seeking Xi’an terra-cotta warriors from the other side.
Paola got a job running a restaurant, uptown. Riccardo got on his motorcycle and drove to Rome. Massimo got married.
One day L’Angolo was closed.
Pino moved to Florida for a while and then went home to Castellammare, where he runs the Soho Lounge. Nowadays, I hang around Foley’s at Herald Square, on Irish pub dedicated to baseball, if you can imagine such a thing. It’s a lovely place, but it doesn’t serve Sicilian rice balls.
15
SCANDAL AND HEAD-BUTT
GERMANY, 2006
This was close to a perfect World Cup—except for the bizarre way Germany became host and the ugly way the final ended.
Germany was chosen after FIFA expanded the tournament to thirty-two teams and encouraged emerging soccer nations to bid for future World Cups. Sepp Blatter went on record that if he were needed to cast a tie-breaking vote for 2006 he would choose South Africa. He was bucking for a Nobel Peace Prize, and this could be his ticket.
It never came to that. In 2000, Charles Dempsey from New Zealand, one of the twenty-four voting members of the FIFA executive committee, was instructed by his Oceania region to pick South Africa. However, the night before the vote, Dempsey vanished from Zurich. There being no provision for a proxy vote, Germany prevailed by a 12–11 margin.
This meant Blatter did not have to pick sides, which was highly convenient for him. Accusations of financial irregularities within FIFA were surfacing in Europe, where a few journalists were beginning to cover soccer politics seriously, as big business with a dark side. With Germany and England competing to be the host for the World Cup in 2006, Blatter’s promised tiebreaker for South Africa would have made the European bloc quite unhappy. Since he was up for reelection in 2002, Blatter wanted his home continent to be happy with him.
When Dempsey resurfaced in New Zealand, he claimed he had been under terrible pressure and had opted not to be remembered as the delegate who caved to one side or the other. Was he threatened with harm? Was he overwhelmed by conflicting offers? We do not know. What we do know is that the vanishing delegate worked out for Sepp Blatter.
Two years later, Dempsey was given a lifetime status with FIFA, which included lucrative travel privileges and expenses. A nice bonanza for a member who had disgraced the organization.
* * *
However it happened, Germany proved to be a worthy host. Its Bundesliga was among the top leagues in the world, with modern, elegant stadiums, a railroad system that allowed fans to flit from match to match, and central cities with affordable hotels that somehow escaped the normal gouge by “official” FIFA hotels.
My wife and I sampled the new Germany in 2005 when we flew in for the draw ceremony in Leipzig, in the former Deutsche Demokratische Republik, East Germany, which had disintegrated in 1990. As soon as our train slid into the former East Berlin, everything looked half a century behind the times—weary land, faded buildings. When we arrived in Leipzig, with the St. Thomas church, where Bach worked, and t
he outdoor Christmas market with mulled wine, we were transported back in time.
The made-for-TV ceremony was held in a looming convention hall, with Heidi Klum flashing her cheekbones and Franz Beckenbauer booting souvenir balls into the stands. Once again, the United States was drawn into its own personal Group of Misery, if not outright death.
Since the United States had humiliated Mexico in the 2002 round of 16 and had given fits to Germany in the quarterfinals, there was reason to think that the FIFA seeding committee would consider those results. Being seeded in the top eight was a huge advantage because it meant facing potentially inferior opponents, but there was a snag: the host team was always placed in the first tier. Germany, rebuilding under its new coach, the retired striker Jürgen Klinsmann, was ranked sixteenth, but had to be placed in the top bracket. When Bruce Arena, back for a second World Cup, realized that Mexico had been seeded in the top tier, he knew his squad was headed for the lower depths.
“That means we play one seeded team, one European team, and one team from the other pot,” Arena said in classic New York I’ve-been-around fatalistic tones.
Amid the flashing lights and thudding sound system of the ceremony, Arena learned his fate: the U.S. team was drawn into a group with the second-ranked Czech Republic, fourteenth-ranked Italy, and fiftieth-ranked Ghana.
The American journalists crowded around Arena, hoping he would pop off.
“We’re pleased,” Arena said.
Why in the world was he pleased?
“We know our opponents,” he said with his normal smirk. “Now we can prepare.”
When asked about his own Italian roots, Arena allowed himself thirty seconds of sentimentality, recalling being six years old in the Brooklyn grocery of his maternal grandfather, Salvatore Schembre, who kept a poster of the Azzurri on the wall. Now Arena was a national coach, and he thought of his second opponent as a powerful three-time champion, not as his ancestral homeland.
Early in 2006, Arena began to choose his squad.
Clint Mathis was gone. His aggressive goals in 2002 had earned him a look in the Bundesliga, until his inner Cletus emerged. Sent into a match late, he produced a game-tying goal, but he could not resist racing past his own coach and tapping an imaginary wristwatch, as if to say, “Why don’t you cut it a little closer next time?” That pretty much finished Mathis in Germany, and Arena did not choose him for 2006.
The mainstays were back—Reyna, Donovan, McBride, Beasley, Pope. Keller was back in goal. There was one intriguing new face—Clint Dempsey, a hard-edged kid who played with appealing desperation from growing up with mostly Mexican immigrants in East Texas. Steve Cherundolo, small and unobtrusive, had quietly made himself into a very decent right back at Hannover. One of the new faces was Oguchi Onyewu, known as Gooch, an introverted Clemson University player with Nigerian roots, who was the biggest defender the United States had—six foot four and 210 pounds.
As he had done in Seoul in 2002, Arena treated his players like adults, housing them in the bustling heart of a great city, Hamburg, the northern port where they could go shopping, check out the parks and water views, maybe even visit the Reeperbahn district, where the Beatles had emerged four decades earlier.
Their first match was in Gelsenkirchen, an industrial city, against the second-ranked team in the world. The Czechs, with four players from major western European leagues, did not take long to exploit the Yanks.
Pavel Nedvĕd came out flying, bringing the game to Gooch, who had the unfortunate effect of making people bounce off him. Nedvĕd, who refined his tumbling repertoire with Juventus, hit the deck, bestowing a yellow card to Gooch in the fifth minute.
Within the same sixty ticks of the clock, Jan Koller, four inches taller than Gooch, lumbered into scoring position near Onyewu, who looked hesitant to get ejected so early in the match. Koller, whose large bald head earned him the nickname of Dino (as in dinosaur), stuck out that cranial appendage and hammered home a header. Petr Čech shut out the Yanks, 3–0, but Koller tore up his thigh and was done for the tournament.
“We lost to the second-rated team in the world,” Keller said afterward, trying to find the bright side.
In the emerging world of social media, something amazing was happening back home. People were ticked off at Our Lads. Just as English fans hated their Swedish coach, and German fans were not sure how they felt about the Americanized Klinsmann, so American fans were turning mutinous over Bruce Arena.
This was a stunning development. Soccer was catching on with younger Americans, who had played a tame version of the sport in their suburban youth leagues and now possibly played in adult leagues but certainly had some discretional cash to sit in pubs and form opinions.
Back in the United States, electronic mobs were roaming the virtual countryside, flicking cranky messages with their thumbs rather than brandishing wooden pitchforks. The new breed wanted Bruce Arena gone, wanted to know why he had not used Eddie Johnson and John O’Brien until the United States was down a couple of goals. Where the heck was Freddy Adu? Why had Nike invested in the great savior of American soccer if he was not on the playing field in Gelsenkirchen? Get us Bruce Arena’s head! Yesterday!
After the drubbing from the Czechs, the Americans prepared to play Italy in Kaiserslautern, not far from the U.S. Air Force base at Ramstein. I visited the base and met Allison Hardwick, who piloted C-130 transport planes on their tight and perilous descent into Baghdad. A defender in the intramural league on the base, Hardwick said she was planning to attend the Italy match—“a dream of mine.”
With American servicepeople in the stands, waving flags and chanting “U-S-A,” the Americans played a nasty and ultimately brave match. Italy scored first, in the twenty-second minute, and then surrendered an own goal in the twenty-seventh minute. One minute later, Daniele De Rossi flung an elbow at Brian McBride’s head while they were up in the air, and McBride went down, bleeding. The referee, Jorge Larrionda of Uruguay, wisely asked for input from one of the sideline assistants, who had seen the elbow flying, and Larrionda tossed De Rossi with a red card.
A world power would know how to exploit that extra player, but the Yanks squandered it—and worse. Just before halftime, Pablo Mastroeni took out Andrea Pirlo with a lumbering cleats-up tackle and was handed a red card, so the United States and Italy went into the locker room at the half even in score and ejections. Two minutes into the second half, Eddie Pope, one of the steadiest defenders ever to play for the United States, committed a two-footed tackle, worthy of a yellow card. Already playing with a yellow from earlier in the game, Pope was sent off, to his horror.
Down a player, the Americans took the play to the Italians, with Keller punching or swatting or catching everything that flew near him, securing a 1–1 draw that earned the respect of everybody in the stadium, including the Italian fans.
Within an hour, in this new electronic world, I received e-mails from a friend in Greece and another in Italy, saying the Americans deserved better than a draw.
After two matches, the United States needed a victory over Ghana in Nuremberg to have any chance to advance. In the twenty-second minute, Captain Claudio Reyna twisted his knee near midfield, and Ghana scooped up the ball and scored. Reyna tried to continue but had to come out in the fortieth minute.
Dempsey scored in the forty-third minute, and it seemed the Yanks might overcome the bad start. But, two minutes into injury time in the first half, the Curse of Gooch struck again. As Onyewu headed the ball out of the box, he made minor contact with Razak Pimpong, nine full inches shorter than him. The German ref, Markus Merk, saw Pimpong bouncing away and called for a penalty kick, which Stephen Appiah converted. The 2–1 score stood up, and the loss sent the Yanks home.
We reporters had been around these players for weeks in Germany, and for years before that. It was not fun to stand in a mixed zone and ask Keller, Donovan, and McBride to explain things, but they were cooperative; we all had jobs to do.
Arena had become more sar
castic, more withdrawn, as the tournament went on, and he bristled when asked why he had moved Eddie Lewis and DaMarcus Beasley from their comfort range on the left side.
The new president of the U.S. federation, Sunil Gulati, was uncharacteristically terse near the mixed zone. Gulati was a soccer lifer, born in India, childhood in Connecticut, amateur player and referee, official and fan. I used to see him in the bleachers at Columbia University on Saturday mornings, bickering and bantering with Paul Gardner. Gulati was also an economist and college professor, with ties to the Kraft family of football and soccer. I knew him well enough to sense he was not pleased with three-and-out.
Arena had warned us in 2002, after that quarterfinal loss to Germany, not to assume the United States had arrived as a power. Arena was right; he often was. There is some question whether coaches should serve a second term with the national team because the players grow tired of the same lectures, the same tactics, the same inflections. (“It’s a BAWL.”) Many coaches choose to make their tenure a one-time-only deal and move on to their next club gig. Arena had chosen to come back; he and Gulati would part ways a few weeks later.
* * *
There were many new and appealing teams in this World Cup, including Angola, Togo, Ivory Coast, and Ghana, plus three European squads competing for the first time since being spun off from their former amalgamations—the Czech Republic, Ukraine, and the short-lived Serbia and Montenegro. For me, the most enjoyable new team was Trinidad and Tobago.
After witnessing Paul Caligiuri’s booming goal in 1989 in Port of Spain, I had never stopped hoping that T&T would get to the World Cup. In the fall of 2005, T&T was once again close, meeting Bahrain in a special play-off, with the winner going to Germany.
A friend knew some Trinidadians who would be watching in an apartment in Brooklyn, and we wangled an invitation. A few days ahead, I called Caligiuri, now coaching at Cal Poly Pomona, and asked if he would say hello to some fans in Brooklyn. Caligiuri said he, too, had been rooting for T&T ever since that sunny afternoon in 1989.
Eight World Cups Page 21