Soccer Against the Enemy

by Simon Kuper

  He stood in a great African tradition. Every team on the continent has its nickname: Cameroon is the Indomitable Lions, Botswana the Zebras, Nigeria the Super Eagles, the Kaizer Chiefs the Amakhosi, or the Phefeni Glamour Boys, and the Fairway Stars the Ya Wla Koto, a battle cry meaning, “The knobkerrie has fallen on the opponent’s head.”

  South African players are known by their nicknames too: in black South Africa, as in Latin America, you become a real person only when you get a nickname. The Bafana Bafana that day included John “Shoes” Moshoeu, Fani “Saddam” Madida and Theophilius “Doctor” Khumalo. With a name like Theophilius, a nickname was pure necessity for Doctor, and Madida could be pleased with “Saddam” too: he had gained the nickname when he began to shatter defenses at the time of the Gulf War. He had since moved to Besiktas in Turkey, and heaven knew what they made of the tag there. Decades before, there had been a number of “Herr Hitler’s on the South African pitches. “Jimmy Greaves” is a simple nickname to explain, but there must have been reasons for monikers like “Bob is a shilling,” “Haleluya Sezeni,” “Teachers” Meeting,” and “Brrrr . . .” One unfortunate was known as “Baboon Shepherd,” while “Hurry-hurry” Johanneson went to Leeds United and got himself picked for England, though one doubts that his nickname survived the move. Gary Bailey was “Sunshine” in South Africa but never in Manchester. Patrick “Terror” Lekota is a senior ANC politician, but is still known by the nickname he acquired as a player. Some players hate having nicknames. Walking into bars to shouts of, “Hey, Baboon Shepherd!,” they feel they have lost some of their privacy. Pelé always used to say he was two men: Pelé as a public figure, Edson as a private person.

  The National Stadium looked full of South Africans. It was hard to tell, since many Botswanans routinely go about in Kaizer Chiefs shirts. Certainly all the banners were for the Bafana Bafana, I saw as I walked around the athletics track. “Hey, white man! What are you doing here where you have no business of being?” one fan asked me. Thabo Mbeki was introduced to the teams, and the tiny man reached up and clasped each player’s hand in a matey shake. Palacios’ son sat beside his father on the South African bench. It was the Peruvian’s first game in charge and he had vowed to teach the Bafana some discipline.

  Maybe he had, but South Africa still played like a grotesque parody of Brazil: backheels, double and triple feints, all without point. Shoes tried to flick the ball over his head with his heel, failed, and was cheered by the crowd; but the worst offender was Doctor. After failing to walk a cross from Madida into the net, he turned and gave the stadium a massive grin. Later, he flicked the ball up and balanced it on his toe, showed it to a Botswanan defender and was rushed off his feet; then, as Botswana went off with the ball, he walked to the touch-line and asked the bench for water. Perhaps it was his good luck that Ron Atkinson had decided against bringing him to the Midlands, and the Zimbabwean team had rechristened him “Nurse,” but the South African fans loved him. Roy Wegerle (who says he learned his tricks in South Africa) is a computer by comparison. Yet the joke was on the Gradgrinds as the Bafana won 2-0, the second goal stemming from an overhead volley from Doctor that set up a four-man move.

  FNB Stadium, between Johannesburg and Soweto. In the 1950s, Essop Pahad had told me, when the South African team was all-white, two stands at every international match were reserved for non-whites. “They would be crammed full,” Pahad reminisced, “with everyone supporting the visiting team. I can only recall one foolish Indian fellow supporting South Africa, only one foolish fellow, and he was always in trouble.”

  Before South Africa played Nigeria, the drums were going, the fans were toy-toying, and the Sowetan’s T-shirts were commanding, “Don’t just stand There—Build the Nation!” On the field, Nigeria’s Dutch manager Clemens Westerhof was gazing at the stands with Willem, my photographer and his compatriot. “There aren’t many grounds as good as this in Europe,” Westerhof assured him. Few all-seater stadium for 75,000 in Britain, certainly. Bhamjee could be proud in prison, though the NSL had never paid for the FNB Stadium and its construction had never been completed.

  The crowd that day was 60,000. The pressbox was full to bursting. Those at the front could not see unless they stood up, and we at the back could not see if they did, so there were loud disputes. I was sitting at a desk marked “Foreign Correspondence,” and my neighbor’s place was designated “Sappa,” an allusion to the South African Press Association, SAPA. The SAPA reporter had to file reports during the match: he wrote about six during the 90 minutes, and saw little of the game. I had to jolt his arm whenever there was a scoring chance, and I bear that in mind now when I read agency match reports.

  Nigeria scored a psychological goal when the teams lined up for the anthems: every Super Eagle was eight feet tall. That made the psychological score 3-0, for they had whacked the Bafana in Lagos, and almost all of them played for European clubs. One Super Eagle was Swansea City’s Reuben Agboola, which begged the question why a member of one of Africa’s best teams could do no better.

  It came as no surprise whatsoever when minutes after the kickoff, a particularly tall Super Eagle intercepted a South African backpass and rammed the ball into the net. It was more surprising when the referee disallowed the goal for offside, for presumably he knew that there can be no offside from a backpass. The Bafana Bafana made halftime with the official score still 0-0. At halftime, Mark gave interviews on the pitch to black radio reporters. They all knew as much about soccer as he did, but they were black men and not confident enough to give their own views.

  Early in the second half, George Dearnaley tapped a low cross into the net and the nation stood on its head. In the pressbox, the South Africans, black and white, leapt skywards, and the big white striker from Natal celebrated with 10,000 blacks in the stand behind the goal. Then the Botswanan in black gave a free kick for offside, and we were back in the Old South Africa.

  The match ended scoreless, South Africa were out of the World Cup, and the nonstop drummers went home with headaches. But Westerhof (who had been predicting a Nigerian walkover) said, “All praise to South Africa,” and Palacios told me, “For the next World Cup, I think we will be ready.”

  In the parking lot, with Perlman, I watched the two best South African players, Steve Crowley and Shoes, fight their way to their cars. I mentioned to Perlman how much at ease Crowley looked: he teased the fans and they him, and he knew the right clasps for their handshakes. It was the only place in South Africa where I had seen people forget their skin colors, I said. Perlman got angry again.

  “That’s the classic foreign correspondent’s story on South African soccer! Look, when the crowd cheered Dearnaley they weren’t even aware that he was white and they were black. South African soccer is past that kind of thing. There are other stories you should be writing!”

  On the plane back to England I met a man I had already met in Cape Town. He was a white South African who supported Arsenal, perhaps because he had not seen them play since the 1970s. We arranged to go together to watch Arsenal play Leeds in the FA Cup later that week. It was a freezing night, and we stood at the Clock End. I saw almost nothing of the pitch, and nothing at all of the goal directly in front of us. Unfortunately all four goals were scored there. Leeds overran Arsenal in the first half, thanks to Gordon Strachan. “That Strachan. Dunno what they feed him on,” said the man next to us, and he shouted at the Arsenal defense: “Go on, tackle him! What are you, the Gordon Strachan Appreciation Society?” David Hillier, the crowd’s least favorite Gunner, made his umpteenth clumsy challenge and was booked. “Send him off, ref!” shouted one fan. “Ban him for life!” advised another. “Or longer if possible!” added a third. The game ended in a 2-2 draw. The soccer was dreadful, but five months later Arsenal had won the FA Cup.

  CHAPTER 15

  SHORT, DARK, AMERICANS

  THERE IS PROBABLY ONLY one city in the world where a friendly game between El Salvador and Denmark can draw 30,000-odd fans, and that city i
s not San Salvador, certainly not Copenhagen, but Los Angeles. On my way to the L.A. Coliseum I quite forgot I was in the United States. All the fans on the streets were small and dark, and few of the program sellers and beggars looked Danish either. No one was waving gimmicky team symbols, all the fans were men, and the only food on sale seemed to be unhygienic burgers. It was all most un-American.

  A Boston Herald columnist was the first person to see through the 1994 World Cup. Nix soccer festival or commercial bonanza, he wrote: the World Cup was a scam set up by the immigration department. Get all the illegal aliens into one stadium and swoop, was the idea. I sat in the Coliseum among what looked to be 30,000 Salvadorians, and if the organizers reported only 15,000 that may have been because they had to pay the Coliseum owners a share of gate receipts.

  Down below, I saw a man I had last seen in Latvia: Möller-Nielsen was exercising the Danish substitutes. Less than three weeks after the El Salvador game, both he and I arrived in Argentina (Denmark were playing there), so that in five months we were in the same place three times. We coincided in three different continents.

  The Salvadorian crowd was happy. It cheered the fireworks it threw, the fan who was being led away, and the two policemen who were leading him. It stayed happy even as the small, mediocre Salvadorian side lost 2-0 to the big, mediocre Danes. In the final minutes, it succumbed to nostalgia for the civil war of yore, and stopped throwing fireworks onto the pitch and began to throw them into the stands instead. It chuckled at the explosions, but more and more people made for the exits, and when a bottle broke on the empty seat beside me I left too. The next morning at breakfast, the Los Angeles Times, in a 12-page sports section, carried not a word about the match. I was back in the United States.

  “For me much easier to work here,” the USA’s coach, Bora Milutinovic, admitted to me later. “Here, you open the newspaper, not is soccer. Mexico every day you have something, something true, something the people write. Also this is Mexico.” Milutinovic is a Serb who came to the States after two decades in Latin America.

  Ana is a nanny from El Salvador. Leaving America again, I visited her family in South-Central L.A., where the L.A. riots took place. In the living room were a few cousins, Ana herself, her baby Diego, sleeping in a cot in the corner, and her husband, Hember, a soccer freak. Hember showed me Diego and explained: “Maradona is the best guy in the world for soccer. When Diego is two years older, I think I go to the park to find a team for him. When we see anything soccer on TV, I put him in front.” Hember only watches the local Hispanic channel, which constantly shows Mexican league matches. But he had gone to the Coliseum for El Salvador vs. Denmark: “Denmark team had a lot of big people, hey?” I asked whether fireworks were common practice at matches in El Salvador. “In my country, they take you to jail.”

  He played himself, for a Sunday team—like going to church, he said. Were all the players in his team from Latin America? “All the players in my team are from Nueva Guadaloupe in El Salvador.” In his league there were also black teams from Jamaica and Belize, and even a couple of black American teams. “When I came here, American people did not like soccer. But now American people are starting to like.” Not all of them, though. Sometimes his team went to Rancho Park and found a softball game going on—Hember made as if to shield himself from flying balls. “They don’t like, we don’t like, they call the police, and they are Americans, so we have to go.” But he liked to see the U.S. win, unless they were playing El Salvador. The United States’ best player was Hugo Pérez, he thought. Pérez is from El Salvador.

  The talk made Hember homesick, and he played me a promotional videotape of El Salvador. It appeared to show men kicking one another under water. “You see,” he said. “Even on the beach, they play soccer.”

  When immigrants from Europe landed in the U.S., their children were teased on the street for their funny accents, clothes, and parents. The last thing these children were going to do was play a funny European game on the streets and be teased again, so they took up baseball. That is why Americans don’t play soccer.

  When we say that Americans don’t play soccer, or that they celebrate Thanksgiving or come to Europe in tour groups, we are thinking of the big white people who live in American suburbs. Tens of millions of Hispanic Americans do play and watch and read about soccer. Yet even white suburban America plays soccer, in its way. I used to play soccer in America. I was ten when my family moved for a year to Stanford, a sunny Californian university town where all the boys and girls play soccer. Richer Americans tend to. Missionaries are trying to spread the word, but for the moment ghetto kids take the view that soccer is for softies.

  Most of the coaches in Stanford had never played, so they took ideas from the sports they knew. One coach, when his team won a corner, would bellow code names like “Eagle!” or “Spiral!” at the child trying to lift the ball through the air as far as the goalposts. Another coach, when his team was in attack, would place his two fullbacks exactly on the corners of the penalty box, and position his center-back in the semi-circle in front of the area. There they would stand, their hands folded behind their backs, until play returned to their half of the pitch. Then there was the right half who had orders to pass every ball he got five yards to his left. The theory was that the team’s right back, overlapping, would get the ball straight into his feet. The ploy seldom worked.

  Few of the children I knew minded much. They played soccer as European kids might play the oboe: because their parents thought it was good for them. It was fun too, sure, but nothing to get excited over. There were few good players. “OK, you have 15 million Americans playing the game, but for most of them it’s just one form of recreation among many,” Lynn Berling-Manuel, editor of Soccer America, admitted to me. “After Pelé, who hasn’t played for a decade, most American soccer players can’t name a single professional.” None of my friends in Stanford ever watched soccer, even though George Best was playing for the local team, the San Jose Earthquakes. Someone must have gone to watch, however, for those were the days when it seemed that soccer had landed in America. The North American Soccer League drew large crowds, come to watch ancient Europeans finish their careers. “An elephant’s grave-yard,” Gianni Rivera called the NASL, but what elephants! I remember, in 1981, seeing the Earthquakes play the New York Cosmos in a match that featured Best, Franz Beckenbauer, and Johan Neeskens. Months later, when we were watching the Earthquakes indoors, Best ran at a defender, trod on the ball, making it shoot over the man’s head, and jogged round him to collect it. Of course he did nothing else all match.

  Lawrie Calloway played for teams like Wolves, Blackburn, Shrewsbury, and Rochdale in England before coming to America in 1974, where his clubs included the Earthquakes. I do not remember him there. “We definitely became celebrities,” he told me, in an accent that was a mix of Birmingham and California. “Coming from the English second division, which is where I spent most of my time, when all the attention went to the George Bests, the Charlie Georges, the Bobby Moores, to come here and have profiles written about you, to be on TV—it was very gratifying for me.” As a journalist, I was touched.

  But the NASL folded in 1985. The men who ran it tried to found too many clubs too soon, and they knew too little about soccer. “I only realized late on that about 100,000 people can pass themselves off as Polish internationals,” the late Howard Samuels, chairman of the American League, confessed. The fans were no experts either. Calloway told me: “They cheered the cheerleaders, and when a guy booted it 60 yards or headed it 30 yards everyone was on their feet. The story I tell is that at San Jose we had a cheer-leader named Crazy George, who became quite a celebrity, and who made the Guinness Book of Records for the longest cheer ever. He had the one side of the stadium shouting ‘Earth’ and the other ‘Quakes,’ and kept this going for thirteen and a half minutes—during which time the other team scored a goal.”

  Now Calloway is coach of the San Francisco Bay Blackhawks, and when we spoke they were tryi
ng to join the Mexican league. “It’s a long shot,” he confided. A very long shot, surely? “It’s the same as Cardiff playing in the English league. Nothing’s impossible.” Even so, he admitted, the Blackhawks were praying for a new American pro league: “We don’t really want to play in the Mexican league for the rest of our lives.” San Francisco lies 475 miles to the northwest of the northwestern tip of Mexico.

  Peter Bridgewater, another Englishman in California, is in charge of Stanford’s World Cup. He is an angry man. I put it to him that while Rio, Rome, and Barcelona were natural World Cup sites, Stanford, California, was not. “Mr. Kuper, where do you live in England? In London?! Highbury is a small town, Wembley is an even smaller town! Is Wembley a good place to have soccer?” And which teams did he hope would play in Stanford? “England!” But to tell it like it is, Stanford is like Leamington Spa.

  Americans never found out that soccer is a man’s game. Growing up in England and Holland, I had never suspected that girls could play soccer, but they did in Stanford. On our school playground we had kickarounds in which the whole year joined in. There are four-year-old girls in the United States playing league soccer, and nearly half the soccer players in the country are women.

  I asked Lynn Berling-Manuel, female editor of the nation’s largest soccer magazine (“I must say that I get a tremendous amount of mail addressed to Mr. Lynn Berling-Manuel”) why America was different from the rest of the world. The key, she said, was that American women had come to soccer at the same time as American men. Unlike European women, they never felt like outsiders to the game.