Eight World Cups

by George Vecsey

  At the U.S. media sessions in Trinidad, Caligiuri told reporters that he and his countrymen were facing “the biggest game of our lives.”

  In the qualifying rounds, the United States had played in Kingston, Jamaica; St. Louis; San José, Costa Rica; St. Louis again; Torrance, California; New Britain, Connecticut; Tegucigalpa, Honduras; Guatemala City; and St. Louis a third time. (Costa Rica had already qualified, and Mexico was banned this time after being caught using overage players in a youth tournament.)

  European clubs are not always happy to release players for the long trek across the ocean to play for their national teams; the United States federation had virtually no power in world soccer and sometimes had to rely on goodwill and begging to assemble its team. Caligiuri had managed to play only one qualifier in this sequence. Maybe it was to his advantage that he had toughened himself all season in that hard proving ground of the Bundesliga.

  Caligiuri’s roommate in Trinidad was Tony Meola, the new first-string goalkeeper. Twenty years old, playing for the University of Virginia and a coach named Bruce Arena, Meola was still an amateur, paid a small stipend from the federation, but he carried himself with a swagger.

  Meola was a three-sport star from the soccer hotbed of Kearny, New Jersey, just across the Hudson River from Manhattan. His father, a barber from Italy, had encouraged him to play the sport of their culture. The son had seen Pelé and the Cosmos at Giants Stadium, which held a Kearny Day once a season. At Kearny High, he played soccer in the fall, often scoring a goal or two before switching to keeper to protect the lead. At six feet, one inch, he also played center in basketball. And in baseball he moved between catcher and center field and was projected as a selection in the first few rounds of the amateur draft. But Meola sent a message to the baseball scouts: Don’t bother drafting me; I am a soccer player.

  He seemed like a familiar movie character to me—young Sinatra or young De Niro or young Travolta, playing the cocky kid from Noo Yawk. (Or, in his case, Jersey.)

  “The night before the game, Paul Caligiuri and I were in our room,” Meola said later to the press. “I was on the bed and he was laying on the floor. He says, ‘How’s this for a headline: “Caligiuri Gets Goal; Meola Gets Shutout”?’ He really did say that. I was laughing.”

  After a day around Meola, I was convinced he would not give up a goal against T&T, even if they played all week. My only question was whether the United States could score one, on the road.

  The U.S. squad had two other talented players from Kearny—Tab Ramos, born in Uruguay, and John Harkes, born in America to two Scottish immigrants. In four years, the talent level on the American squad had increased.

  * * *

  The huge crowd was unaware that Jack Warner had sold extra tickets. People were surging toward the stadium, which was no joke, since 96 people had been crushed to death and another 750 or so injured in Sheffield, England, back in April. All it took was one panic toward a closed gate and people could be killed. The American reporters did not know this as we arrived in a team caravan, but some fans were fainting and others were cursing Jack Warner. But most remained in a good mood, and did not take out their anger on the visitors, moving aside when the U.S. bus arrived.

  “We arrived in two little vans and walked right through the crowd,” Caligiuri would recall years later.

  At Azteca, experienced reporters told me, the fans would have been rocking the bus to make the players seasick. Here, people parted and smiled and wished the Americans good luck.

  The United States started the match with the late-November sun at its back, shining in the T&T keeper’s eyes. The players knew the glare would be worse for Meola in the second half. In the thirty-first minute, Tab Ramos chipped a sideways pass to Caligiuri, who was perhaps forty yards from the goal. Caligiuri deftly slid past one defender and advanced the ball to about twenty-five yards from the goal.

  Those grim practices in Germany had toughened him up. He could not afford a novice’s hesitation—“Gee, maybe I’d better not. What if Coach gets mad”—that seems to hinder American players. He let fly, with his left foot, the ball veering into the right corner, away from the keeper’s lunge.

  Looking back on the video, the shot is not a Matthäus cannonball or a David Beckham missile but more of a parabola that stunned the T&T keeper. There is no denying that Caligiuri’s shot came out of the afternoon sun, but that is part of the game, too. “We knew we needed a shot,” Caligiuri would tell reporters later. “I knew I had the space. You have to take what they give you.”

  The roommates did it: Caligiuri gave them a lead, and Meola held on during a taut second half. The United States was going to the World Cup for the first time in forty years. Many of the reporters in the press section realized the victory was also taking them to Italy, but we did not cheer, because of our professional code and also out of respect for the demoralized Trinidadians.

  Then came one of the most touching displays of sportsmanship I have ever seen. As several dozen reporters made our way through the tight crowd toward the locker-room area, the fans parted and congratulated us. Kind faces turned to us, and people said, “Nice game,” and some people shook our hands. We tried to say that we didn’t do anything; it was the players. We are neutral. We just report. Some of that was a straight-faced lie, of course, but the code forbade us from any sign of chauvinistic joy.

  Americans who have never been to a soccer match often make jokes about hooligans; they should have been there that afternoon in Port of Spain. The fans had been ripped off by their own federation head, were jammed together in dangerous circumstances, and had witnessed a goal that would haunt Trinidadians for sixteen years. Their hearts were broken, yet they treated us with respect as the Americans left in the same two flimsy vans, unmolested.

  “I’ve played in Latin America and the Caribbean, where they throw rocks at you, the military police have to stop them from rocking your bus,” Caligiuri continued. “Never, ever, did you hear people congratulate you the way people did in Trinidad. The guys started giving them paraphernalia—our shin guards, our headbands, anything. We appreciated it so much. Normally, you’d be ducking down in your seat.”

  * * *

  When confronted later over the surplus tickets, Warner offered explanations, none of them accepted by his countrymen, who knew him best. Warner felt the heat and decided to give up his post as secretary of the T&T association since quite clearly a man who could print extra tickets and endanger thousands was meant for better things. In 1990, he became president of the CONCACAF regional federation, strengthening his power within FIFA. He was a big man.

  Years later, the coach of T&T at the time, Gally Cummings, who had played for the early Cosmos, would claim that Warner had asked him not to say that the game was oversold. Cummings said he declined. “The place was packed like sardines,” he said. “If we had had an emergency, a lot of people would have died.” Soon Cummings was fired, and his coaching career was hampered in the Caribbean as long as Warner was in power.

  At the end of 1989, T&T was awarded the FIFA Fair Play Award. As far as I was concerned, the fans could have won it for the entire century.

  7

  MARKING MARADONA

  ITALY, 1990

  In the 1980s, the best league in the world materialized on my television. Through the electronic snow of the UHF antenna, I could make out the bianconeri of Juventus, the viola of Fiorentina, the rossoneri of AC Milan, every Sunday morning.

  I got to know the starters and subs on most of the teams in Italy’s Serie A, I could recognize their playing style even without seeing their numbers, and I could second-guess the coaches’ lineups the way I criticized the managers of the Mets and the Yankees.

  Sometimes I saw amazing calls go the way of Juventus or other top teams in the eighty-ninth minute—offside, fouls, penalty kicks out of nowhere. I would not understand the officiating until 2006, when the power structure of the league was implicated in an influence-peddling scandal. Back then, strange ca
lls were a Sunday-morning mystery on my wiggly television screen.

  On Monday morning, I would rush out and buy La Gazzetta dello Sport, the pink broadsheet daily sports paper, which is widely distributed in the States, with its voluminous stories and statistics and diagrams of the goals. I could not read Dante or Calvino, but with my dictionary by my side, I began to get a feel for the language of calcio—simulazione, polemiche, fuorigioco.

  I also came to understand that the highly regional nation known as Italy would unite for the national team, the Azzurri, as for nothing else. I was also getting a glimmer that powerful clubs like Juventus and AC Milan and Inter Milan were more cohesive (and possibly more talented) than the national team. The rivalries in the Italian league were ancient and deep. In the late ’80s, the vast majority of players in Serie A was still Italian; players in gaudy uniforms marched onto the field like the Montagues and the Capulets colliding in the marketplace of Verona in the glorious Franco Zeffirelli film version of Romeo and Juliet. The intra-city intrigue known as il derby reminded me of baseball in my childhood—my Brooklyn Dodgers and those New York Giants, who used to play twenty-two times a season and remain my model for ancient resentments. But Italy’s rivalries went back centuries.

  When southern teams traveled north to play Juventus in Turin or Sampdoria in Genoa, there were signs in the stands saying, Benvenuto a l’Italia—Welcome to Italy. This was close to racism. In most of those years, Sicily did not have a team in Serie A, so the southern outsider was upstart Napoli, with its imported instigator, Diego Armando Maradona.

  Not quite thirty, he had run out of favor even in Naples, a city that values rough-cut individualists. After scoring the most notorious and perhaps the most artistic goals in World Cup history, Maradona had led Napoli to a championship—the scudetto—in 1986–87 and was on his way to a second in 1989–90, while making $3 million in salary and maybe triple that from endorsements. Sometimes he would fly to Japan in midweek to promote an account rather than practice with the team.

  In the last match of the 1988–89 season, Maradona signaled to be replaced after only seventeen minutes, and the fans jeered him. “The Entire City Is Against Him,” one Naples paper proclaimed, and Maradona asked to be transferred to another city. His manager, Guillermo Coppola—a flamboyant character in his own right—said the club was afraid to move him because the Camorra wanted him to stay in Naples due to the gambling he generated.

  After another very public affair, he decided to marry his childhood sweetheart, Claudia Villafañe, because their older daughter, Dalma, “asked me to show her our wedding album.” For the wedding in Buenos Aires, in the middle of the Italian season, Maradona stuffed himself into a tuxedo, looking like the figure atop a rococo wedding cake, and threw a reception for 1,500 of his closest friends, an orgy of bad taste in the amusement area Luna Park. The highlight of the reception, which lasted from 11:00 p.m. to 8:00 a.m., was Maradona punching a photographer in the nose. Later, there were allegations by Italian journalists that cocaine had been distributed in open bowls at the reception, but Maradona’s accountant said they were bowls of sugar set out at each table.

  * * *

  With the United States taking part in the World Cup for the first time since 1950, the New York Times ratcheted up its interest in soccer, and I was asked to write a magazine article about Maradona, who proved to be as elusive in real life as he was skittering through the English defense.

  I began by making contact with the multinational sponsors who paid fortunes for him to endorse their goods, but one sympathetic official said, “We have trouble getting him to appear for his promotions.”

  Somebody slipped me Maradona’s home phone number in Naples. I dialed the number, and in my very modest Italian I explained my mission. A male voice at the other end immediately switched to a form of Spanish. All right. I switched to my limited Spanish. The man at the other end shifted back to Italian. He seemed to understand my message—I was a New York Times reporter, looking to interview Maradona—and he professed to take my number and promised to pass it along. I did not get a call back.

  Club officials in Naples encouraged me to come over but guaranteed nothing. Maradona had already gotten away with swatting a goal with his paw, with the whole world watching; this seemed to indicate he did exactly what he wanted.

  By reading the Italian papers in New York, I began collecting examples of Maradona’s love life, his drug problems, his genius, his mood swings.

  I flew to Italy during a cold snap in February and took the train down to Naples, with the Times bureau delegating a charming office assistant named Cristina to translate for me. On Saturday evening, Cristina located a restaurant where Maradona was known to hang out, but they said they hadn’t seen him for a while.

  On Sunday morning, the hard-core soccer fans, known as Ultras or Teste Matte (Crazy Heads), were assembled outside San Paolo Stadium, wearing leather jackets displaying the Confederate flag, a telling bit of self-image for the city definitely below Italy’s Mason-Dixon Line. As I followed the other reporters toward the tribuna stampa (press box), I turned for a glimpse of the stadium, but an Italian reporter nudged me back under the overhang. Just then, a wad of wet paper towels, as big and nearly as hard as a baseball, whizzed past my head, landing with a nasty smack against the wall. Benvenuto a Napoli.

  The match was brilliant—Napoli at its peak, with Maradona working in tandem with the Brazilian forward Careca, taking turns flitting through the Roma defenses like a pair of trout gliding along a creek bottom.

  Roma took a lead in the fourth minute but suffered for its latter-day version of the Claudio Gentile defense. Stefano Pellegrini, a twenty-two-year-old defender, had told reporters during the week that “I am the man” to mark Maradona. Late in the first half, Pellegrini jostled Maradona, who took a learned flop, his body quivering in opera buffa fashion. It looked like just another yellow card to me, but the official went for Maradona’s writhing and waved a red card. Rome would have to play the last forty-six minutes down a man, not a good plan with Maradona and Careca on the loose.

  In the fifty-third minute, Maradona converted a penalty kick. In the sixty-second, Careca scored a goal. In the seventy-second minute, Napoli earned another penalty kick. Careca subtly nodded to the spot, twelve yards from the goal, and Maradona calmly iced the match.

  Afterward, Napoli held a press conference in a room near the locker room. To my delight, Maradona himself materialized, his thick curls showing a touch of gray, an earring glittering from his left lobe.

  After they lowered the microphone for him—geez, he was short—Maradona began answering questions.

  That voice sounded familiar.

  Son of a bitch. That was the voice on the other end of the phone, the guy who kept switching languages on me. Cristina said his guttural Italian, with an Argentine accent, was not bad at all.

  Asked about the two penalty kicks, Maradona said: “You have to be cool; you cannot think about anything. When I shoot a penalty kick, I never look at the ball. I look at the goalie.”

  Asked about the rumors that he would be leaving Naples, he said, “No, gentlemen, I have decided not to leave. I don’t want to move Dalmita to another city. She speaks Italian better than I do, and Claudia lives peacefully. I have a contract and I will remain in Naples.”

  He added that he wanted to break the club record for goals, saying, “I want to do something to leave my name in this city.”

  His responses were pretty tame for such a notorious figure, but at least I had a sighting, and a hearing. The more I thought about it, the more I respected the way he had goofed on me over the phone. After all, look what he had done with Peter Shilton.

  On Monday, I had interviews with Napoli’s owner and general manager, who clearly regarded Maradona as a difficult genius, worth all the aggravation as long as he won another scudetto and filled San Paolo. They asked a genial driver, Alfredo Sepe, to take me to Maradona’s villa in Posillipo, an old Greek section on a hill, with hig
h-rises and villas enjoying a stunning view of the bay.

  The driver parked in front of a modern three-story mansion, with a gigantic television dish and high fences. “Ecco, Diego Armando,” he said, pointing out a maid playing on a porch with Maradona’s younger daughter, Giannina. By now I was becoming paranoid, apparently an occupational hazard for people in the wake of Maradona. I could imagine him lurking behind shuttered windows, peeping out at the sparkling bay, or maybe at us. (In 1994, he would fire a pellet gun at reporters who had intruded on his psychic space.)

  “He sometimes takes a walk,” Sepe said, “but he cannot take his children because too many people are looking for his autograph. It is a safe neighborhood because there is a man from NATO across the street, and he always has plenty of security.”

  The driver really tried; he called the house and left a message that a reporter for the New York Times was outside. I actually think Alfredo said I was a nice guy, harmless, a foreigner. But Maradona was not stirring. Eventually, a club representative drove up and apologized that they had not been able to produce Maradona. He suggested I try the next afternoon after practice.

  On Tuesday, the players gathered for a short workout at the training base, on the edge of town. I did not spot the distinctive fireplug physique among the athletes in sweatsuits, jogging around the field.

  “Maradona does not practice today,” a friendly photographer told me. Apparently, he had a sore back. When practice was over, the coach emerged from his office, scuffing at the ground, looking more than a bit annoyed. Apparently, this was how it worked at Napoli. Diego Armando showed up when he felt like it. (At that same training base, a year or two later, a few goons infiltrated the practice field and shoved some Napoli players. Maradona told the press that management had cut a hole in the fence to allow the thugs to punish the players for their desultory performance—another glimpse into the fevered mind of Diego Armando.)