Eight World Cups

by George Vecsey

  Club officials gave me their best Italianate shrug. What can you do? I went home to write my article, about the difficulty I had marking Maradona. On April 29, Naples clinched the league championship on a goal set up by an exquisite, lofting free kick by Maradona.

  Then he and his Argentina squad prepared for the World Cup in Italy, with some of their matches scheduled in Naples.

  * * *

  Heading into my third World Cup, I was starting to get a glimmer of a sport millions of fans know from birth. People would tell me about some hero or incident from the past and realize I had no clue.

  As New York baseball fans in the 1950s, my friends and I debated the merits of Willie Mays vs. Mickey Mantle vs. Duke Snider and tried to compare them to Ty Cobb or Wee Willie Keeler, who played in different eras.

  For a soccer equivalent, I called the Professor.

  “Every four years is another era,” said Julio Mazzei, the former coach of the Cosmos, the friend of Pelé, who was always available for a private seminar on his sport, sometimes long-distance from Brazil. The Professor proudly believed that the one-touch beauty of the sport sprang from his homeland, from jogo bonito, the beautiful game. Old TV clips show Brazilian players in rudimentary gear booting mud-caked leather balls, apparently having the space to perform their art.

  Because of my Hungarian surname, I became aware of Ferenc Puskás, with the thickest set of thighs in the history of humankind. People talked about the way Hungary had been the favorite for the 1954 World Cup, but Puskás was hacked so viciously in an early 8–3 victory over West Germany that he suffered a hairline fracture of his ankle. In the final, Puskás amazingly scored a goal on his cracked ankle, but the West Germans rallied from two goals down to win 3–2.

  The Hungarians were legends, Brazil on the Danube, eight or nine of them swarming downfield, beating England, 6–3, at Wembley. The English could not believe it and came back for more, and Hungary won, 7–1. That first victory is memorialized by the 6–3 wine bar, still operative in Budapest.

  In our long-distance chat, the Professor told me how teams had changed defensive formations to cope with teams like Hungary and Brazil. My high school had played with two defenders, five midfielders, and three forwards, a 2-5-3 lineup that may have helped all those opposing forwards to swarm past me. World-level teams had begun playing 4-4-2 or 4-3-2-1 or 3-5-2 to cope with Puskás or Pelé.

  “For the next ten years, even in Brazil, when they looked at the kids, they didn’t want the skinny ones, the artistic ones, anymore,” the Professor told me.

  The full-speed-ahead concept of the Hungarians morphed into the “Total Football” that Rinus Michels of Ajax Amsterdam expanded into the Dutch soul. Michels used to say he expected all ten of his field players to be able to play interchangeably, to move forward. But West Germany beat the Dutch in 1974, and Argentina beat them in 1978. Then Michels, the coach, moved to Barcelona, followed by Johan Cruyff, the star player, and the concept of Total Football was integrated into another receptive culture.

  In 1982, I had been prepared for the samba dancers from Brazil, but the Italians tripped them up. The same happened in 1986, when Argentina showed it could play nice or it could score on a handball, too. The Professor was not an admirer of Maradona—the old Brazil-Argentina rivalry. He called 1986 “the Maradona Cup,” suggesting that sometimes chutzpah beat style.

  * * *

  After two previous World Cups, I had a new experience—an American team to cover. The United States knew nothing of national teams in any sport, except for the Olympic squads that popped up every four years. Now the United States was in the same position as real soccer nations. The few hard-core fans in America were debating who would make the twenty-two-player roster.

  The coach was Bob Gansler, a product of the American ethnic leagues. He took the U.S. squad for a “friendly” (an exhibition match) in Budapest in March, part of the normal World Cup process, toughening up the candidates in foreign stadiums. My colleague Michael Janofsky caught up with Gansler on a hill overlooking the Danube, and this rather stoic man opened up about his European roots.

  He was born in Hungary, and his father had been drafted and captured by the Russians during World War II. After the war, the Russians evicted all ethnic Germans to West Germany.

  “It was not like a holocaust or anything,” Gansler told Janofsky. “But we lost everything we had. I remember when they put us on a freight train. Everything was chaos. Then it took a couple of weeks for a trip that should have taken eight hours, because whenever the Russians needed an engine, they would take the one off our train and put it back a couple of days later.”

  When the family had trouble assimilating in what felt like a foreign land, Gansler’s grandfather made a trip to Milwaukee and soon sent for his family. This was how Gansler became an American, gained a degree from Marquette University, played on two Olympic teams, earned five caps with the national team. He knew that if history had been different, he could have been a farmer in south-central Hungary.

  “As I sit here, along with the river, some thoughts are floating by,” Gansler said. “You wonder what might have been had you stayed here.”

  Gansler’s reflections were touching. This is how Americans are made, with a trace of the Old World remaining. Unknown to most Americans, Gansler was charged with preparing the national squad for the World Cup in Italy.

  The American squad of 1990 sometimes seemed to be a children’s crusade, like the scene in Doctor Zhivago, when the military school sends fourteen-year-olds to die at the front. (A rather basic difference is that nobody died at that World Cup.) The American squad and the American federation had virtually no experience; everybody was doing this for the first time. The victory over England in 1950 was ancient history, although stalwarts like Walter Bahr, Frank Borghi, and Harry Keough were still around as gregarious totems to a victory nobody knew.

  The country was vast, and interest in soccer localized. One corner of industrial New Jersey was doing more than its share, with Kearny contributing Tony Meola, Tab Ramos, and John Harkes to the squad. Paul Caligiuri was back, joined by Marcelo Balboa, whose Argentine-born father had played professionally, and Eric Wynalda, a brash forward of Dutch ancestry. Bruce Murray, an American-born striker, was capable of converting up front. As a Queens guy, I was thrilled to see Mike Windischmann, born in West Germany but raised in the German American community of Glendale.

  As in real soccer nations, there was even some controversy over the selection of the squad. One of the most versatile offensive players in the U.S. pool was Hugo Pérez, born in El Salvador with a father and grandfather who had played at a high level. After moving to the United States, Pérez played in the closing months of the North American Soccer League and then dominated the indoor game in San Diego. Now an American citizen, Pérez had a great scoring touch, but injuries and work-visa issues in Europe kept him from playing enough outdoor games to show Gansler he could make it up and down the field for ninety minutes.

  When Pérez was left off the final squad for Italy, some people saw this as an example that the federation did not want Latino players. To this day there is the alligator-in-the-sewers urban legend that Latino players with national-team potential are playing pickup games on weekends after working all week on gardening trucks. If that’s the case, Bob Gansler, a sharp judge of talent, would have loved to have gotten their names and addresses, along with videos of their matches.

  The U.S. team traveled to Switzerland for an exhibition, staying in the tiny mountain town of Bad Ragaz, home of thermal baths. “To say that it is quiet around here almost disturbs the calm,” Janofsky reported. “Church bells ring at the appropriate times. Horses pulling wagons of tourists neigh now and again. Somewhere off in the distance, a dog barks and a rooster crows. But that’s about it.”

  After an unpromising friendly, the U.S. team moved to a camp west of Florence, near the Ligurian Sea. My man Janofsky thought it best if he rented a flat overlooking the picturesque shops on the
Ponte Vecchio. I can’t say I blamed him.

  It made sense to divide the territory, so I opted for a base in Rome. During my Maradona hunt in February, I had heard of an American writer willing to rent his flat for the entire World Cup while he and his companion escaped to the countryside. I committed without my wife seeing the flat and was somewhat insecure over whether she would love the old Roman building across from the Piazza Navona. When I covered the papal conclave in 1978, we had borrowed a flat at the Piazza Navona; it’s hard not to love a neighborhood where you can gaze at a Bernini statue while eating a tartufo in an outdoor café. I should not have worried. When she arrived, Marianne looked at the opera albums, the architecture books, and the kitchen with its utensils and spices and decided she would enjoy it just fine.

  We were living in the Piazza Sforza Cesarini, an ancient part of the city across from the Piazza Navona. As in many European buildings, the lights in the foyer were on a timer; when you came home at night you had to feel your way along the wall until you located the switch. The surface of the hallway was rough, pebbly—in one renovation, generations or centuries earlier, builders had used excess material dug out of the ground, including bits and pieces of ancient Roman pottery. As you groped for the light switch, you were putting your hands on shards of history.

  Our sweet Roman summer included two trattorias directly below us; the smoke from their kitchens forced us to close the windows and shutters. The waiters in one trattoria had lived in England for a while and could chat in our language; sometimes we went to the other because we liked certain specialties. It took us weeks to discover that the “English” trattoria was rightist and the other trattoria was leftist, and the operators and clientele hated each other. In Italy there are so many layers.

  Other times, Marianne went shopping in the narrow streets off Via Giulia and cooked lovely meals in the late afternoon. The media bus route conveniently began around the corner and went directly to the Olympic Stadium, with its lush gardens and statuary. In short order, I began to think of myself as a resident of Rome.

  * * *

  As the youngest of twenty-four teams in the field, with an average player age of twenty-three, the American team was not given any chance to advance beyond the first round of group play. In the first match in Florence, Czechoslovakia scored in the twenty-sixth minute, and then Mike Windischmann, the steady captain from Queens, got caught behind a Czech invader and decided he had no choice but to hack him down. FIFA had been instructing officials to call blatant fouls in the box, and the referee blew his whistle for a penalty kick. The Czechoslovaks did not squander the opportunity.

  “Two goals down and back in the locker room, we were a bit disorganized,” Gansler, said later, adding, “Michael was a bit unnerved. He knew that was a ball he should have cleared. Obviously, it weighed on his conscience.”

  In the second half, now down by three goals, Caligiuri, the hero of Port of Spain, found space on the right side and scored. But the United States lost, 5–1, and reporters began to second-guess Gansler’s strategy and personnel decisions—the normal reaction to a World Cup loss.

  “The United States Soccer Federation and Bob Gansler have prepared us,” Caligiuri insisted. “We don’t have a professional outdoor league, and that makes a coach’s job difficult,” Caligiuri added. “The United States players have a lot of potential. This is where it begins.”

  Caligiuri was typical of the college-educated American players, who were comfortable talking with reporters. Many players from other countries did not have even a high-school education and could not express themselves comfortably in public, but the Czechoslovak players were worldly in other ways: the Soviet Union had pulled out of the country only a few months before, and the players were missing the first free elections in their country since 1946, with no provision for absentee ballots. Afterward, they dedicated their victory to the newly elected president, the playwright Václav Havel.

  The United States moved down to Rome for its second match, against Italy. I wanted to write about the bonds between the two countries, so I called Tony Meola’s parents, originally from the Avellino area, who were returning to watch their son play for their adopted country. Tony heard that his grandmother was walking around the town square near Avellino, just in case anybody wanted to chat about the American keeper.

  When I reached him, Vincent Meola was laughing because a bank clerk had seen his American passport and praised him for speaking Italian so well. “Soccer was in my blood, my Italian blood,” he said. “Like football is in the blood of most American kids.” He did not mind admitting that he had tears in his eyes when his son walked onto the field against Czechoslovakia. (Tony did not tell anybody that he had not been able to sleep the night before that match.)

  “There will be so many rooting for Italy, and just a few for us,” Vincent said. “But you know what I say? I say, ‘Viva, Stati Uniti,’ and hope for the best.”

  “I find no changes,” Maria Meola said of her first trip back since their honeymoon. “I love the fig trees and the pear trees and people’s gardens. I like people saying: ‘Buon giorno. Ciao.’ In New Jersey, you walk into a store and nobody looks at you. But I love the U.S. It is my home.”

  Playing Italy in front of seventy-three thousand fans in Olympic Stadium, Gansler made three changes, which cut down on the Italian attack. Still, there was one breakdown, with Gianluca Vialli flicking a back-heel pass for Giuseppe Giannini, who had space to score.

  The match stabilized after Italy missed a penalty kick, and the Americans threatened in the seventieth minute. The players who were there, on the field, still think about it. The Americans gained a free kick from close range and discussed who was going to take it. Peter Vermes, a defender, ceded to Bruce Murray, a striker, and Vermes positioned himself at the right side of the Italian wall—just in case. Vermes had survivor genes. His parents had escaped Hungary in the rebellion of 1956, settling in New Jersey, teaching their son to work hard, play hard. Murray’s shot rebounded to Vermes, who peppered a left-footed shot at a sharp angle to Walter Zenga, perhaps the best keeper in the world that year. Zenga was off balance; the ball did its best to ricochet between the maze of Zenga’s legs but was slowed down by Zenga’s rear end and slowly advanced toward the goal line, until an Italian defender cleared it, and Italy held on for a 1–0 victory. In the never-ending polemic of agony, some Italian fans and writers blamed the lack of goals on the importing of foreign scorers into Serie A, claiming that homegrown forwards did not develop as goal scorers. But the fans in Olympic Stadium did applaud the United States for a brave showing.

  Two decades later, as Vermes was inducted into the American Soccer Hall of Fame, he declined to see the Zenga play as a lost opportunity for fame. After a long playing career, he was the coach of a highly successful franchise in Kansas City. “Everyone asks, ‘If you would have scored that goal, where would you be today?’ I think it was the best thing that ever happened to me, because I’m right where I want to be now.”

  Other Americans understood what it meant to take their stand in Rome.

  “We played Italy, one of the great teams in the world, and we showed we could play a little,” said Desmond Armstrong, a defender, an English major from the University of Maryland. He admitted he had been thinking about a career change after the disaster against Czechoslovakia, but the Italy match made him reconsider.

  “I looked at my teammates; I saw Tab Ramos moving the ball, the best player on the field,” Armstrong said afterward. “Before the game, I didn’t know if there was a future in this. Now I think I could still be playing in four years when I’m twenty-nine. I see Bergomi playing, and he’s twenty-nine,” Armstrong said, referring to Giuseppe Bergomi, the smooth defender who had played in the 1982 final as an eighteen-year-old because of a teammate’s injury and was now the captain of the Azzurri.

  “The only difference between him and me is that he has a league to play in,” Armstrong said. “We’re playing for ourselves here,” he added. �
�There is definitely a selfish aspect. We want to show we have serious players. We want to show America we should keep going. We’ve got to put our players somewhere else.”

  Gansler said, “The difference between our team in the first game and the second was psychological.” He added, “Yes, the psychological drives the physical, but the difference this time was psychological.”

  The Americans went back to Florence for their third match and were thumped by Austria, 2–1. Their adventure was over, with three losses and only two goals. But they had played in the World Cup, and that was no small thing.

  * * *

  I met my first soccer hooligan in 1990. I had missed that pleasure in 1982 by virtue of being in Barcelona while the English fans were cavorting in other parts of Spain. In 1986, the Mexican organizers wisely greeted English fans with a mixture of hospitality and intimidation, so the boys mostly stayed under the radar.

  Hooligans are serious business. As Bill Buford pointed out in his classic book, Among the Thugs, these are not casual troublemakers, out for a dustup on Saturday afternoon, but rather an antisocial element with jobs and the skills to stage military-like strikes against civilians.

  England had a toxic image because of the stampede before the Juventus-Liverpool final for the European Cup in Brussels in 1985, which killed thirty-nine fans, and the panic in 1989, when nearly one hundred fans were crushed against unyielding gates in Sheffield. In 1990, Italy was taking no chances.

  When England was drawn into a group with Egypt, the Netherlands, and Ireland, all three of its matches were placed in Cagliari, on the island of Sardinia, which made it easier to control fans arriving by ferry or plane.

  For the first match against Ireland, I flew from Rome to Cagliari, and took my hooligan-watching position near the ferry landing. Hundreds of police were out, in full gear, arranging sturdy metal stanchions to keep the English confined to the street. If that treatment did not bring out antisocial tendencies, nothing would.