by Simon Kuper
How had she herself come to soccer? “My dad had never been to a soccer game in his life. I’m the oldest of six children, and with six kids you can’t afford to go anywhere. So in 1967, our local soccer team, the Oakland Clippers, were offering a very cheap family package. For something like $20 you could take everyone and park the car, and Dad, being the big spender he was, thought this was just the thing. And so all my family became soccer fans, to some degree. I think this was a very common experience.” The NASL tried to sell soccer to families, and it got women. “It was a unique marketing direction that other sports didn’t have. At first they marketed soccer as a macho bang-’em-up, crash-’em-up game, and had a very tough time selling it. People came to the stadiums and said, ‘This sure isn’t NFL.’ ” The upshot was that in 1991 in China the U.S. won the first ever women’s World Cup.
I had spoken to Calloway, Bridgwater, and Berling-Manuel over the phone. There are telephones all over the world, but Americans are the only people I found who use them to give frank interviews to people they have never met. After tramping the streets of Europe and Africa, I spent most of my days in L.A. in bed, on the phone. I reached April Heinrichs, the American captain who lifted the trophy in Beijing, at the University of Maryland. It is at colleges like this that the best women’s soccer in the country is played. Heinrichs told me: “I’m a full-time women’s coach here, That’s my job, That’s what I am, and I have a full-time assistant coach and a budget of over $80,000.” I told her about the British TV series The Manageress: a soap about a woman who manages a male professional team, and who gains respect after a long struggle against sexism. Did Heinrichs identify with the struggle? “Absolutely not. I’m 29 years old. I belong to the first generation of female athletes in this country to be accepted. If you talk to women 10 or 15 years older than me, they have scars from their experiences.” That dated acceptance to the early days of American feminism. Could the feminist movement take credit for America winning the World Cup? “Well . . .” said Heinrichs. I apologized: “Of course you still have to play well and score goals.” “Apart from that,” she replied, “absolutely, yes.”
Had she played against England? “Yes. I get a sense that though it’s a small country they have some really good players. I can’t figure it: they don’t train hard, they don’t get together very often, and they don’t take good care of themselves. I can only explain it because they have what we haven’t got: every weekend they have some of the best men’s soccer in the world on TV.”
Did she agree that soccer in the U.S., and perhaps particularly women’s soccer, was a middle class sport? “No.” No? “No, I would say it was an upper middle-class sport. Unfortunately.” Then she added: “But I’m quite pleased with that.” Why? “I think it’s important that education is stressed in this world.”
Almost all the American players at the 1950 World Cup came from St Louis, Missouri. St Louis did have something distantly resembling a soccer culture, but the real reason for the lack of balance was that the American FA was based in the city and was too poor to scout around. As we know, the 1950 Americans beat England 1-0, but when they flew home it was in two separate planes, to save money. Their welcoming committee consisted of a player’s wife, come to scold her husband for being back late.
A day after El Salvador vs. Denmark, I found the present American squad in a hotel overlooking the Pacific in Santa Barbara. The Red Lion hotel was far too expensive for me, so I found a room a couple of miles around the corner, in a hotel that was only somewhat too expensive. I walked to the Red Lion along the beachfront, where a few Hispanics were kicking a ball around. A small, subtropical campus town on the Pacific, whose inhabitants include Ronald Reagan, Santa Barbara looked far too nice to go wild over a soccer match.
I reached the Red Lion a full hour late for my appointment with Dean Linke, the American press chief. His deputy met me in the lobby. Dean was extremely sorry that he could not receive me in person; he had had to go to a soccer clinic; meanwhile, he hoped that this press pack would be of use—and the deputy gave me a file of documents as thick as a largish encyclopaedia. I knew the Brazilians said that playing the World Cup in the U.S. was like playing the baseball World Series in Brazil; I knew that American outdoor soccer had been run by a man who thought it a poor alternative to the indoor game; and Americans do go hunting for burgers when the referee gives a corner kick; but at that moment I thought they deserved the World Cup. The deputy even agreed with my judgment of Santa Barbara. “You’d sit in that stadium on the ocean, watching the match with maybe 300 other people, and if the game was bad you’d find yourself looking over the fence at the shore, at all the people sailing and lying on the sand.” The local pro team had long since gone bankrupt.
Linke being away, I decided to meet the Rumanians first. They were also staying in the Red Lion, and I tracked down their handler, Julian Stanculescu, a chummy babyfaced Rumanian who lives in Chicago. On the floor of his room was a bag of soccer balls, used only hours before by real international soccer players, and while Julian talked I took a ball out and rolled it beneath my feet. Julian was pressing on me what looked like the brochure of a religious sect, and which had on its cover the photographs of two men who both looked like Julian except that one wore a beard. It turned out that the brochure described the aims of the American Soccer Academy, and that only one of the men was Julian (vice president). The bearded one was his father, Dr. Victor I. Stanculescu (president). Julian established their bona fides by assuring me that he and Dr. Victor were good friends of Bobby Robson’s.
I juggled the ball and Julian recounted substandard dirty jokes until two caterers came to ask what the Rumanians wanted for breakfast. The glamour of it all! What did the stars eat for breakfast? The Rumanians wanted omelettes and maybe cereal, except their doctor, who asked for a Bucharest dish of ham and eggs. The main thing, Julian emphasized, was that the drinking water must be in sealed bottles. The team had just flown in from South America, where several players had fallen ill from drinking unsealed water, and they were taking no more risks.
Then Julian took me to find the Rumanian coach, Cornel Dinu. Dinu was eating his dinner, and snapped at Julian without even turning round. I waited in the lobby for an hour and watched American and Rumanian internationals loaf about. One Rumanian, who looked to be still in his teens, and who, to judge from his rural haircut, had yet to make it big, sat alone on the sofa opposite me. I pitied him. Presumably he was an idol in Rumania, as big an idol, say, as Andy Sinton is in England, and Rumania after all is a decent soccer country, but here in Santa Barbara he was alone, and in some ways even lower on the social scale than me. At least I spoke the language and knew a couple of Soccer America writers, whereas he probably played for a small club and was a newcomer to the national side. I bet he wanted to go home.
Julian reappeared and said that Dinu was sorry and would speak to me now. By then it was already very late. I waited another hour. Journalists spend a lot of time waiting. Then Dinu appeared in the lobby, a tall man with a permanent rash on his face. He sat on the sofa and looked away from me. “This guy’s a legend in Rumania,” Julian, who was interpreting, assured me. Dinu had won 75 caps as a player, and after the fall of Ceaucescu had become minister of sport, a post from which he had since resigned to become manager of the national team. I asked him why he had done so. “Between politics and soccer, I chose soccer,” he mumbled. He knew that life in the cabinet would have been more relaxed, but “stress is part of our life.”
How was Rumanian soccer doing? He complained about brainless club directors. Gates had fallen too. “Before, soccer was the bread of everyone. Now people have other concerns.” It was a soccer man’s yearning for the good old days of Ceaucescu.
I asked about the trip through South America, and he frowned even more. “It was arranged by an agent who made all the arrangements to suit himself,” he said. Rumania had flown endlessly, from Argentina to Paraguay, Ecuador, and Peru. “Once, we arrived a couple of hours befor
e the match, after traveling for days. On our way to Los Angeles, we were flying in a plane that was headed for Los Angeles, but when we landed at Mexico City we had to get out and wait for the next flight!” Nothing of the sort ever happened in Rumania.
The next morning I went to watch the Americans train at a local college. I got there before them and waited with nervous students and a very nervous college coach, all armed with oranges. I was given one.
The Americans arrived and practiced. When practice ended, a few of them, including Milutinovic, the coach, mucked around in front of one goal, and let me retrieve the balls for them. I discovered that professional soccer players kick hard, and when I tried to catch a banana free kick from Milutinovic it spun straight out of my hands. I hoped he wasn’t looking. Afterwards I asked Peter Vermes, a striker, how far the U.S. could go at the World Cup. He admitted: “I’d be kidding myself and you if I didn’t say it: for me, I’d like to win the World Cup.”
Back at the Red Lion, Milutinovic sprawled on a sofa in the lobby, my tape recorder under his nose and the American press at his feet on the floor. He has two nicknames: The Miracle Worker and Bora Ball. Unlike some miracle workers and most England managers, he is a funny man. He even likes journalists. Duncan Irving, an Englishman at Soccer America, told me of his first handshake with Milutinovic. Duncan gripped hard. Milutinovic gripped harder. Duncan gripped harder, Milutinovic gripped harder, and Duncan gripped harder. “Aha!” said Milutinovic. “Mafia!” He was no Dinu, and Graham Taylor might even still be England manager if he had sacked his PR man and hired the Serb.
Milutinovic had played in Yugoslavia, France, Switzerland and Mexico, and had managed Mexico and Costa Rica at the past two World Cups—it was under him that Costa Rica had beaten Scotland in Genoa in 1990. He talked to us about Latin American passion. “Pasión,” he said in Spanish. “Passion! You’re not passionate,” he told the press. Had he seen any passion growing among Americans yet? “This is the problem with these people: they don’t have a problem.” He meant that Americans were insufficiently torn to be passionate. A game of American football lasted three or four hours, and fans went off to eat, to go to the toilet. “But the people like this,” he marvelled, “this is America. Por example, also, if you see this city of Santa Barbara, this hotel . . .” and he tailed off. “This is America, you understand? America is unique country in the world, we have everything.”
I asked him whether it was a good time to be Serbian. “Why not? You know what, there’s a problem, the English people is very proud to be English, I’m very proud to be Serbian. It’s no good, but what we going to do?” And he added: “Maybe you from Zagreb?” I issued a hasty denial. “Was a joke!” he said just as quickly. He looked away from us for the first time, and I regretted the silly question. “My family is on the border with Bosnia,” he continued. “Maybe a hundred yards. From here to ocean,” he pointed out of the window. He changed the subject: “I’m very happy with the players. I speak Spanish, nobody understands me, I think people understand me, everyone is happy.” How many languages did he speak? “I speak Spanish, Serbian, French, Italian, I understand Russian, Bulgarian is not a language and I try to speak English. I think four. English, if I’m hungry I ask to eat. Four.” When we asked about players he answered with jokes.
The conference broke up, and Tony Meola, the American goalkeeper, came looking for me. Linke had sent him, he said. We sat down on Milutinovic’s sofa, both of us 23, and he the star, and he told me what had made an American boy dream of playing in goal for the United States. Meola’s father, Vincente, once a reserve with Avellino, had come to America to be a barber, and had landed up in Kearny, New Jersey. Kearny is not your average American small town. It is inhabited mostly by Irish and Scots families who came across in the 1920s, their passages paid, to work in the cotton mills, and they have clung to soccer. “All the dads of my teammates grew up somewhere in the U.K.,” Meola told me. Also, as luck would have it, Kearny lies just three miles from Giants Stadium, and while Meola and I were growing up, in the great days of the NASL, the New York Cosmos was drawing 80,000 at Giants Stadium, and the New York Giants, the American NFL team, were only getting 30,000. Though Kearny has just 38,000 inhabitants, it has produced three members of the present U.S. squad: Meola, Tab Ramos and Derby County’s John Harkes. Meola and Harkes had played together for nearly 20 years, and Harkes’ father had coached them.
It was not an all-American story, but it was one that many of the American players could tell. Linke’s magnificent press pack told me that Hugo Pérez’s father, grandfather and cousin had all played professional soccer in El Salvador; that Peter Vermes’ father had been a pro in Hungary, Marcelo Balboa’s in Argentina and Tab Ramos’ in Uruguay. By contrast, Kasey Keller’s father had been a softball pitcher, Eric Wynalda’s an American football player at Princeton University, Bruce Murray’s a golf pro, Chris Sullivan’s a boxer and Chris Henderson’s a semiprofessional baseball player.
Then there were players who had become Americans: Fernando Clavijo, a pro from Uruguay; Janusz Michallik, who had left Poland at 16, the son of a Polish international; Jean Harbour, who had come to the States to study biochemistry, son of a Nigerian international; Brian Quinn, a Gaelic football and hurling star from Belfast, who together with his wife had become an American citizen in a halftime ceremony at an indoor match; and the Pretorian Roy Wegerle, who got an American passport because he married Marie Gargallo of Miami. (The Midlands must be a nasty cold shock to both of them.) Two other players, Thomas Dooley (born in Germany) and Earnie Stewart (in Holland), are the offspring of European mothers and GI fathers. Dooley barely speaks English, but as he told Sports Illustrated, he has driven an American car for years. “That is not normal in Germany,” he said. No, but it is normal in Germany to express your identity through your car. No doubt there should have been more Hispanics in the team, but Milutinovic could not send scouts to every Mexican semipro league in the country.
Next, a man from Sports Illustrated and I interviewed Eric Wynalda, who played for Saarbrücken in the Bundesliga, and who drove, I could not but notice, a car with the license plate “WYNALDA.” Blond and tanned, he looked like everyone’s idea of a Californian beachboy. This was accurate: he was a local, and had been shown surfing on German TV. “If he play soccer how he surfs,” Milutinovic confided, “we’re going to be world winners.” Milutinovic and Wynalda liked practising their German on each other, and it was Milutinovic who insisted that Wynalda take his interviewers to the bar and treat us to drinks. We took the chance to ask the coach what he thought of Rumania. “Fuck Rumania! My problem is not to see if we win. My problem is to see if we make progress.” Wynalda signed the tab in Milutinovic’s name, and wrote on a generous tip.
He told us that he had been pushed into soccer by his father, Dave. Dave Wynalda is the son of Dutch parents, and he spent the World Cups of the 1970s jumping up and down in front of the TV. He called soccer “a thinking man’s sport,” though the way his son played it that was not always true. Eric Wynalda had been sent off against Czechoslovakia in the 1990 World Cup, and apparently Milutinovic had told him: “You need discipline, and the best place to learn discipline is Germany.”
When we spoke, in the February of his first season in the Bundesliga, “the Big Mac on the Ball” (Die Welt’s phrase) was the third-highest scorer in the league. He had just sold 3,000 T-shirts of himself to FC Saarbrücken, his brother Brandt had come to Europe to work as his agent, and now Sports Illustrated was following him around. He returned to Germany after the Rumanian match, and as far as I know did not score another goal all season.
The man from Sports Illustrated asked him why soccer had failed to take off in the U.S. “You ask any of those U.S. Soccer Federation executives,” Wynalda replied. “Any time they bid to buy time for soccer on TV, baseball, soccer or tennis buy them out for that time. That’s the hot dog sports as I like to call them—meaning that you sit on your ass and eat hot dogs. Those guys see what’s going on in
Europe with soccer, and they all sit around in their smoky rooms and say, ‘What can we do to stop that happening here?’ What killed soccer last year was the rise of beach volleyball!”
“In Europe,” he claimed, “the fans stand the whole time and they don’t care, and they wave flags and they chant and they sing. At halftime everyone eats, and they go back into the stands. In Europe fandom goes much deeper than in America. When Brazil lost, people were jumping off buildings. I don’t think anyone jumped off a building when Buffalo lost the Super Bowl.”
He spoke to us some more on the morning of the Rumania match—Milutinovic led a relaxed camp—and when he went off to play, the Sports Illustrated man and I debated whether the English fans would fight at the World Cup. I said that if they so much as showed their faces in downtown Washington or L.A., let alone went about chucking stones, it would be the last we would hear of them, ever. Sadly, my prediction was never to be tested.
As Milutinovic had warned us, the people of Santa Barbara had no problem. In recent weeks I had seen South Africa vs. Nigeria, Arsenal vs. Leeds and El Salvador vs. Denmark. USA vs. Rumania was a lot quieter. In front of me in the stand was a family in deckchairs, and before kickoff the crowd politely applauded the four Rumanian fans who lapped the pitch carrying their national flag. This, plainly, was pasión. Among the spectators were many women and small children. It was a long way from Bucharest.
The game began, the USA scored almost immediately, and throughout the first half fans kept wandering into the stadium. Rumania’s fantastic No. 8, Ilie Dumitrescu, made it 1-1. All through the second half, with scores still tied, fans strolled out again.
