Читать книгу Hooper's Revolution - Dennie Wendt - Страница 7

PROLOGUE

The New York Giganticos professional soccer team played for friends and family in the early ’70s, on a bumpy patch of grass in a high school football stadium on Long Island. By the summer of ’76 they played in the biggest stadium in the city, a baseball stadium, on a smooth, lush green lawn. And even with their big, beloved, beautiful New York home, they were too big for any one city now, too big even for Gotham. By 1976, they had ditched their “New” and their “York” and had become only the Giganticos. Like a band.

The Giganticos, defending American All-Star Soccer Association champions, weren’t just the most famous soccer team in the world in 1976—they were the most famous men in the world in 1976. Nine of the ten best players from the 1974 World Cup had been signed by the Giganticos of the eight-year-old AASSA, as were the best players from six countries who hadn’t qualified. The Giganticos had signed Zaire’s best player and the Haitian who had scored against Italy and Argentina. Their names, said together, formed a Portuguese-Dutch-Slavic-Spanish-French-Italian-Flemish-German epic poem to the heroic and creative potential of the game. Virtually everyone in the team’s lineup was in the twilight of his career, finishing up his playing days while hanging out in the Manhattan club scene with fat paychecks, lithe European models, and minimal fitness expectations.

With their expensive, decadent, almost comical roster—a confabulation of conjurers only America could assemble—the Giganticos traversed the planet like benevolent gods, vanquishing their opponents—and what opponents: The Giganticos went to Munich and Milan and Madrid... and they won! They went to Mexico and the Middle East and Africa... and won! The Giganticos went to London... and won! In ninety-minute chunks they won in Liverpool and Leeds and Manchester and Glasgow and then...and then... they circled the pitch to adoring cheers from the defeated team’s supporters. The fans stayed and sang and cheered just to be looked upon by the magicians from Brazil and Argentina and Italy and Uruguay and Holland, always Holland—how, how, how, the Russians wanted to know—and even the best from Germany, France, Belgium... and the Giganticos even had the best Liberians and Iranians who were magicians, sorcerers, geniuses too, but had never been able to prove it through their pitiable national teams. They flocked to them in the streets, surrounded their hotels, blocked their busses. They screamed for them, cried for them, clamored just to touch them, if they only could, if they only could.

The Giganticos were owned by a free-spending Manhattan media conglomerate whose European executives knew what few residents of the United States of America knew in the bicentennial year of the republic: that football—soccer—was the world’s truest, most reliable, most incendiary, most tribal passion, and that the most beloved assemblage of humanity you could cobble together was a soccer team, a football squad—an entertaining, glamorous side that you’d love whether they were yours or not. The rich European men in Manhattan spent on the Giganticos. They spent and they spent.

In between AASSA matches against the likes of the Flamingos of Florida, the Colorado Cowhands, and the Rose City Revolution, the Giganticos hosted Europe’s finest clubs at their big and beautiful New York stadium and they jetted off to Mexico, South America, and beyond for exhibitions attended by hundreds of thousands of adoring fans. The fans never rioted, they never fought. They came to watch.

Men wept. Women screamed.

The Giganticos’ game was poetry, but it was engineering too. They built it right in front of you, assembled it for their audiences to appreciate moment by moment, minute by minute. Their goals weren’t the sudden shock that they were in the pedestrian football world; they were flourishes at the conclusions of elaborate sequences of grandeur and beauty. The Giganticos were sublime.

When the Giganticos traveled they took their own airplane, purchased for them by the European executives of the media conglomerate, and they were delivered to their matches in airbrushed tour buses worthy of Fleetwood Mac. They stepped from their coach in a dazzling array of ’70s menswear—bell-bottom trousers, the widest lapels the world had to offer, spectacular ties, scarves, cravats, ascots. Their colorful shirts bore patterns and collars you could wear only if you were the best in the world at something. Their Belgian goalkeeper wore a hat with a feather in it—and he was Belgian. They waved as they stepped off the bus to the local riffraff who had gathered to see if they were real—if it was possible that the Giganticos had really, really and truly, come to town from Montevideo perhaps, where they had just won a quarterfinal as a guest team in the South American championship, or from Cuba maybe, where they’d played at Castro’s behest with a waiver from the State Department, or from Hawaii even, where they’d played an exhibition against the Japanese national team and won by five goals.

They made a mockery of the American All-Star Soccer Association. They won games 12–1, 9–0, and 8–5 (having played the second half without a goalkeeper). Americans filled stadiums to see the Giganticos thrash their home teams, even though the locals couldn’t tell the difference between a corner kick or a goal kick or pronounce many of the players’ names, and even though they didn’t really know who any of them were. They knew they were good, they knew they were famous everywhere else in the world, but they didn’t know who any of them were. Not really.

Except for one: the Pearl of Brazil. They knew who he was, and they loved him. Everyone loved him. On planet Earth, in 1976, if you did not know—and love—the Pearl, your tribe had not yet been discovered.

He had met the pope and the Queen of England. He had met the Beatles and Elvis, and he had visited the White House. Other athletes, men seemingly twice his size—boxers, basketball players, home-run hitters—clamored to meet him and bask in his glow. He had toured Africa—not as a footballer, but as a harbinger of good, a layer on of hands.

He had once been rumored to be dead, and millions had poured into the streets all over the world, wailing with grief. His country plunged into the deepest misery, but he had not been dead—just misplaced in Ethiopia on a goodwill mission (his handlers had all been imprisoned indefinitely upon return to Brazil). He was not big or strong, but he had a mystical connection with the ball and a supernatural sense of the game that gave him full awareness of everything that was happening on the field at all times. He was almost never dispossessed and he made the most miraculous passes, threading the ball into spaces that seemed not to be spaces at all, easing the ball to his teammates’ feet with a mystical, gravity-defying lightness. And his goals! They were almost laughably acrobatic, wondrous creations that weren’t just magic, but magic tricks. His fans (everyone) wondered how he pulled them off. And he worked his magic everywhere he went: in four World Cups, on tours to every imaginable locale, and now in America. He was as charismatic as a great president and he was as humble as a child. No one rooted against him.

To the footballers of the world in 1976, he was a deity, a benevolent being sent by even more benevolent gods for the betterment of football, and therefore for the benefit of the planet. He was their king. Describing him this way did not seem ridiculous; it seemed like an understatement.

But in 1976, the Pearl of Brazil announced his retirement. The season of the American Bicentennial would be his last. He had come to America to share his version of the game with the unwashed masses, to act as ambassador for the Beautiful Game. He would win one more championship, leave the game better than he found it, and walk away. The summer of 1976 would be quite a summer for the Giganticos, and anyone who wanted any part of the world’s greatest footballer would have to get to him sometime that summer.

And a lot of people wanted to get to the Pearl of Brazil that summer.