When Prince died last month, someone on my
Twitter feed posted a snapshot of the page in a book they'd written that told an
anecdote involving the singer. Less than a day had passed since the
announcement, and already a writer was crying out, "Prince is dead, buy my
book!" Well, as I'm always told, publishing's a business just like any
other.
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| Cutting through the bullshit: Cruyff in DC |
It's
taken me a few weeks to write about Johan Cruyff. The day after his death, one
of my publishers contacted me to write a piece about the Dutchman and his time
in the North American Soccer League. They would try and place it with a
newspaper. Good publicity for the book, you understand. It wasn't a good time,
and in any case, I didn't want to. There were dozens of Cruyff appreciations
being hacked out, as you'd expect. Nothing I said was going to add to the
narrative, and I'd have been left with the same sensation I had when I saw the
Prince tweet - Cruyff is dead, read all about it! I do read
obituaries and I've also been paid to write them, so I'm not trying to come
across as morally aloft. But there's a difference between using words to
deal with your upset and manufacturing them to push your bloody book (again).
During
these past few weeks, though, I did think about Cruyff a lot, just as I had done while writing 'Rock n Roll Soccer'. During that time, I thought how
magnificent it would be to talk to him about the NASL. Doubtless, my publisher
would have been happy too. But I really did want to know what he'd thought of
the league, of the USA, why he went there, and what was his view of soccer
there now. I wanted to know what he thought way more than I wanted to know what
Pelé or Franz Beckenbauer thought. Cruyff, I imagined, would have torn it up
and prompted me to start all over again. He would have said the unexpected, the
slanted, the unpopular, the bizarre, the interesting. Not many soccer players
manage that.
In
many interviews I conducted for the book, I maybe suggested certain things in
my questions. Thus prompted, the interviewee might agree, or they said,
"You know, I'd never thought of it like that, but I think you're
right." How great for the writer's ego! What I loved to hear, however, was
the moment when they said, "No, it wasn't like that at all. That's bullshit. This is what
it was like." I thought that Cruyff would do that with every question. He would make me feel small and stupid. Like the
player and the person he was, he would come at every topic from a completely fresh
angle, varying his replies from the ludicrous to the enlightening. It's a
certainty that he would have made me write a better book.
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Leading from the front: "He was
the ultimate team player." |
The
players who encountered him in the NASL loved to talk about him. Who wouldn't
want to remind people that they played alongside him? Or against him, like
Rochester's Damir Šutevski, who admits in a game where Cruyff scored twice for
LA (even though he only played one half, in his first game for six months),
"I covered him but I couldn't stop him. He took me to the cleaners."
Carmine Marcantonio of the Washington Diplomats recalls trying to compete with Cruyff and
LA in a playoff game in 1979, and takes up the tale of chasing the player when
he received the ball at the top of his own penalty area. "He got the ball,
I caught up with him, I tried to grab his shirt, but I couldn't bring him down
and I went down and dislocated my finger trying to hold him back. He went
upfield with the ball, faked out two or three defenders and scored the winning
goal. There's a picture with four of us on the ground and Johan putting the
ball in the empty net."
Cruyff
was promptly signed by the Diplomats for the 1980 season, "and that was
one of the best years I had, being teammates with Johan", says
Marcantonio. "He was the ultimate team player. He took more pleasure in
assisting and would pass to a team-mate to score." Cruyff scored 10 goals,
but also registered 20 assists in 25 regular season games. However, Bob Iarusci
and Don Droege - also both on the Diplomats' team that year - agree that Cruyff
disturbed the equilibrium of what had been a fairly successful side, and that
he more or less usurped team coach Gordon Bradley when it came to tactics.
Droege personally wasn't bothered: "I'm just a lowly American player, and
I'm just happy to be out on the field. But the English players like Alan Green,
Bobby Stokes, Jim Steele, Matt Dillon - you bring in a player like Cruyff and
the whole dynamics are gone." Droege didn't recall any truth to the
rumoured story of Cruyff wiping Bradley's chalkboard clean so that he could
give his own team-talk, but adds, "I do remember talking with Bradley in
the bathroom and him checking under the stalls to make sure Cruyff wasn't in
there listening to us."
Cruyff
claimed at the time he was in the NASL to help promote and develop the game in
the US, but it was also thought that, like Pelé, he came out of retirement
because he needed cash after making some poor investments. It's no longer
relevant. It's only important that he graced the league with his superior enigmatic
touch for a handful of years. "He was a great individual," says
Marcantonio, "in that he almost wanted to run the show on the field, but
wanted it done in a team concept. Johan was very domineering. Like any great
player, he didn't shut up." And for that we can only be thankful.
(The story of NASL soccer in Washington DC,
and Cruyff's role in turning around the Diplomats' 1980 season, can be read in
Chapter 8 of Rock n Roll Soccer, 'Broken Teams in Dysfunctional DC: Cruyff, the
Dips, the Darts and the Whips.' Buy it now for just $£ etc. etc.)
