A Soccer Story

There were so many interesting and surprising things about covering my first World Cup … but in the end, I would say what was most interesting and surprising was the really cool feeling of being young again.

Here’s what I mean: I know very little about soccer. Oh, I mostly know the rules, I have a rudimentary understanding of strategy, I can appreciate the skill in a basic way, I can get excited when someone does something remarkable. But I don’t KNOW soccer — don’t know the players, don’t know the history, don’t know all the great stories. And it’s the stories that for me bring color and light to a sport like baseball. I don’t think I could love baseball the way I do if I did not know about Babe Ruth’s called shot, Jackie Robinson’s refusal to fight back, Roberto Clemente’s arm, Roger Maris’ hair falling out, Hank Aaron’s box of racist letters, Ted Williams’ bold wish to want people to see him walking down the street and say “There goes the greatest hitter who ever lived.”

I don’t think I could love baseball the way I do without remembering the way Pete Rose slid head first, George Brett chasing .400, Dwight Gooden (when he was Dwight) throwing high fastball past the world, Pedro Martinez painting outside corners.

The knuckleball wouldn’t mean as much to me if I didn’t know Bob Uecker’s secret to catching one — wait until it stops rolling and then pick it up.

Albert Pujols’ brilliance would not mean as much to me if I didn’t know about Stan Musial and his peekaboo batting stance that Ted Lyons said looked like a boy looking around a corner to see if the cops were coming.

The Yankees-Red Sox rivalry would not mean so much to me if I didn’t know about Bucky Dent and Dave Roberts. The Giants-Dodgers rivalry would not mean so much to me if I did not know about Bobby Thomson winning the pennant and Juan Marichal clubbing Johnny Roseboro. The Cubs would not be the Cubs if I did not know about 102 years of frustration. Washington’s baseball history would not be quite as poignant if I did not know about our capital’s past of being first in war, first in peace, last in the American League.

The point is, I learned these things, many of them when I was a kid. I didn’t know anything so baseball as an open world, full of discovery, full of stories, full of great characters, full of funny lines. It still can be, and I still hear about teams and players I knew nothing about. But it’s not the same … I know the main characters, and I know the biggest stories. The same is true for football, for basketball, for golf, for just about all of our games. This is what happens when you grow up a sports fan in America. It’s the biggest reason why I love our games.

But … I know almost nothing about soccer’s past. I know only a handful of names, know only a handful of stories. I know Pele’s father cried when Brazil lost the 1950 World Cup final, and Pele promised him that someday he would win the World Cup. I know a bit about how the New York Cosmos tried to make soccer popular by importing gigantic stars to the North American Soccer League. I know Beckham married a Spice Girl. I know how Nick Hornby fell in love with Arsenal. That about covers it.

So, soccer is an open world for me … coming to soccer at the World Cup really felt a bit like being a kid again. And at the World Cup in South Africa people (fans, journalists, strangers on the street) were thrilled to talk soccer, to teach a few basics, to educate an American who showed any curiosity at all. More than once, I heard Kansas City Chiefs founder Lamar Hunt try to explain why he loved soccer — Hunt is in the U.S. Soccer Hall of Fame and was for much of his life one of the leading forces in the effort to make the world’s sport more popular here. He told me that he went to the World Cup in 1966 and fell in love with the passion of the game. That was the word he always used — the word everybody tends to use about soccer. Passion. It’s everywhere at a soccer match. It’s on the field. It’s in the stands. It’s in the game reports. People just care SO much, and it’s a difficult thing for a soccer amateur to understand. But people always wanted to share it with me. And I realized when I was there that you don’t have to understand it to love it.

I also heard soccer stories … lots of soccer stories. About Total Football in Holland. About Garra in Uruguay. About Maradona in Argentina. About the importance of beauty in Brazil. About self loathing in England. About the German persistence. About artistry in Spain.

I also heard a story that I had never heard … one that I suppose is extremely famous in soccer communities, probably every bit as famous around the world as the 1958 NFL Championship or Carlton Fisk’s home run or the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team or Michael Jordan’s final shot against Utah is here at home. Someone mentioned it to me in passing while I was in South Africa, and I said something like “What’s that?” The shake of the head suggested that I was missing something EVERYBODY knows. There’s a good chance you’ve heard it already.

The story comes from 1942, in Kiev, which is the capital of the Ukraine and also its largest city. That year, it was the capital of the Soviet Ukraine … and it was very much at the center of Nazi power and inhumanity. The Nazis had taken the city early in their invasion. Kiev is probably most remembered for the horrible tragedy that happened in September of 1941. More than 30,000 Jews were pulled from Kiev and massacred at Babi Yar, a ravine near the city.

The story goes that Kiev had a good soccer team before war — known as Dynamo. After the war started, and Kiev fell into German hands, the team stopped playing soccer, of course. But the players did not want to stop. One of them, a goalkeeper named Mykola Trusevych, started to work at a bakery in the city. He was given the job, apparently, because the owner admired the way he played goal. That owner missed soccer and what it had done for the city, and so he asked Trusevych to put together a team. Trusevych searched the city to find his old teammates from Dynamo. After a while, many of the players began to work at this bakery. And they would sneak out to a field to practice. They called themselves FC Start.

There were others who wanted to play soccer at the time — something to remove themselves from the madness surrounding them. I’ve often thought about the Japanese-Americans who were held in internment camps here during the war, and the many stories you would hear about them playing baseball behind barbed wire. There is something so human about that, and so the players of FC Start joined this rag-tag league in Kiev, filled with other teams of other players who just wanted to feel a little bit normal in a time of madness*.

*One of the trips a group of us made in South Africa was to Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela was jailed for so long. It was an emotional experience, of course (and not only because I almost lost it with seasickness in the short ferry ride over). We saw the garden area where Mandela had hidden the book he was writing. We saw his cell. We walked into other cells, read stories on the walls, heard from a former prisoner who took us to the limestone quarry where he had worked. But the thing that stuck with me most came from our guide, who had been a political prisoner and who was the leading goal scorer in the prison soccer games one year. The guide, Dumizami Mwandla, remembered precisely how many goals he had scored. Eighteen.

The Germans heard about FC Start and suggested a little soccer match against a German army team. If this sounds a lot like the story of the movie “Victory,” well, yes this is the inspiration. But this story goes in a different direction, to say the least. The Germans suggested opening up the stadium and playing a match to build up morale, to help the city feel a bit more normal again. According to the story, the players were torn. Many of them thought that playing the Germans in a time of war was terribly wrong. Others thought that if they could beat the Germans, it would, in fact, lift the spirits of the people. They decided to play.

Many of the “Victory” elements are there. The FC Start players were malnourished and exhausted compared to the Germans. The referee was apparently an unabashed Nazi supporter. The Germans scored first and played violently.

Only then, the players from Kiev came together. They scored the tying goal. And then, not long before the end of the first half, they scored the go-ahed goal. They led 2-1, and the fans in the stands cheered loudly enough that supposedly German police rushed down, fired shots up in the air and threatened anyone found cheering again. FC Start scored a third goal before the whistle.

Then came halftime, and according to “Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel,” a German officer came into the locker room and said this: “That’s great — you’ve played some very good football and we appreciate it. You have done quite enough to uphold your honor as sportsmen. But now, in the second half, you don’t play so keenly. You must understand. You must lose. You must. The German army hasn’t lost a single game yet, certainly not in occupied territory. This is an order. So, if you don’t lose the game, you’ll be shot.”

Well … here it is. We talk a lot about courage in sports, and it’s usually a ridiculous use of the word. Courage to make a putt. Courage to drive in the winning run. Courage to stand in the pocket. Now, here, this is at the heart of courage — what do you do? Do you lay down in the second half, lose the game, lose what matters most to you in order to stay alive? Or do you keep playing in the belief that this game is more than a game, that winning and losing is more than a score?

The players from Kiev kept playing. They scored a fourth goal, and then a fifth goal, and the Ukrainian fans cheered and cried in joy. There’s a story that late in the match, a defender named Oleksiy Klimenko broke through the German defense, beat the goalkeeper and, instead of simply punching the ball into the net, turned and kicked the ball as hard as he could back into the middle of the field. The final score was 5-3. Every version I’ve heard insists that the referee stopped the match long before the 90 minutes were up. It is said that guard dogs were let loose on the fans.

And … then what? Well, the story as told by Eduardo Galeano in the impossibly beautiful “Soccer in Sun and Shadow” is that the players were immediately captured and “all 11 were shot with their shirts on at the end of a cliff.” Some say they were shot a few months later. Other reports say none of this is exactly right. Apparently there was another game. And this time the players from FC Start clearly were warned that if they did not lose, if they did not stand down, they would be shot. They won again. And this time, several players were arrested, questioned, tortured, and four were later killed in a labor camp.

There have been people who have studied what is now known as “The Death Match” … and there are a few who insist that the death of the players had little or nothing to do with winning the game. Time blunts emotion and leaves behind vague hints. But the story is still told, year after year, and maybe to know the story is to understand soccer just a little bit more, to understand why it means so much to so many people all over the world. The stadium where the FC Start and the Germans played the match is still standing in Kiev — it is now called “Start Stadium.” There’s a monument in front to the players who would rather win and die.