Eduardo Galeano - Soccer in Sun and Shadow

In 1964 this center forward for Hamburg was chosen as the best player in Germany. He belonged to Hamburg body and soul: “I’m just another fan. Hamburg is my home,” he liked to say. Uwe Seeler scorned numerous juicy offers to play on Europe’s most powerful teams. He played in four World Cups. To shout “Uwe, Uwe” was the best way of shouting “Germany, Germany.”

In 1965, when he was fifty years old, Stanley Matthews still caused serious outbreaks of hysteria in British soccer. There weren’t enough psychiatrists to deal with all the victims, who had been perfectly normal until the cursed moment they were bewitched by this grandfatherly tormentor of fullbacks.

Defenders would grab his shirt or his shorts, they would get him in wrestling holds or tackle him with kicks worthy of the police blotter, but nothing stopped him because they never managed to clip his wings. Matthews was precisely that, a winger, the one who flew highest over England’s turf, all along the touchlines.

Queen Elizabeth was well aware of this: she made him a knight.

The military was bathing Indonesia in blood, half a million, a million, who-knows-how-many dead, and General Suharto was inaugurating his long dictatorship by murdering the few reds, pinks or questionables still alive. Other officers were overthrowing N’Krumah, president of Ghana and prophet of African unity, while their colleagues in Argentina were evicting President Illia by coup d’état.

For the first time in history a woman, Indira Gandhi, was governing India. Students were toppling Ecuador’s military dictatorship. The U.S. Air Force was bombing Hanoi with renewed vigor, but Americans were growing ever more convinced they should never have gone into Vietnam, let alone stayed, and should leave as soon as possible.

Truman Capote had just published In Cold Blood . García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Lezama Lima’s Paradiso were in the bookstores. The priest Camilo Torres was dying in battle in the mountains of Colombia, Che Guevara was riding his skinny Rocinante through Bolivia’s countryside, and Mao was unleashing the Cultural Revolution in China. Several atomic bombs were falling on the Spanish coast at Almería, sowing panic even though none of them went off. Well-informed sources in Miami were announcing the imminent fall of Fidel Castro, it was only a matter of hours.

In London, with Harold Wilson chewing his pipestem and celebrating victory at the polls, young women sporting miniskirts, Carnaby Street as fashion capital, and the entire world humming Beatles tunes, the eighth World Cup got under way.

This was the final World Cup for Garrincha and it was also a good-bye party for Mexican goalkeeper Antonio Carbajal, the only player to be in the tournament five times.

Sixteen teams took part: ten from Europe, five from the Americas, and, strange as it seems, North Korea. Astonishingly, the Koreans eliminated Italy with a goal by Pak, a dentist from the city of Pyongyang who played soccer in his spare time. On the Italian squad were no less than Gianni Rivera and Sandro Mazzola. Pier Paolo Pasolini used to say they played soccer in lucid prose interspersed with sparkling verse, but that dentist left them speechless.

For the first time the entire championship was broadcast live by satellite and, though in black and white, the whole world could watch the show put on by the referees. In the previous World Cup, European referees officiated at twenty-six matches; in this one, they ran twenty-four out of thirty-two. A German referee gave England the match against Argentina, while an English referee gave Germany the match against Uruguay. Brazil had no better luck: Pelé was hunted down and kicked with impunity by Bulgaria and Portugal, which knocked Brazil out of the championship.

Queen Elizabeth attended the final. She did not scream when players scored, but she did applaud discreetly. The World Cup came down to the England of Bobby Charlton, a man of fearful drive and marksmanship, and the Germany of Beckenbauer, who had just begun his career and was already playing with hat, gloves, and cane. Someone had stolen the Rimet Cup, but a dog named Pickles found it in a London garden, and the trophy reached the winners’ hands in time. England won 4–2. Portugal came in third, the Soviet Union fourth. Queen Elizabeth gave Alf Ramsey, the manager of the victorious team, a title of nobility, and Pickles became a national hero.

The ’66 World Cup was usurped by defensive tactics. Every team used the sweeper system with an extra defender by the goal line behind the fullbacks. Even so, Eusebio, Portugal’s African artilleryman, managed to pierce those impenetrable rear-guard walls nine times. Behind him on the list of leading scorers was Haller of Germany with six.

In a Western he would have been the fastest foot in the West. On the soccer field he scored a hundred goals before he was twenty, and by the time he was twenty-five they still hadn’t invented a lightning rod that could ground him. More than run, he exploded: Jimmy Greaves pushed off so fast, the referees used to call him offside by mistake, because they could not figure out where his sudden stabs and bull’s-eye shots came from. They would see him land, but they never saw him take off.

“I want to score so badly,” he said, “it hurts.”

Greaves had no luck at the ’66 World Cup. He did not score a single goal, and an attack of jaundice made him sit out the final.

It happened at the World Cup in 1966. Germany was playing Switzerland.

Uwe Seeler launched the attack along with Franz Beckenbauer, the two of them like Sancho Panza and Don Quixote, the ball fired by an invisible trigger, back and forth, yours and mine. Once the entire Swiss defense was left useless as a deaf ear, Beckenbauer faced the goalkeeper Elsener, who leaped to his left. Beckenbauer pivoted at full tilt, shot to the opposite side, and in it went.

Beckenbauer was twenty and that was his first goal in a World Cup. After that he took part in four more, as player or manager, and never finished below third place. Twice he raised the Rimet Cup: playing in ’74 and managing in ’90. Bucking the trend toward a soccer of sheer panzer-style strength, he proved that elegance can be more powerful than a tank and delicacy more penetrating than a howitzer.

This emperor of the midfield, known as “The Kaiser,” was born in a working-class section of Munich, but he commanded both attack and defense with nobility: in the back nothing escaped him, not one ball, not a fly, not a mosquito could get through; and when he crossed the field he was like fire.