WORLD CUP ‘94: 4 Days and Counting : Color Him Entertaining : The Outlandish Style of Goalkeeper Jorge Campos Adds Flair to the Game
As the United Soccerphobes of America hunker down behind their living room sofas, bracing themselves for a month-long onslaught of strange foreigners with no last names, 0-0 ties and a sport that strikes them as nothing more than 90 minutes of foreplay before the riot, an icebreaker has been sent north across the border.
His name is Jorge Campos, and he shouldn’t be hard to spot.
He will be the one in the phosphorescent orange togs splashed with yellow, green and purple zig-zagging stripes. Or in the neon lime with the lavender and canary argyle. Or in the hot pink with swirling pools of gold, violet and chartreuse, appearing to be part jockey, part Disney character, part Jell-O dessert.
He will also be tending goal for Mexico’s World Cup team. Occasionally. Most of the time, he will be running laps around Mexico’s half of the field, jogging from the goal mouth to the midfield line and sprinting back again, darting out of the box to sweep the ball out to the flank, dashing madly to tackle the ball with a perfect figure-4 slide, chasing down a retreating opponent and barking at him like a laughing hyena--sometimes all within the same minute.
Soccer, sedative of the masses?
Not the way Campos has taken it and run. He is the official party favor of the 1994 World Cup, a sparking pinwheel on Cinco de Mayo, your non-boredom guarantee every time Mexico steps onto the field during the tournament to come.
What in the world will Campos do next?
Freelance Mexico all the way into the Cup semifinals?
Score a goal on an end-to-end 11-on-10 attack?
Stray one step too far, let a loose ball skitter past him into the net and watch Mexico go down in flames in the first round?
No one has a clue, and that’s the beauty of Campos’ game. Half the soccer world views him as an improvisational genius who is revolutionizing the sport with every step he takes. The other half think he’s stark raving loco. But, from one moment to the next, neither half can be totally sure.
Campos, a former surfer from Acapulco, now participates in a sport where he supplies the waves. He can take your basic 1-0 yawner and make it pulse with excitement, much as he did on June 4 at the Rose Bowl, Mexico versus the United States in a World Cup tuneup.
Campos strode onto the grass wearing a florescent orange ensemble strewn with wild geometric patterns, a little something he had thrown together for the occasion. He looked like a traffic cone. The crowd gasped with delight and up in the press box, someone deadpanned, “Darn, I almost wore the same outfit today.”
The game began to the killer-bee buzz of several thousand airhorns, and soon, the overwhelmingly pro-Mexico crowd was chanting their hero’s name.
HORRR-HAY!
HORRR-HAY!
Campos took his place in front of the Mexican goal, but not for long. It was showtime. Saturday afternoon at the Improv. As teammates mounted a rush into U.S. territory, Campos began to roam--first out of the box, then past the penalty area, then finally all the way to the midfield circle, where he could get a better view of the action.
The ball turns over and Campos hurries back to the goal mouth, mainly for appearance’s sake.
An attacker dribbles down the right flank, readying for a crossing pass--Campos darts 20 yards out of the box to sweep the ball away.
Another U.S. pass is squirted left to right in front of the box. Caught out of position, Campos catches up to the striker with a full-on sprint and kicks the ball away with a fundamentally correct slide into second base.
If Campos played ice hockey, he’d be Ron Hextall, Robb Stauber. Red Line Campos. The happy wanderer, dodging slings and arrows wherever he may meander.
U.S. midfielder John Harkes, just arrived from Europe and not in uniform for the game, shakes his head in the press box at halftime.
“Well, Campos is always flashy,” Harkes mutters.
“If I were out there today, I’d be shooting at him from the 50-yard line.”
After the game, which the U.S. team won, 1-0, on a goal by Roy Wegerle in the 52nd minute, U.S. goalkeeper Tony Meola, a staunch stay-at-home type, is asked what he thinks about the Campos free style.
“I think it’s great for Mexico,” Meola says, “but I don’t think it’s going to work if he has to go to Europe. The same thing that happened to Higuita, you know--you’re going to get beat. You just don’t play that way.
“But he’s very good for Mexico. There’s nobody in the world that can do for Mexico what he can do.”
Higuita. There they go again, always dredging up the name of Rene Higuita whenever the conversation turns to Campos.
That’s because Higuita, a former Colombian goalkeeper, is about the only point of reference when it comes to Campos. Like Campos, Higuita was a wide-ranging daredevil, but in the 1990 World Cup, he was burned for eternity when he misplayed a ball outside the penalty area and lost it to Cameroon’s Roger Milla, who converted for the goal that eliminated Colombia.
Campos hears about Higuita only as often as he is interviewed. After defending him for the first 1,000 questions, Campos now takes the offensive when asked about Higuita.
“I would hope something would happen to me like it did to him,” Campos says, “because he has already played a World Cup, whereas I have not.
“I believe that Higuita did a very good job in the last World Cup. Everybody remembers the mistakes he made, but they don’t remember the great plays, the great stops. And through time, he has revolutionized the game of soccer.”
If Higuita laid the groundwork, Campos is carrying the baton the next leg. No less an authority than Cesar Luis Menotti, coach of Argentina’s 1978 World Cup champion, calls Campos “the goalkeeper of the 21st century,” citing the offensive possibilities Campos has created from a defensive position.
Bora Milutinovic, coach of the U.S. World Cup team, is also an unabashed fan. Milutinovic, who once coached the club team Campos plays for, Universidad Autonoma de Mexico Pumas, voted Campos second on his 1993 world player of the year ballot behind Roberto Baggio of Italy.
Asked what he likes about Campos, Milutinovic puts it succinctly:
“Everything.”
After being named U.S. coach in 1991, Milutinovic joked that if Mexico didn’t want a goalkeeper as unpredictable as Campos, he’d be glad to take the problem off their hands. “I don’t think he comes so (dangerously) far out,” Milutinovic says. “This is how the team plays. You build the team around Campos. You have the team play as he plays.”
Mexico Coach Miguel Mejia Baron has done just that. Rather than tether Campos to his goalpost, Baron encourages the mad forays out of the box. Because Campos is small for a goalkeeper--only 5 foot 9--Baron believes he must accentuate his greatest strengths, mobility and agility.
“He does take risks,” Baron allows. “We are fully aware of that. But football is a game of risks and he has the team’s and coach’s backing.”
So far the risk has not translated into disaster, although one misstep by Campos did prove costly in a January friendly against Bulgaria in San Diego. Playing the ball loosely outside the box late in the game, Campos turned it over and was forced to foul to prevent an empty-net goal.
Bulgaria converted the resulting penalty kick, the game ended in a 1-1 tie and the headlines in Mexico the following morning read:
“1 GOAL FOR MEXICO,
1 BLUNDER FOR CAMPOS.”
“Yes, I had some problems,” Campos says of the Bulgaria match, “but fortunately, that’s been the only one, and it happened in a friendly match. Fortunately, it hasn’t happened in an official game. Hopefully, it never will.”
Campos has been called a “sweeper-keeper” and in the program, he is occasionally listed as “Goalkeeper/Forward.” He has played both positions professionally, sometimes in the same game, which is a little like Troy Aikman moonlighting as a defensive tackle during the Super Bowl.
Campos broke in with Pumas as a forward in 1989 and actually led the team in scoring with 14 goals. He made the move to goalkeeper in 1990 and has stayed there ever since, although he still wears the jersey and shorts of a field player underneath his goalie’s uniform, just in case.
During Gold Cup ‘93, Campos made several such quick changes. Baron would replace him in goal in the second half and move him up front, from where Campos assisted on goals against Canada and Martinique. He also hit the post on a shot against Jamaica.
Campos says it is “my dream to score a goal in World Cup” and thoroughly relishes those rare opportunities he is given to mix it up on the other end.
“The goalkeeper has a lot more pressure,” Campos has said. “There, one can’t make a mistake. You can avoid 10 goals and if they put one in on you, they forget everything beforehand.
“Forward is the opposite. As an attacker, I feel more free and tranquil.”
Back in his homeland, Campos is a national hero, rivaling boxer Julio Cesar Chavez as the most revered athlete in Mexico. Children especially love his garish self-designed uniforms. Pint-sized knockoffs of the Campos look were the most popular Halloween costume in Mexico last year.
Now he is coming to the United States, and all of North America could be his for the taking. Already, Nike has launched a heavy promotional campaign, placing the face of Jorge Campos, rainbow warrior, in television commercials, in magazine ads and on a mammoth mural painted on the east side of the Hollywood Equitable Building on the corner of Hollywood andVine.
Some product, this Campos. A soccer player flamboyant enough to even catch the wary eye of the American sports fan--and already gift-wrapped, to boot.
“I understand the popularity of Jorge Campos is the product of this special moment in Mexican football,” Campos recently told the Mexican sports magazine Deporte Ilustrado. “But everything comes and goes. Everything changes.
“There will be other players and other teams and hopefully, (Mexican) football will have better days ahead. By then, my persona will be left behind and I will be forgotten, because that’s the way things happen.”
Don’t bet your mango-mauve-and-magenta soccer sweater on it.
World Cup
Player at a Glance
Name: Jorge Campos.
Born: Oct. 15, 1966, Acapulco, Mexico.
Height: 5-9.
Weight: 152 pounds.
Position: Goalkeeper.
Club: Universidad Autonoma de Mexico Pumas.
National team debut: 1988.
Caps (international matches): 34.
Little-known fact: A contract dispute with a sponsor nearly held up Campos’ arrival in the United States for World Cup preparations. Nivea, the facial cream manufacturer, threatened Campos with a breach of contract lawsuit when he refused to wear gloves with the company’s name on them during matches. A civil suit would have prevented Campos from leaving the country until its resolution, which could have taken months, but Campos agreed to settle out of court by making a payment to Nivea.
Honors: Ranked third-best goalkeeper in the world by the International Football Federation in August 1993. Member of 1993 Gold Cup championship team and second-place Copa America ’93 team. As a forward, led UNAM in scoring with 14 goals during 1989-90 season.
