WORLD CUP USA ’94 / THE FIRST ROUND : The Vice Squad : Colombian Team Fighting Country’s Negative Image by Serving as Cultural Ambassadors
Carlos Valderrama was dancing, throwing the defenders of Bayern Munich off guard, rolling pinpoint passes onto the feet of his forwards. The television cameras feasted on him.
Valderrama, two-time South American player of the year, is the best of what Colombia’s national coach, Francisco Maturana, calls “the party” of Colombian soccer.
Maturana, who has coached Colombia’s international team since 1987, has made Colombian soccer true to its national spirit and in so doing has put together a successful and wildly admired team.
It was not always like that.
As recently as 15 years ago, the stars of Colombia’s teams were mostly foreigners. Colombian players were uninterested in their international team and the results were predictable: Until 1990, Colombia hadn’t been to the World Cup since 1962.
Today, Maturana has taken Colombia to the World Cup for the second consecutive time.
But Maturana, a former soccer star and dentist, faces an even more complex challenge: the specter of drugs and drug money that haunts the game in Colombia, which is the world’s largest supplier of cocaine.
When Colombia was nowhere on the soccer map, drug profits played an important role in attracting talent and raising the standards of Colombia’s teams. In the early 1980s, professional soccer players made $900 to $1,800 a month. Today, they make more than $3,000 a month, and the perks for being a star have multiplied.
Pablo Escobar, a ruthless cocaine baron until his death in a shootout with police last year, was a big-time contributor to Medellin’s professional team, Atletico Nacional.
Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela, the head of the rival Cali cocaine cartel, patronized the Cali team, America, and his brother, Miguel, was listed as the team’s president.
Violence, meanwhile, stalked soccer. Rodrigo Lara Bonilla, a justice minister who accused most of Colombia’s professional teams of having links to drug trafficking, was killed by drug traffickers in 1984. Colombian soccer executives were assassinated by drug traffickers.
And Rene Higuita, one of the world’s top goalkeepers, lost his place in the World Cup because of his friendship with drug traffickers. Higuita pioneered a new, madcap style of goalkeeping, charging brazenly 20 yards out of the net. A keeper-sweeper, he would take on opposing players, take penalty shots and even score goals.
His recklessness, however, carried over to real life. When Higuita’s friend, Escobar, kidnaped the 13-year-old daughter of another cocaine figure, Higuita agreed to intercede. He freed the girl, then accepted $50,000 in gratitude money. That violated a law that prohibits mediating in or concealing a kidnaping. After seven months in jail, Higuita is awaiting trial.
Although none of the members of Colombia’s current team have been linked to drug activities, they say they are determined to counteract the negative image of their country. The team reflects Colombia’s regional cultures, and players see a national mission in substituting the public perception of drugs and violence with the beauty of their sport.
The more defensive players are from the Andean region, where obedience and discipline take precedence over dazzle. These include Luis Fernando Herrera, a man steeped in the Roman Catholic faith and family.
Herrera, a smiling, relaxed player, stresses the exhilaration of playing. His 3-year-old son was kidnaped in Medellin and then recovered only days after Colombia’s 5-0 victory over Argentina in the World Cup qualifying round. Yet, he insists, “Soccer is joy and fun.”
The forwards are mostly from the Pacific region and the Caribbean coast, home of Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez, of all-night salsa parties and rum.
Faustino Asprilla is one of the world’s quickest and most acrobatic players. He can curl balls into the net from difficult angles--or get involved in six automobile crashes in a single month, as he did in 1992. He punctuates every goal with a dizzying cartwheel.
“Soccer players play like they live,” Maturana said. “Imagine Brazilian soccer and you think of a game like the Brazilian character, lively and free. Germans are precise. We Colombians are uncomplicated, hard workers and tricksters, organizing ourselves to give flight to fantasy.”
Oscar Cordoba, the 24-year-old keeper who replaced Higuita, is a serious and charismatic former advertising design student.
“Colombia’s team reflects the idiosyncrasies of its people and what they want to show at an international level, sport and the good things about their country,” Cordoba said.
Cordoba is cautious, far less likely to commit the kind of error that Higuita made in 1990 when he ventured too far from the net, leaving the goal open for Cameroon’s Roger Milla, whose goal resulted in Colombia’s elimination from the World Cup.
He is also the nation’s perfect ambassador.
“We want to improve Colombia’s image in the world like our bullfighter, Cesar Rincon, does in Spain, or our bicycling champions do in
France and Italy,” he said.
Many Colombians agree. On a recent Sunday, people of all ages clogged a street in Bogota’s old Spanish neighborhood with a pick-up game, set against the backdrop of the Andes and a broken brick wall plastered with torn political posters.
“Colombia is having a difficult time with all the violence,” said Erik Kowall, a 23-year-old graphic-design student who had joined in the game. “We are seen as bad people abroad.
“The image is far from reality. If our team does well, that will emphasize the good about our country. It will help change the world’s vision of us.”
