Here’s what you need to know about growing up in the blue-collar city of Oshawa, Ontario, Canada in the ‘90s: There were hockey players, and then there was everyone else.
That’s probably why I remember watching West Germany play Argentina in the 1990 World Cup final at my grandparents’ otherwise quiet townhouse in Scarborough so vividly. They arrived from Bad Wildungen, a small town in the West German state of Hesse, in 1954, seeking a new life. For years I had wandered around their home, staring at trinkets with impossible-to-pronounce names like Schleswig-Holstein, and photos of buildings carved out of fairy tales. I would sit on their shaggy green carpet surrounded by uncles and plates of white sausages and potato salad. Though only 25 minutes away by car, Oshawa was a world away.
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I had been playing organized soccer, not hockey, for two summers by that point, though I never really understood why. I was told to, probably.
My entire family kept talking about that final louder than anyone I’d ever heard, even as mind-numbing a game as it ended up being.
One player I couldn’t keep my eyes off was Jurgen Klinsmann, the blonde forward running around near the goal, moving far more outlandishly than his compatriots in an attempt to liven the game up. And being six years old, the associations came quick.
“He’s wearing 18!” I thought. “My birthday is October 18th! I should wear that number, too! We have the same initials! How about that!”
And like that, I had my first sports idol — a player from a place my family was from, one I believed I was an expert on and therefore one I believed no one else in Oshawa had a connection to.
I pretended my “German name” was Jurgen around my teammates to seem foreign, and probably because I wanted to move like him, as well. The soccer I grew up learning was about team control: Don’t try anything wild with the ball when you can move it ahead for someone else instead. Even now, I find it hard to remember ever shooting a ball at that age, only passing.
Klinsmann made aggressiveness near the goal look easy. His limbs extended and contorted with the ball on his feet in ways I had never thought to try. He changed games. I changed the protective band around my glasses at half-time to ensure they wouldn’t fall off during play, yet again.
Before Klinsmann, I was never sure what soccer was supposed to look like, or even what it was capable of becoming. But I was sure he did not play the hyper-controlled game I had been taught to play. In Canada, the influence of hockey meant soccer as I knew it was a physical game built on structure first, and flair… well, never.
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Klinsmann was everything I wanted to be: He was different, in that he played for a nation that wasn’t Italy, Scotland or England — the teams that any other outsider aligned themselves with in Oshawa. And he was dominant, in that he scored goals as the pre-eminent player, which I certainly was not.
Throughout the early ‘90s, as the Toronto Maple Leafs and Toronto Blue Jays mounted incredible playoff runs, my admiration of Klinsmann increased. As did my belief that different was good, no matter what. Everyone around me cheered for the Leafs and the Jays, but Klinsmann and the German national team were my guys.
The 1994 World Cup kicked off with Germany against Bolivia at 3:00 p.m. on a Friday afternoon. I ran home from school after the 3:15 final bell and made it in just before half-time.
Just over 15 minutes into the second half, Bolivia tried to press Germany playing out of the back, and Lothar Matthäus sent a long ball above the entire Bolivia side. Bolivia goalkeeper Carlos Trucco slipped outside of the 18-yard box and Klinsmann sent the ball into an empty net for the opening goal of the World Cup.
“This is going to be easy,” I thought. “We’re going to win the World Cup.”
Klinsmann would knock in four more goals over the next three matches in a way that continued to expose me to a creative side of the game.
On his magnificent volley against Korea, there was some atrocious defending, and Klinsmann probably could have scored on a simple first touch, but the inventiveness of the goal left him mouth-agape, surprised he had pulled it off. That goal had me running around the house in a similar manner.
After a disappointing quarterfinal exit, Klinsmann moved to Tottenham. This was ideal. I could now haul ass down to the only decent magazine shop in Oshawa to get my soccer fix in the few Premier League-heavy soccer magazines, like FourFourTwo, that made their way over to this side of the pond. Every week, I had a few sentences to carry in my back pocket should the conversation steer towards favourite athletes.
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I surely didn’t understand his opening line at his unveiling after signing for Tottenham. (“Maybe I can ask you the first question,” he famously said. “Are there any diving schools in London?”) But Klinsmann doing things differently now seemed in line with who he was, and what kind of goals he could score.
Klinsmann returned for Germany at Euro ‘96, scoring three goals in the tournament, and then leaving as a champion. Against Russia, I saw Klinsmann score with a part of the foot I didn’t even know you were allowed to shoot with.
Though current perceptions of him have been clouded by recent history, his ability to move through defenders with relative ease was captivating.
If I felt confident admiring different teams and players, it was because Klinsmann also showed that confidence.
Of course, young teenage arrogance only lasts so long. Even as Klinsmann scored another three goals early in the 1998 World Cup, Germany exited in the quarterfinals once again. He left the national team after that, and maybe I did too for a while.
But he re-emerged as the head coach of the national team when I was teaching in Poland in 2006. I was surrounded by English teachers who wanted to watch their country’s “golden generation,” and an entire nation of Poles swelling with nationalistic fervour.
“Germany are so boring, so mechanical,” I was told.
From what I remember of the post-Klinsmann years, they were right.
Sitting alone in a Wroclaw bar for the opening match, I saw Klinsmann’s toothy grin before the tournament’s opening game.
It took Germany just six minutes to open the scoring with a long-range shot from a right back, Philipp Lahm. Germany played fearlessly, pouring on four goals, including one from, like, a billion yards out from goal by Torsten Frings.
Klinsmann smiled again. I smiled, too. Everyone looked to be having a lot of fun, doing things differently than expected.
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I was far away from Oshawa, but again felt connected to something. That run to the 2006 World Cup semifinals was some of the most fun I’ve had watching the German men’s national team.
Yet even with Germany’s surprise third-place finish, I was old enough now, and had enough access to the rest of the world to begin understanding just how different a dude Klinsmann really was.
That player who was “livening up” the 1990 World Cup final? He is better remembered for an egregious sell job to draw a red card, building towards Klinsmann’s reputation as a diver. His opening line at Tottenham went over my 10-year-old head.
That smiling coach who propelled a team that had no business going so deep in the 2006 World Cup? He was probably more autocratic of a leader than coaches I’m now interested in, and it was later revealed he probably focused too heavily on fitness instead of tactics. He implored players to attack the game, but left very little regard for how to properly defend to close out games. He was later called out by Lahm, another hero of mine, for his lack of proper tactical preparation during his spell as Bayern Munich coach in 2008-09.
“We practically only practiced fitness under Klinsmann, there was very little technical instruction and the players themselves discussed the way they would play a game before the match,” wrote Lahm in his 2011 autobiography “The Subtle Difference.”
And of course, there’s Klinsmann’s tenure as U.S. men’s national team head coach and technical director. His tactical deficiencies were again evident, and his choices in part contributed to the U.S. missing out on the 2018 World Cup.
By the time the reported power-hungry Klinsmann left his post as Hertha Berlin manager after just 76 days in February, I was nowhere near as eager to bring up Klinsmann’s name in a boasting manner.
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Once I learned more about the man beyond the smiling, mobile attacker, I remembered how liberating it was to become invested in sports with the heart and the naivety of childhood, as I was sitting on that shaggy green carpet, and not the head and rational understanding of adulthood.
The German national team is still the only team I remain emotionally invested in. I called my father after Germany beat Argentina to win the 2014 World Cup, screaming “We did it!” Though “we” played no role whatsoever in Die Mannschaft’s success. I blacked out for a few seconds after Toni Kroos curled in a game-winning goal against Sweden in the 2018 World Cup, and wallowed in misery for 48 hours after Germany failed to score against South Korea four days later and were eliminated from the tournament.
That weird pride and disappointment exists because Klinsmann broke from the mould.
I still can’t help but root for Klinsmann, even though that probably makes me an outsider again. Maybe it’s just easier to forget how complex our heroes are, and how complicated it is to do things your own way.
(Photo: Mark Leech/Offside/Getty Images)
