I don’t know why they have a problem with me. Why do they have a problem with me?”
The groundskeeper interrupted Edward. He wanted to lock up the stadium. With his hand, he made a gesture to Edward to stop talking, to gather his clothes, and leave.
“You see, I am man of the world,” the Serb coach Ivan Golac says. In an accent that contains only slight traces of his Balkan roots, he ticks o¤ evidence supporting HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE BLACK CARPATHIANS
this claim. He keeps his main residence in Vienna.
During the summer, he decamps to an apartment in France, just over the border from Spain, where he walks quiet mountain paths with his wife. But more than being a man of the world, he is, at heart, a man of England.
Golac’s case of Anglophilia began as a teenage obsession. Before even the arrival of such a term in communist Belgrade, he was a flower child. He wore his hair shoulder-length and acquired a fanatical interest in the English music scene that went far deeper than the Stones, the Kinks, and The Who. Swinging London had a soccer outpost, the World Cup–winning English team of the sixties. They played with such enthusiasm and panache that Golac desperately wanted to join them. “I dreamed only of playing in England.”
For a decade, he lived his dream, playing in Southampton and living like a country squire in verdant southern England.
Like Edward, Golac has been flung far and wide by the soccer economy. When the opportunity at Karpaty opened, a stint coaching with an Icelandic outfit across the bay from Reykjavik had just ended. “A friend told me there was a club in the Ukraine with an ambitious owner. This interested me greatly.” By the time we sat down in the Viennese Co¤eehouse and ordered ice cream, he had survived four months of Ukrainian soccer. The beginning of his tenure had not gone well.
Golac arrived at Karpaty and immediately ushered in an era of losing. His English understanding of the game didn’t jibe with the habits of the Lobanovsky-steeped players. Team oªcials would gasp at his predilection for empowering players to make tactical decisions on the fly. And players would look like soccer idiots when handed a little piece of on-field volition. “It was a shock to me. They were not allowed to think.” The Nigerian problem needed to be dealt with, too. Nobody could deny that the team chemistry experiment had created corrosive compounds.
When I first met Golac, he made it clear that he considered himself blessed to have avoided Serbia in wartime. The hacking apart of multi-ethnic Yugoslavia saddened and disgusted him. In his condemnation of Ukrainian racism, he invoked this position again. “I know nationalism and was surprised at how strong it is here.”
“They’re good boys,” he said, turning the subject to Edward and Samson. “It’s hard for the African players to adapt, especially when you have training sessions at minus 25. It’s hard enough for us continental people. I can’t imagine for them. They get very low, very depressed. That’s where you’ve got to be very careful, very gentle with them.”
Listening to him talk in his confident pianissimo voice, I imagined him to be a superb psychologist. In training, I noticed that he e¤ectively criticized players without jabbing their egos. I pressed him to explain to his methodology. “Describe the gentle approach?”
“I’ve told them, ‘You’ve got ability, boys. You’ve got ambition, I suppose. If you don’t do well, if you’re not disciplined, if you’re not ambitious enough, and can’t match my ambition, I’ll send you back to Africa.’ ”
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. HOW SOCCER EXPLAINS THE BLACK CARPATHIANS
Our conversation put me in the mind of the previous week. After presiding over a string of bitter losses, the coach had decided to call on God for help. The team visited a village church, not far from Karpaty’s training complex, fifteen minutes from Lviv’s city center.
On the Christian family tree, Ukrainians have their own divergent branch called Greek Catholicism. As church architecture evinces, the denomination shares many of Russian Orthodoxy’s traits and traditions. This small village church has a cupola with a Red
Square – like cap of silver that tapers around a distinctly eastern curve. Inside, icons of the medieval, pre-perspective style abound. They are displayed in a three-tiered gold-leaf altarpiece.
As the team bus made its way to the church, it passed a family in a horse-drawn cart and peasant women using shovels to dig rows in front-yard plots. When Karpaty arrived at church, the last service hadn’t yet finished.
The team piled out of the bus and bided time on the rocky road in front of the church. As always, Edward and Samson stood together. In their tracksuits and sneakers, they hardly looked prepared for the sacred.
Across the road, the coaches and trainers waited in their own group. The club’s chief assistant coach, a hard-looking man with a martial flattop, entertained them. “Edward is always crossing himself.” He bowed his head and made the Greek Catholic gesture with vaudevillian exaggeration. The management laughed.
“I wish the Ukrainian boys did the same more often.”
He clasped his hands, looked toward the sky, and sarcastically smiled. The management laughed some more. After a few minutes of awkwardly waiting, the club’s executive director signaled that Karpaty should file into the church. The Ukrainians traced crosses on their chests in rapid succession at almost every door jam and juncture; their hands never falling to their sides. In an entryway, they stopped to kiss the feet of a crucifix hung on an almost-hidden sidewall. A thickly bearded priest in billowing white robes chanted the end of the liturgy.
While the Ukrainians enthusiastically moved
toward the priest, Karpaty’s two Muslim players, both from the ex-Yugoslavia, stopped near the back of the church. Although they seemed to concentrate hard on the ritual, they shifted their hands from their pockets to behind their backs and into their pockets again. The Ukrainians—and the Greek Catholic church—had
robustly
