Soccer: NZ star who's still a wide-eyed fan

By MICHELE HEWITSON

The man once described as God-like is sitting behind his desk in his office in the Mt Eden Christian Life Centre. It is a spartan room with an air of the make-shift. Gathering dust high on a set of shelves are two glass trophies. Etched on the surface of one are words which proclaim Wynton Rufer to be the Oceania Player of the Century.

Rufer, the man behind the desk, is wearing serious spectacles, and slivers of silver are beginning to show in his dark, well-cut hair. He mutters something about having to organise his trophies some day.

Getting him to organise his memories of the World Cup, 20 years ago, proves to be as difficult.

On June 24, 1982, Wynton Rufer ran on to a field in Seville in baking heat and to the accompaniment of a steel orchestra, trumpets and drums. In the stands, the fans danced the samba. Just minutes before the game, Brazilian fans sent up a hot air balloon. When the Kiwis got hold of the ball, the drums beat out what a commentator called "a kind of death march".

Brazil won 4-0. Afterwards, a young striker called Wynton Rufer had a tape recorder thrust at him. He said: "They were the better team, they deserved to win. Then: "I was over-awed to think I was playing against Brazil."

Although Rufer remembers "just wanting to savour the whole atmosphere", the anecdote he offers is smaller, more personal. In the midst of all that racket and colour and history, the 19-year-old was concentrating on getting a snapshot of his mum and dad in the stands. "John Adshead [the All Whites' coach] was barking at me to get warming up. And I had my camera out. I was more interested in getting some pictures than worrying about the game."

But still, there he was, playing Brazil. There was something dream-like about that day for the kid who had grown up in Strathmore, Wellington, worshipping Pele, the great Brazilian striker, from as afar as it was possible to get.

Every summer Sunday at midday he and his dad Arthur and his older brother Shane would take over the couch to watch The Big Match. "It was like the gospel on Sundays. I'll always remember."

He can still remember, too, "as a kid, listening to the Waltons-style radio in 1970 and Pele, in the 17th minute had risen at the far post and crashed in a header after a cross ... I just always tried to play like a Brazilian. Yeah. Tried. It's the beauty of the way they play the game."

You might have noticed this already: when Rufer gets nostalgic about soccer, it's a nostalgia which invokes the spirit of other games played by other people.

Try a question about why he fell in love with a round ball, and he can tell you a story which involves his own skills as a striker - but only peripherally. He can sum up the thrill economically enough: "Scoring goals."

But the way he chooses to share the thrill is to talk about a 1997 soccer school he ran in Otara with kids who had never seen a soccer ball before and who had never heard of Rufer.

"We'd set up these little games and it was amazing to watch when a goal was scored. The kids just went jumping up and down and going berserk. It was a beautiful illustration of what this game is really about. We'd not told them that you're meant to jump up and down and hug each other when you score a goal. And yet they were doing it."

This is what Rufer does these days. He retired from playing the game in December last year after a stand-off with Football Kingz coach Kevin Fallon about the training regime. Rufer wanted, he said, to concentrate on his youth development work, WYNRS, which he runs out of this office. He took 18 kids to Germany recently. He took them inside the changing rooms at the Werder Bremen stadium. This was his club; he wanted them to visualise their names written above the lockers.

In Germany, where he played from 1989 until 1992, the year Werder Bremen won the European Cup Winners' Cup (he returned to play for second-division club Kaiserslautern for half a season in 1997), Rufer was a star. His was a face that was recognised on the street; the kids clamoured for autographs.

He made money. "Oh, I was getting a fair few dollars."

Rufer claims that money has never been a motivation. Early in 1982 a couple of guys from FC Zurich turned up at his place in Wellington with a suitcase. They snapped the locks and showed him stacks of bank notes. They told him that if he'd sign up, this cache of $16,000 was his. Once he got to Zurich, he'd get another $16,000 and a two-year contract. The suitcase-carrying men arrived at 7.20pm. Rufer finally signed at 4am.

He really wanted to play for Grasshoppers, whose coach had trained Pele. It wasn't more money which persuaded him. FC Zurich got Rufer because "they gave my brother Shane the same contract for a year. They didn't even know if he had legs."

There's a photograph of a beaming Rufer in our files from that year. It was taken at the Don Carlos Hotel in Marbella. He is flanked by two bikini-clad beauties. He says he was "a bit of a ratbag" before he met his wife, Lisa, who "sorted me out". They met on September 21, 1985, and married on December 7, 1986.

They became born-again Christians a month before exchanging their vows. He tells me, apropos of what, I'm not sure, that "she was a virgin until we got married". Umm, was he? "Well, I became a Christian. I mean, I wasn't. No. But when I became a Christian I believe I was born again, so it's like a virgin." Rufer says that Christianity, "like soccer, has been the best thing that's happened in my life".

It may look like a blessed life, but Rufer says his career took a long time to get started. And that as the returning son he has met "obstacles" in New Zealand. He'll joke that when he came back to New Zealand in 1997, he played on fields where there were "150 people, 30 of them seagulls and a couple of dogs". He had been used to crowds of 45,000. "It was a bit tough." Beyond that, he won't elaborate.

He will say that his professional career was "like a Cinderella film". He makes light of the adulation, the money, the descriptions of the God-like aura. "Then it's all over and you have to get back to reality. Then you start learning what people are like."

When I ask him, twice in the course of an hour, why he's so uncomfortable talking about his career, he says, "What's there to talk about? I'm a has-been."

A has-been with his eye still on the ball. And the World Cup. He thinks France could win. Or Argentina.

But you know who he'd love to win. "Brazil. If Ronaldo can work a bit of magic."

nzherald.co.nz/fifaworldcup

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