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England footballing legend Sir Bobby Charlton carried the burden of the Munich crash with him his whole life, writes Steve Braunias.
He was the saddest-looking person I ever met, a veil of tears from his head down to his celebrated feet, and also he looked hundreds of years old –he was a Knight of the Realm who stepped out of an ancient history that came down to us in the fading black and white of press photographs, film reels, and inky match reports. The death last week of Sir Bobby Charlton, a kind of patron saint of English football, fixes him in grayscale. Even the colour images of Charlton winning the 1966 World Cup with England have a wan, drained quality. The most beautiful tribute in the wake of his death at 86 was drawn by Guardian comic artist David Squires in black and white, the panels wordless, the tone poignant and reverential. I recognised the suffering in the drawings of Charlton’s face; it was there when I met him in strange circumstances in 1998, and came away feeling I had just had an audience with the Dalai Lama.
It was at something called Football Expo, held in the vast conference rooms of the Singapore convention centre. Desperate salesmen from across the globe – 67 countries were represented, with 800 people in attendance – set up stalls for all manner of football-related junk. There was a very fit German who demonstrated the Fitness Ball, a football tied to an elastic band secured around the waist. There was a louche French-Canadian who sold football stickers and filled in the empty hours reading Money by Martin Amis. There was a Pakistani who manufactured artificial turf and moaned about the expense of coming to the expo: “The stall costs $5310 for three days! For a 3x3-metre space! Plus $12 per chair.” And there, roaming the aircon fields, was Sir Bobby Charlton.
He was there in his capacity as an ambassador for the English Football Association’s bid to host the 2006 World Cup. There was another roving emissary charged with the same mission at Football Expo: Franz Beckenbauer, the legendary former captain of West Germany who faced off against Charlton in two of the most famous World Cup matches of all times. They were adversaries, equals, old warhorses doing battle one more time in the PR fight to win hearts and minds. With Germany eventually awarded hosting rights to the 2006 tournament. I suppose you could say it was a 2-1 win for Beckenbauer.
When I spoke with Beckenbauer in Singapore, I asked him about the same subject I discussed with Charlton: the second of their two famous World Cup games, in 1970, when West Germany came from 2-0 behind to beat the reigning world champions 3-2 in the quarter-finals. It was Charlton’s last-ever game for his country and the enduring controversy – actually much more than a controversy, more like a national agony felt in England for years to come – was that he was substituted late in the game with England still ahead 2-1. He was England’s talisman, their living legend; to take him off seemed unthinkable, ruinous, and maybe even signalled the beginning of the end of England’s claim as a superpower in world football.
There are pictures of Charlton leaving the field that day. His whole body looks like it’s crying. It was a very hot day. The tournament was played in Mexico. Players routinely lost weight during the 1970 games, dropping off kilos in sweat. His expression is baffled; Charlton was such a modest person, a man who lived by a code of decency, a stranger to vanity or arrogance, but he knew his own importance, his own thrilling ability that made him a legend in the first place. His manager at Manchester United, Sir Matt Busby, writes in his autobiography Soccer at the Top about seeing Charlton when he was 15 being able to “hit the ball with a great thump and for great distances”. It wasn’t simply a matter of strength, he wrote. “Some people are born with hard shots. If a lad can’t kick the ball hard when he is six he will not kick it hard when he is 16 or 26 or 36… It is one of the mysteries. It is called timing.”
The hard shot, the long passing, the incredible body swerve – they were the parts, and the whole of him was as the creative fulcrum of England and Manchester United throughout the 1960s. New Zealand saw him at his peak, when United played here on a summer tour in 1967. A story on the club’s website records: “Future Prime Minister Rob Muldoon thanked the United team for making the long journey, while Olympic gold medallist Sir Peter Snell handed out cartons of cigarettes as a representative of local tour sponsor Rothmans.” (Charlton was a smoker.) They beat Auckland 8-1 and the national side 11-0, with Charlton scoring a hat-trick. For his third goal, he chipped Kiwi goalkeeper Arthur Stroud, who had got one of his undershirts stuck over his head as he tried to take it off.
Bobby Charlton in action during a friendly match. Photo / AP
Good times. But for all of his success in the ’60s, winning a World Cup medal and scoring twice to lead Man United to beat Benfica 4-1 in the 1968 European Final, the central event and the profound appeal of the Bobby Charlton story is what happened in the 1950s. He opens his 2007 autobiography by going straight to the 1958 Munich disaster. Eight of his Manchester United colleagues died when their Elizabethan aircraft crashed on take-off. Charlton survived with barely a scratch. “The truth I have lived with since 6 February 1958,” he writes, “is that everything I had been able to achieve since that day… has been accompanied by a simple question: why me? Why… was I still whole?”
A question like that shapes your fate but also your face. Forever after Munich, Charlton looked exactly like a man who had walked away from death. That walking veil of tears who I met in 1998, that wise old Dalai Lama who knew the mysteries and depths of suffering, wandered around the Singapore showrooms not so much as a great sportsman from the past but as a kind of holy ghost. He was spectral, a visitor from purgatory. Actually, he was also very present in corporeal form. His handshake was so firm that it felt like an electric shock. In contrast, Franz Beckenbauer’s handshake was like stroking velvet.
Beckenbauer was slender, dressed in a casual jacket and chinos, all smiles. He wanted to talk about Germany’s bid for the 2006 World Cup. I listened politely, and didn’t hear anything he said. When he finished, I put to him the far more important subject of whether or not he thought England would have beaten West Germany in the 1970 World Cup quarter-final if Charlton had stayed on the field. He replied, “Ja, I think maybe it was mistake to put Bobby off the field. Bobby at this time was really great player. When he left, it was good for us. I felt more comfortable. I could now play.”
It was a thrill to meet Beckenbauer, an honour to meet Charlton. He was stocky, dressed like a corpse in a three-piece suit, sad-faced. He made minimum effort to talk about England’s bid for the 2006 World Cup, and became animated when I put it to him that England would have beaten West Germany in the 1970 World Cup quarter-final if he had stayed on the field. He answered: “Well, you never know, do you? You might be right. You might not be. I was one of the older players then and I was rested, hopefully for the next match. I didn’t have a next match as it turned out. Never played for England again. So…”
Manchester United football legends Denis Law (l) Bobby Charlton and George Best (r) pictured in 1995. Photo / Getty Images
Franz Beckenbauer (left), Sir Bobby Charlton and Jurgen Klinsmann on a visit to New Zealand. Photo / Martin Sykes
He paused, and that wise old face (he was only 60) seemed about to dissolve into tears, his breath nearly gave out; it nudged against small words, trying to push them into sound. “Anyway. There you go. That’s life. One of the few disappointments. Haven’t been many.”
This, coming from the man who survived Munich, seeing the dead bodies of his teammates in the snow; he was 19 years old. “Bobby Charlton appeared alongside me,” his teammate Bill Foulkes remembered in The Team That Wouldn’t Die, a full account of the crash. “I asked if he was all right. He just stared and looked vacant. Then a stretcher was put down. And another. And another.”
Charlton went home a few days later. He was still whole. His glory days as a football player were to follow. “A shot from Charlton,” wrote Arthur Hopcraft in his 1968 classic The Football Man, “is one of the great events of the sport… the power of it is massive and it erupts out of elegance.” It is the mystery of timing, as Matt Busby said. To watch Charlton “hit the ball with a great thump and for great distances” on the black-and-white highlight reels is to marvel at something even more mysterious. He has a quality about him – his movements, his balance, the elegant way he carries himself – that seems transcendental. Millions of people across the world have been deeply moved this week by his death. We farewelled a ghost.
