The PlayerBy Jonathan Vankin
Reprinted from Metro: Silicon Valley's Weekly, July 9, 1992.Page 3
MARINER'S GOAL AGAINST HUNGARY helped to rehabilitate his relationship with England's Wembley fans. They tolerate little short of total English supremacy, and on a team which, in Bob Harris' analysis, "was struggling to find an identity ," the supporters needed an outlet for their frustrations. They enjoyed deriding Mariner, despite--0r perhaps on account of -his status as the nation's best center forward.
"Sure, they got on me back once or twice," he shrugs. "But it's part of the game. If you go through your career with everybody saying, 'Well done, lad!' then I'd probably still be playing. But it doesn't happen in life and that's why you've got to have a strong constitution.
"Of course it hurts. If you say that it doesn't hurt-everybody wants to be loved. But fuck it. It's history now."
Not long after his moment of magnificence against Hungary faded from British tabloids, Mariner noticed a twinge, then a sharp pain, stabbing the backs of his feet. By January of 1982 he had operations on both Achilles tendons. The World Cup was a few months away. It's going to pass me by, he feared.
The England team sent him to Cambridge University to work with trainers who had him sprinting, leaping into long-jump pits and steeling his tender heels for an eventual game day. "Those guys got me supremely fit. It bloody killed me, mind you. But they did it." Mariner responded by matching an English record for goals scored in consecutive international games, six, including two in the World Cup tournament. "I'm proud of that, because it was really hard work. But hard work doesn't bother me," Mariner sniffs. "It's just par for the course as far as I'm concerned."
In his career, Mariner was "capped" 35 times, which means that he played for England in 35 games. Each time a player appears in an international game he receives a cap.
The pain recurred after he transferred to Arsenal. He skipped his first game, against Liverpool, and the injury plagued him for his two years there. "You think, 'I can run it off,' but you can't get rid of it, in training, in matches. So it was a bit of a let down. It was on and off all the time I was at Arsenal. It was a great shame."
While he wrestled with his own injury , Mariner found something amiss on the Arsenal squad. The manager, Don Howe, was a rigid disciplinarian.
Mariner enjoys that trait in a coach. Not all of his teammates were likewise amused. A few of them were arrested for drunk driving, and Mariner felt that Howe was unjustly blamed for their misbehavior. Then, Arsenal advanced to the quarterfinals of the FA Cup and traveled to York City , a third division club which in a true meritocracy wouldn't have been permitted on the same surface as Arsenal.
The pitch at York was icy. Arsenal controlled the game, but couldn't score. There were two minutes left, and Arsenal was content to play out a draw, then meet York again at Arsenal's Highbury Stadium to, Mariner promised, "give 'em a smackin'."
Steve Williams, playing his first game for Arsenal, was fighting a York player for the ball at midfield, and the going got rough. The players continued to scuffle down the field, toward the Arsenal goal. Williams clearly wanted to flatten the guy. Unfortunately, he waited until they'd reaclled the penalty area to do it. York was awarded a penalty kick, popped it into the net and Arsenal, disgraced, was bounced from the FA Cup.
Howe raged.
"They had had blazing rows," Mariner said in a newspaper column, after Howe was forced to resign. "Don had filled him time and again and had also given him the biggest rollicking of his life after that Cup game at York. "
Williams, to his credit, was first on the phone with condolences to Howe after the manager quit, according to Mariner's column. But Mariner suspects that certain "big name" players on the squad snuck behind Howe ' s pack to the board of directors and ratted him out.
Something was amiss as well in the stands of England's football grounds. The sport has always been associated with violence, but until the early 1970s the violence was an outgrowth of English fervor for game. Attending a football match in England, and in much of Europe, is not comparable with a day at the ballpark in the United States. Only next season will the English Football League require clubs to play in all-seat stadiums. Huge numbers of supporters stand on the terraces, literally locked into wire pens, jammed shoulder to haunch like calves in a veal farm. The sway and rhythm of the game sends tangible, irresistible, physical waves through the penned-in mass. There are no passive spectators. The crowd chants, sings and often, fights. The football stadium is not a place one goes to be comfortable.
In the '70s the fighting changed in a sinister way. It was no longer spontaneous; numerous "firms" (so called after the Kray twins East London crime "firm") assembled across the country -- little mafias, loyal to their teams, but organized for the purpose of perpetrating mayhem. In 1978, the year Ipswich won the FA Cup, Mariner was on the field for the Cup quarterfinal at Millwall, a stadium appropriately christened "The Lion's Den," which the league had closed three times in years past due to crowd violence. Ipswich won, 6-1, but there had been altercations among opposing supporters before the game. Reportedly, Millwall' s management failed to adequately separate the two teams' fans. The clashes continued. With the score 1-0 near the end of the first half, Millwall supporters stampeded across the field to attack Ipswich fans. Police with their nightsticks joined the riot. The players were sent off for 18 minutes. Thirty people were arrested (22 from Millwall) and 45 were injured.
Afterward, a fuming Bobby Robson spoke to reporters:
"To think we fought the war so that hooligans like these could survive! These people are not human and have no place in society. They will kill the game."
"Unfortunately, you just worry about your own safety ill that situation," says Mariner. "After that game we got back to our bus. We didn't have a window in the bloody thing."
The violence crested in the mid-1980s. On May 29,1985 John Wark was playing for Liverpool in the finals of the UEFA Cup, against Juventus, an Italian side. The game was played at Heysel Stadium in Brussels.
"We knew what was going on," Wark recounts. "Our dressing room was right near the section. We could hear all the screaming. They came in and gave us reports of how many were dead. After that we had to playa game." About 45 minutes before kickoff Liverpool supporters, many with Union Jack kerchiefs covering their faces Jesse James-style, had rushed the Italians' terrace. The melee killed thirty-eight people, mostly Italian, mostly suffocated or crushed. Four hundred and thirty-seven more were injured. Once agam, throughout England, came dire pronouncements that football was soon to die.
Around that time, Paul Mariner and a group of his Arsenal teammates made several visits to a youth detention center where bands of hooligans, tattoos up and down their arms and even on a few foreheads, were locked up.
"We tried to go in and give them our point of view, how they' re destroying our livelihood," he says. "'Cause they love the game. They pay thousands of pounds to go and follow their team. We'd say, 'Do you watch the games?' 'Well, we watch a bit of the games but we go for the fighting.' I said, 'Yeah, but you're going to destroy the thing you love most.' "It opened my eyes. There's some really wild guys. But you talk to them one on one or in a little group session -- even though they didn't support the team I was playing for, they hated me, they appreciated my skills. So there was a common ground. I don't know if they got any better for it. I certainly did."
MARINER BECAME A TEMPORARY LONDONER while with Arsenal. The Lancashire boy who'd grown up to live on a Suffolk farm emerged as a figure on the swinging social scene, hanging out at jet-set clubs in the West End. But as his playing career edged towards its conclusion, Mariner became domesticated. Arsenal transferred him to Portsmouth, a second division club. He was 34, but he still played on the front line. It took him 11 games to score his first goal. At the end of the season, with Portsmouth fighting for promotion to the first division, Mariner went on a tear, seven goals in nine games or something like that, and Portsmouth moved up.
In the meantime, Ali Mariner, a former teacher, was scouting schools in Portsmouth for their two sons (a third was not far behind), and finding little to her liking. The Mariners resolved to school the children at home. Paul handles math. Ali takes on English. When Mariner took his job in San Jose, the whole Mariner clan trailed not far behind The Blackhawks put them up in a townhouse near the Milpitas line. The Mariners still school their three sons (Danny, George and Joe, ages 8,7 and 4) at home.
"There's good backup in England. There's a thing called Education Otherwise. There's a lot of people in our area that do it. It suits us at present. It suits our lifestyle. Because I wouldn't want to be here and they not be with me. It's hard. I like them to be with me," says Mariner.
Home schooling was probably a wise decision, because the Mariners , existence was about to become increasingly peripatetic. When Paul Mariner retired in 1988, he and a partner started a sports agency called First Artists.
"I put my phone book in, he put his check book in."
Using Mariner's contacts, First Artists cut its first deal. They contracted to represent England's national team. That's a big score. At the time, two or three weekends per month, Mariner was flying to Malta. He had agreed to play games, but not practice with, a team there; another lucrative proposition. Paul Mariner was turning into a yuppie. His Lancashire-forged will withstood injuries, booing and contract squabbles, but he couldn't take that. "I found out that I didn't like going to people and asking for sponsorship money. I wasn't cut out for it," he says. "Then the travel was getting me down. I was leaving the house at six o ' clock in the morning and not getting home until nine at night. I was hardly seeing the children, which is a major worry to me. It just culminated in losing weight. I was looking ill. "
Ali asked him if he'd taken a recent peek in a mirror-. "Not really," he said. "I haven't had time."
"Well take a look at yourself. I think you're doing too much."
It was late springtime. At the headquarters of England's Football Association, First Artists held a party to premiere its new instructional soccer video, starring four players from the national team. Soccer notables from the far-flung reaches of the game attended the screening. One was John Bramley, head coach of an American team in Albany, New York.
"He recognized me and he said, 'What are you doing now?' I said, 'Nothing. I'm doing nothing. I'm just working this business and to be honest I'm not really enjoying it.
"'He said, 'How'd you fancy coming to America to play in the summer.' I said, 'I'd love to.' That was it, as simple as that."
"Deep down, soccer's in your blood," Mariner says, patting his midsection as if, by referring to "soccer" he was indicating his own physical being, his guts, his DNA. "I thought, 'I'm really missing the game. I've got to take this opportunity to go and play in the States.' So I went to me partner and said, 'Look, I want to take the summer off and go and play in the States.' I said. 'To be honest I'm not enjoying myself. Don't have any fear of me starting another company because I don't like the business."'
With that, Paul Mariner began his career in American soccer .