The night air is close to the freezing point. A ball crossing the goal mouth takes a deflection off a defender’s shin and spirals into the air, wrong-footing every player but one.
Park Ji-sung is already airborne. The ball is behind his back, yet somehow he twists his body like a corkscrew, arches his back, strains his neck muscles. His looping header is the only goal of the game as Manchester United beats Arsenal, 1-0, on Monday to go atop England’s Premier League.
The cameras pan from Park to a small knot of men in the crowd of 75,000.
Park is one of Asia’s most recognized athletes. But the men acclaiming his goal are from the other side of the world, from another culture.
They are survivors of the year’s most touching story: the Chilean mine rescue. Twenty-three of the 33 men who were brought to the surface after being trapped underground in the San Jose mine for 68 days this year were Manchester United’s guests this week. The miners, now celebrities, enjoyed the view from the directors’ box of soccer’s Theater of Dreams.
Sure, there are commercial reasons for inviting them. They posed in the replica shirts of United’s main sponsor, the risk management and insurance company Aon. They also represented Chile’s biggest wine maker, Conchay Toro, which also happens to be United’s official wine partner.
But why not invite them? There are heartfelt reasons for this good-news story. For all that the United and Arsenal players are multimillionaires, it is still possible to trace a direct line between the sport and the mining industry that few of us would choose to work in.
When the miners arrived in Manchester on Sunday, they were invited to a reception held by Sir Bobby Charlton, England’s most famous player – more famous and for longer than David Beckham, who also showed up at the stadium on Monday.
Charlton was born into a coal mining family. His father was a coal cutter. His mother was from a family of miners and soccer players, the Milburns.
And it was his mother, Cissie Charlton, who encouraged her sons, Bobby and Jackie, to go all the way in the game by winning the World Cup in 1966.
When Bobby Charlton, now a director of Manchester United, addressed the Chilean miners, he was in awe of them rather than the other way around. The Charltons have experienced mining disasters, and Bobby told the survivors: “I can’t believe you are the same people the whole world dropped everything for. You took it in your stride, and everyone around the world is very proud of you.”
Proud of them for staying alive. Proud of the rescuers who went down into the bowel of that collapsed mine to bring them up one by one. Proud to give the former miners a night of a lifetime at Old Trafford.
I am privileged to know how deep this connection runs. I know Bobby and Jackie. I knew their uncle, Jackie Milburn, a great yet truly humble Newcastle United goal-scorer. And I listened for hours to Cissie Charlton in her home in the mining community of Ashington, in northern England.
Actively involved well into her 70s, Cissie loved nothing more than passing on the knowledge, or rather the addiction, of soccer skills to seven-year-old boys in her neighborhood. She never forgot the day Manchester United’s soccer scout Joe Armstrong came to her during a school game and said, “I don’t want to butter you up Mrs. Charlton, but your Bobby will play for England before he is 21.”
Play for England he did, 106 times. His older brother Jack – taller, coarser, a defender and destroyer rather than a serene creator like Bobby – never played for Manchester. But he did rise, through sheer determination, to play for England 35 times.
They went their separate ways to the same pinnacle in the one and only English team to win a World Cup.
For the Charltons, and for many miners’ sons in the 1950s and '60s, sports was the escape from hardship.
It still is. David Villa, now a World Cup winner and a Barcelona player, is the son of a Spanish miner. Villa was the first player to send soccer shirts he wore down to the San José Mine when the rescuers established contact with the men underground.
The invaluable message that soccer also requires hard work is the maxim of Alex Ferguson, the veteran manager of Manchester United.
On Sunday, Ferguson, another man risen from industrial roots to a knighthood for his services to sports, will pass the record for longevity as United’s team manager and coach. A predecessor, Matt Busby, was in the hot seat for 24 years, 1 month and 13 days.
Busby built and rebuilt United out of the rubble of World War II, and then again after the 1958 Munich air disaster that killed two-thirds of his “Busby Babes” lineup. Busby, and Bobby Charlton, survived that tragedy. And Busby, too, had strength of character hewn out of a mining background.
Ferguson was different. His father was a tough, principled trade union representative in the Glasgow shipyards.
That still drives Alex Ferguson. You could see it, hear it, in the way the gaffer welcomed the Chilean guests to his training camp on the outskirts of Manchester on Monday morning, allowing those of them who felt up to it to join in the session. “These are people who showed real substance and perseverance to make sure they survived,” Ferguson said on the club’s television station. “They are examples in life you should always take note of.”
Nearing his 69th birthday, still at the cutting edge of sports management and with no intention of giving up his job, Ferguson knows a worker when he sees one.
Park Ji-sung, the Korean known throughout the sport for his prodigious effort and energy, rose above a mediocre stalemate between two of England’s giant clubs on Monday. Scoring is not normally his game, and scoring with his head is as rare as it gets for a player who willed himself to be a top pro.
Park’s mother and father were factory workers in the metal industry. Their very famous son was often rejected by soccer clubs in his childhood because he was too small.
The persevering Park was the perfect match winner to set before the VIPs from Chile.