Cruyff in D.C.: When the game’s greatest midfielder played in the U.S. capital

I remember my introduction to Johan Cruyff very well.

It came in May of 1994. I was an awkward 14-year-old studying abroad, living at my family’s house in Las Matas, outside of Madrid. One day my great aunt Esperanza stuck me on a commuter train headed into the city. What I saw there cemented my love of soccer forever.

Standing in the lower level of the Bernabeu — there were no seats in those days — I watched Cruyff’s Barcelona dismantle Real Madrid. Even to my uneducated eye, Cruyff’s teams were simply different, playing with a fluidity and grace that rewired my teenage brain every bit as much as hearing Nirvana’s “Nevermind” for the first time, or watching Twin Peaks. Hristo Stoichkov, Romario, Michel Laudrup, Eusebio — they were all manager Cruyff’s implements, sharpened and expertly wielded by the Dutchman from the technical area. His teams were unstoppable. 

On worn-out VHS cassettes, my classmates at the time also introduced me to his exploits as a Barça player in the ’70s. He flitted across the TV, leggy and graceful in the midfield, ever-present, always calculating, always directing. Why, I wondered, did the Atlético de Madrid teams I watched every week not have a player like this? I had yet to learn that there was only ever going to be one Johan Cruyff.

I learned, too, that Cruyff had played a short spell in the United States, in the North American Soccer League, from 1979 to 1981. This seemed impossible. I’d spent my summers at A-League games in Nashville, Tenn., a few hundred of us watching players plod about on a high school field. I had never even heard of the NASL until I discovered Cruyff. 

It was 15 years later, when I moved to Washington, D.C., that I dug into Cruyff’s American journey in earnest. I spoke with dozens of his teammates, part of a larger attempt at cobbling together an oral history of the NASL’s Washington Diplomats. Mostly, though, it was a selfish play, an excuse simply to talk about Cruyff with people who had shared the pitch with him. Some of those players spoke about Cruyff with affection, others in less flattering terms.  

But all of them spoke with reverence. Over the years, through their stories, it feels as though the color has been restored to the Johan Cruyff who lives in my mind, rescued from the washed-out images that survive from the 1970s. Every conversation provides another detail to the picture of Johan Cruyff in the District that I have been assembling. 

And yet knowing that story is different from believing it. Every time I drive by RFK Stadium — now a forlorn mass of steel and crumbling concrete destined for the wrecking ball — I have to shake my head. In spite of all the pictures I’ve seen and anecdotes I’ve heard, it requires a defiance of logic, the kind of refusal to bend to reality in which the Dutchman specialized, for me to believe that the greatest midfielder in the history of the game once played here.

Steve Danzansky, the former owner of the Washington Diplomats, is always happy to talk about Johan Cruyff. Even at 80 years old, his memories of the Dutchman are vivid and full of detail. It was Danzansky, in 1980, who convinced Johan Cruyff to come to Washington after a year with the Los Angeles Aztecs. Seated at his kitchen table, a warm smile washes over his face as he describes having dinner and drinks with Cruyff at Tiberio, the Italian restaurant in D.C.’s K Street corridor where he pitched him on a move to the nation’s capital.

Cruyff arrived in the United States in May of 1979. It was the most unexpected of detours. He had originally intended to retire after a 14-year career at Ajax and Barcelona, but decided to press on after a series of terrible business ventures — most notably the loss of millions on a pig farm — forced him back to work. Stateside, the NASL had become a league of choice for aging megastars like Pele, Franz Beckenbauer and George Best. Cruyff would follow. 

(Photo: Peter Ruplenas)

His destination was obvious. The Aztecs were helmed by Cruyff’s mentor, the father of Total Football itself, Rinus Michels. They purchased Cruyff’s rights from the New York Cosmos, whom he’d played with in a series of exhibitions in 1978, and brought him out west. Hours after touching down in L.A., and having never trained with his new team, he walked onto the pitch at the Rose Bowl, scored a pair of goals in seven minutes and led the Aztecs to victory. Cruyff would be named the league’s MVP in 1979.  

But the Aztecs, who had been hemorrhaging money for years, had seen enough of him. Cruyff’s salary — $500,000, some $1.7 million in today’s market — was a near unheard of sum in American soccer during the late ’70s. Only Pele and Beckenbauer’s wages were comparable. The Dutchman’s fate was sealed when the Aztecs were sold to Mexican broadcasting corporation Televisa.  

“They weren’t the slightest bit interested in paying a Dutch player $2 million,” remembers Danzansky. “They wanted Mexican players to help develop their brand in southern California. They were eager to do a transfer to us.” 

Clear across the country, the Washington Diplomats had meddled on the periphery of D.C.’s sporting landscape for years. Crowds at RFK had been up and down, with the club averaging about 13,000 fans in 1979. There were days when Danzansky felt as though the full weight of soccer’s potential success in the District of Columbia rested squarely on his shoulders. He recalls standing on the field at W.T. Woodson High School, the club’s home until 1977, in a downpour, looking up at about 300 people in the stands and wondering why he was even doing this. 

For once, though, the Dips were poised to emerge from the shadows. The club had just been purchased by Gulf and Western, which seemed ready to make a sizable investment. For years the Dips had lusted after the success of the Cosmos and a handful of other franchises. They flew west to meet Cruyff and his representatives, and gauge his interest. Two weeks later, Cruyff boarded a Gulf and Western private jet bound for the capital.  

Months earlier, the Aztecs had bounced the Dips from the playoffs, with Cruyff scoring the game-winner with a jaw-dropping run through the final third that left four Dips defenders on their backs. After the game, then-club president Sonny Werblin lamented D.C.’s lack of interest in soccer.  

“This city doesn’t deserve a superstar,” he said after Cruyff’s visit drew a meager 15,000 fans to RFK. Now, with the Dutch legend in his sights, his tune had changed. “When you have apples you like apples,” he told the Washington Post. “When you don’t have them you don’t like them and you tend to say you don’t need them, either.”

At Tiberio, Danzansky, now the team president, launched into his pitch. There was a problem, though: Every time he got going, he was interrupted by the restaurant’s busboys, waiters and cooks approaching the table to ask for an autograph or a photo.

“People say he came here because of the pig farm,” says Danzansky nowadays, “but it wasn’t that. He had simply done everything else. He understood that having soccer emerge in the U.S. — and in D.C. — was important to the game globally. So he said yes.” 

Cruyff didn’t come cheap. The Dips paid a $1 million transfer fee — $3.6 million in today’s dollars — to the Aztecs, and absorbed his $500,000-per-year salary, as well. And he wasn’t the club’s only purchase. They brought on fellow Dutch midfielder Wim Jansen, Cruyff’s teammate at the 1974 World Cup, and Spanish phenom Juan Lozano. All told, it was a $4 million outlay.

The future of the Diplomats, though, rested almost entirely on Cruyff. 

“I can still remember meeting him so well,” says former Dips defender Don Droege. Even over the phone, you can feel him smiling as he recalls his introduction to Cruyff. “I thought to myself, ‘We just won Soccer Bowl this year. We are going to win the whole thing.’” 

Droege had reason for optimism. Though the Dips were struggling to connect with fans, they were coming off the best season in the club’s six-year history. The team was led by a handful of English, Scottish and Irish players who had earned a reputation for bone-crushing play on the field and can-crushing exploits off of it. Joining them on the roster were a collection of young, raw Americans like Droege and Sonny Askew, a curly-haired teenager from Baltimore, as well as South African forward and fan favorite Kenny Mokgojoa.

(Photo: Tony Quinn)

While the Dips had been successful in 1979, they had not been an elegant team to watch. Their kick-and-run approach came from head coach Gordon Bradley, an Englishman who had played for and coached the Cosmos. It took only a few games of the 1980 season for it to become clear that Bradley’s no-nonsense style not only made him incompatible with the team’s new star, but was in fact an affront to Cruyff’s beliefs about how the game should be played.

“British soccer at the time was just absolutely brutal,” recalls Danzansky. “You bash heads, you beat up people, and that’s that. It was just… rough-hewn. Johan was more of a Pele type of player, but without any of Pele’s gentleness. He sort of had this Germanic rigidity and discipline. He expected only greatness.”

Under Rinus Michels, Cruyff’s playing style was based on the adaptability and interchangeability of players undergirded by their personal responsibility for switching positions and tracking opponents. Bradley’s game was an entirely different animal. All of this is driven home to great effect in a pamphlet I came across years ago entitled “Soccer Tips with the Dips,” in which a few Diplomats prattle on about their roles on the field. Alan Green, a forward, says his role is, “obviously, to score goals.” But Cruyff? His answer reads as if it was generated by a Johan Cruyff bot: 

In Los Angeles, Cruyff had sat deep in the midfield and directed traffic. The Aztecs were not Ajax, but under Michels’ direction, they played an uncommonly attractive style of soccer, at least by NASL standards. In D.C., Cruyff did his best to usher his teammates about, but nobody would listen.

“Every game,” recalls Askew, “the same thing. He’d raise his arms, right there on the field, and just scream, ‘Somebody do something!’ At some point I think he called us a Sunday school team.”

“When the board bought Cruyff, they should’ve bought a few bales of cotton, too,” Dips forward Bobby Stokes said at the time. “To stick in our ears.” 

Danzansky understood Cruyff’s predicament.  

“He was brilliant,” remembers the former owner. “Total soccer was no accident. He was tough, mean and direct. He was like an orchestra conductor with perfect pitch: When a violin goes off-key, it drives them crazy. They hear things, they see things, that ordinary human beings simply do not. I’ve only run across two or three people like Johan, who are just driven insane when something is off. When a guy would go right instead of left, it drove him crazy because it’s like something in that movement is out of key. The notes, on the field, were all wrong to him.” 

Cruyff did not limit his expressions of displeasure to the playing field. The Dutchman formed a unique bond with the Washington Post’s John Feinstein, who became his microphone of choice.  

(Photo: Peter Ruplenas)

“It became almost a ritual, if they lost,” recalled Feinstein when I spoke with him in 2016. “I’d say, ‘So Johan, what happened out there?’ He’d say, ‘What happened? The coach is an idiot. The players don’t know what they’re doing and they don’t fucking listen to me. This is impossible.’ That was what he’d always say: ‘This is impossible.’” 

The next day, when Feinstein’s story appeared in print, Bradley or a team staffer would chide Cruyff, who would then needle Feinstein for reporting his complaints.

“Johan would come up to me and say, ‘Why did you put this in the paper?’ and I’d say, ‘For crying out loud, I had my notebook out!’ And then when practice was over, especially on the road, he’d just come up and say, ‘So where are we going to dinner?’ All was forgotten.”  

Two months into the season, Cruyff had yet to score a goal in a Diplomats uniform, and the press at home and abroad had labeled Cruyff a has-been. In D.C. proper, many fans had already written him off, and the Dips along with him.

Cruyff eventually grew tired of Bradley’s reliance on the longball and defensive brutality. The coach’s insistence on holding two-hour-long training sessions under the D.C. sun didn’t help, as Cruyff had been dealing with nagging injuries all year. So Johan Cruyff put Bradley under his thumb, as he’d done with so many other adversaries during his career.

Before an early-summer game against the New York Cosmos, Cruyff grew so frustrated with Bradley’s tactics that he stormed up to his coach’s chalkboard during a pre-game meeting and erased his directions — right there in front of him — and proceeded to draw up his own gameplan.

“I still remember talking to Gordon before (that) ABC game of the week,” remembers Droege. “We were in the bathroom. He was looking underneath all the stalls to see if Cruyff was in any of them while he was talking to me. He was just scared of him.” 

Others, too, felt Cruyff’s wrath, most notably Askew. In 1979, he’d been a revelation for the Dips, earning himself a spot on the U.S. national team and a slew of endorsements. Askew was a pacy, balls-to-the-wall winger with a tendency to try shit — far from the composed, easily-manipulated chess piece Cruyff would have preferred. Ahead of a game against the Fort Lauderdale Strikers, Cruyff instructed Bradley to pull Askew from the starting XI. 

“One of the worst things, in my whole career, was a comment I made in Fort Lauderdale,” says Askew. “Things were going well, and I fly to Fort Lauderdale, and I’m not in the XI. And to this day, probably the thing that I regret most was me raising my hand and saying ‘I’d like to know who picked this fucking team’ to coach Bradley. Because I wasn’t in it. ‘How could you bench me?’” 

“He looked at me,” says Askew, “and said, ‘I’m sorry. My hands are tied.’”  

Askew spoke up. But others fell in line, like forward Tony Crescetelli, who scored 15 goals in 19 games, largely benefitting from Cruyff’s masterful service.

(Photo: Tony Quinn)

“There were a few guys who just didn’t listen,” Crescetelli says. “There were a few that just did not care about him at all. They thought he was a bigmouth, a loudmouth, Mr. Know-Everything. Listen — you don’t become the best player in the world without talent. You listen to that talent. Insecurity is a thing you create for yourself. I wasn’t insecure. I knew who he was. I watched him play.”  

Besides, Crescetelli adds, “I knew if I didn’t listen to him, I’d put myself on the bench, basically.” 

Cruyff made his changes. In a way, too, he gave up a bit on Total Football for the rest of the year, becoming a more singular player, though he did have trust in a few teammates — Fellow Dutchmen Thomas Rongen, Jansen and the like.  

“I thought my job was to organize the team when I came here,” Cruyff told Feinstein in June of 1980. “Sure, I could score goals. I’m not worried about that in the slightest. In fact, that’s what I’m going to do now. Forget about organization — I’m going to play spectacularly now. I’m going to play football for the spectator. We’ll start winning games. But no championships. If you want to win trophies you have to play organized.” 

Even at 33, Cruyff was a sight to behold. He went from a non-factor in the first half of the season to an absolute dynamo in its latter stages. The Dips were catapulted, in some respects, by a gutsy performance on June 1 — a shootout loss to the Cosmos that perfectly encapsulated the very best and very worst of their Dutch captain.  

Cruyff opened the match by hammering home a header from 16 yards, but the referee called it back after determining that Dips forward Alan Green had obstructed the goalkeeper. Cruyff, who had terrorized just as many officials as opponents in his career, earned a yellow card for his protest.

After 45 minutes, a nagging hamstring injury sidelined Cruyff for the remainder of the game. He emerged from the locker room for the second half wearing a full Puma tracksuit — the Dips were sponsored by Adidas, but this was of little significance to Cruyff, who sometimes masked the Adidas logo on his Dips kit with a patch bearing his own initials — and offered some very pointed thoughts to ABC’s Verne Lundquist in a sideline interview. He then proceeded to supplant Bradley on the touchline, barking orders at his teammates from the technical area for the rest of the half. 

Even after being removed from the pitch, Cruyff couldn’t help himself. He earned a red card midway through the second half for racing around the perimeter of the field to argue with a linesman. 

“He got thrown out of the match for being nasty to the refs,” remembers Danzansky, “and he always said, when I asked him why he went after them so bad, he’d say, ‘I’m not arguing with the referee. I am teaching him about the game of soccer.’” 

The Dips lost the match, but to Danzansky, soccer had potentially made it in the nation’s capital. A crowd of 53,351 fans — the largest ever to watch a soccer game in D.C. — did the convincing.

Weeks later, against the Seattle Sounders, Cruyff scored what is widely considered the second-greatest goal in NASL history (behind George Best’s dizzying run through the box a year later), galloping through midfield and leaving a series of defenders in his wake, before calmly slotting the ball to the far post. Four decades on, it is still electrifying to watch. 

“I remember the goal vividly,” says Rongen. “I was behind him, sort of moving up the field with him, and he starts dropping like six or seven guys. He picks the ball up in his own half, you know. I was also on the field for George Best’s goal — which he said was the best goal he ever scored — but Johan came from even deeper in his own half and just split two guys.”  

“His sense of acceleration and fluidity with the ball was simply incredible,” Rongen adds. “He was one of the guys who was faster with the ball than without it. Not too many players in the world can do that. (Cristiano) Ronaldo can do that. (Lionel) Messi can do that. But neither of them have Cruyff’s kind of beautiful, graceful acceleration.”

The idea that Cruyff was washed up when he came to America is simply preposterous. He was still among the best midfielders in the world, and arguably could have still topped that list. After his spell with the Dips, he’d go on to return to the Netherlands and win three consecutive league titles with Ajax and Feyenoord.  

Even in training, Cruyff was mesmerizing.

(Photo: Tony Quinn)

“I hung out basically with Bob Iarusci and Carmine Marcantonio, two Canadian players,” remembers Droege. “We’d start out and take corner kicks where nobody is in goal, and we’d try and curve it in. We’d go back and back further, making it harder and harder. Cruyff would be watching us. He’d laugh. He’d take (the ball) from, say, four feet behind the goal, juggle it, kick it on the volley from behind the goal, and it would curve around and go in. We’d just laugh, like, ‘man, come on!’ He made what we were doing look like child’s play.”  

The Diplomats rolled into the playoffs. They won the first game of a home-and-away series against Michels’ L.A. Aztecs in the opening round. But when the Dips headed to L.A. for the second of those matches, they were eliminated in agonizing fashion. The referee waved off what would’ve been Washington’s winning goal as the clock expired, ruling that the ball hadn’t crossed the goal line before the clock hit zero. In the ensuing shootout and mini-game, the Dips folded.

The team had chartered a red-eye home from Los Angeles. Players and coaches were spread out across the plane, some sleeping, some lost in contemplative reflection. In the back of the plane, Cruyff and Rongen sat together with a few other teammates. Cruyff drank his customary glass of red wine — just one glass — and smoked like a freight train.  

“We got on a people mover (when we got back),” recalled Feinstein, who was along for the ride. “And as we’re pulling up to the terminal, you could see there were a couple hundred fans there, waiting to greet the team. Johan and I are in the back of the people mover, and he looks and sees a band — they’re playing and the fans are cheering for the team as they get off.” 

Cruyff was confused. Turning to Feinstein, he said, “Don’t they know we lost?” 

“In Europe,” continued Feinstein, if there had been any fans waiting for you, you’d be calling the police for protection. He couldn’t grasp that they’d cheer for the team if they’d lost.” 

(Photo: Peter Ruplenas)

Indeed, Cruyff enjoyed his life in Washington, D.C., free from the constant pressure associated with a mega-club like Ajax or Barcelona. Danzansky remembers house-hunting with Cruyff and his wife Danny, winding through the streets of Georgetown and Chevy Chase before finding a place not far from where the Obamas and Jeff Bezos live today. In Barcelona, Cruyff and his family had survived a kidnapping attempt, and eventually purchased a pair of massive Dobermanns for protection. In the United States, they quickly realized they didn’t need them. 

Rongen remembers the Cruyff home well, as he lived in its basement. He rode with Cruyff to training every day, oftentimes on bicycles. The pair would return home together immediately after games. Danny eventually asked Rongen why he wasn’t going out on the town? “You’re 22,” she said. “Go have a good time.”

Later that week, Rongen did just that, staying out until the wee hours with his teammates and staggering home drunk. He swung the door open to the Cruyffs’ place, where he was greeted by the two Dobermanns, ready to turn him into a late-night snack.

“So I ended up going around the house and I fell asleep in their backyard,” Rongen says. “I get woken up by a man, and he goes, ‘Do you live here?’ I said I did, and he says, ‘Are you all right?’ I told him I had a bit of a headache. He goes, ‘All right, let’s go have a cup of coffee.’ So I walk in the house, and he goes, ‘This is my sister, Eunice Shriver.’ I go, ‘OK, Ms. Shriver, good.’ A few hours later, I go to Johan and say, ‘Who are the neighbors?’ and he says, “Those are the Kennedys.’ That was Ted fucking Kennedy.”  

Cruyff was unquestionably happy in America. Free from the glare of the international media and an adoring legion of fans, the Cruyffs ate out nearly every night in D.C. “Because they could,” says Rongen. “That would’ve just been impossible elsewhere.” And it was in D.C. that Cruyff first felt the inspiration that would lead to his foundation, laying the groundwork for decades of philanthropy. Cruyff led post-game clinics for children in D.C., and oftentimes on the road, as well.  

Adults benefitted from his knowledge of the game, too. Once a week, he would drive up Wisconsin Avenue to film a segment for a local television station, in which he’d do his best to educate the populous on the game of soccer. “I encountered a world of extremes in the NASL,” Cruyff wrote in his memoir, My Turn. “On one hand I had to perform at the top level within a professionally run organization; on the other hand I fronted a television program in which I first had to explain to viewers how big the pitch was, that the pitch was green and what the lines were for.” 

Cruyff formed an uncommon bond with Andy Dolich, the general manager of the Dips, a man who would go on to win the World Series as an executive with the Oakland A’s. Studying Dolich, Cruyff learned the business side of soccer, a skill he’d use to great effect later in his career. “Thanks to my experiences with people like Dolich,” wrote Cruyff, “I know the football sector from soup to nuts. I know what a player thinks, I know what a coach thinks, I know what the sponsors think and I know all the pros and cons of those three elements coming together.” 

“America gave me three beautiful, instructive seasons with the Aztecs and Diplomats,” Cruyff continues, “during which I was able to take stock of my life. It was an enormously rewarding time.” 

After the 1980 season, Cruyff and his Diplomats embarked on a tour of Asia. They played before sellout crowds in Japan, Hong Kong and Indonesia, “which was a former colony of the Netherlands,” says Rongen, “and played in front of 80,000 people.” 

Cruyff, who had just completed the first year of a three-year deal and felt at home in the District, was set to return in 1981. That changed the moment they landed back in D.C.

“We got back, we’re literally walking off the plane, and there’s somebody from the front office that tells us, ‘Sorry guys, there’s no more franchise. Sonny Werblin and (Gulf and Western) pulled out. You’re on your own,” says Rongen. 

(Photos: Peter Ruplenas and Tony Quinn)

Cruyff had succeeded in making the Dips relevant in D.C.; the team averaged nearly 20,000 fans per game in 1980, beating the league average by nearly 5,000 fans per game, and setting the high mark in the club’s six-year history. On the field, he had drawn the club within seconds of making its deepest-ever playoff run. But the disease that afflicted the NASL, and soccer as a whole in the U.S., could not be cured by one man.

Cruyff had suitors — among them English club Leicester City — but he eventually retreated to Spain, where he played a forgettable and injury-plagued spell at second-division side Levante. Before he left D.C., though, he summoned Feinstein for one final meeting.

“I went and met him at the Four Seasons, where he was staying, and we had lunch,” Feinstein recalled. “I was doing kind of a wrap-up story on his year. So we have lunch, do the interview, and after lunch he says, ‘I have something for you.’”

Cruyff produced a box from beneath the table.

“Inside it was one of his jerseys,” said Feinstein, his voice tinged with emotion. “So obviously, the tradition in soccer is that you give your jersey to your opponent at the end of the game, out of respect. And he said, ‘You deserve this. You were a worthy adversary.’ I never thought of myself as an adversary. I still have the jersey, which I cherish.” 

Cruyff was not entirely done with the United States. In 1981, the Diplomats were resurrected by English broadcaster and Coventry City chairman Jimmy Hill, who relocated the Detroit Express to D.C. and slapped the Dips logo on them. The endeavor was a catastrophe from the start, and would end with Hill fleeing on a late-night flight back to the U.K., leaving a slew of unpaid wages in his wake.

Johan Cruyff, though, was roped back in, brought in midseason after recovering from yet another injury. In six appearances, Cruyff notched a pair of goals for the forgettable Dips.  

Yet even Cruyff’s American denouement produced lasting memories for his new teammates. English midfielder David Bradford had made the move from Detroit and now found himself rooming with Cruyff on the road.  

“(Head coach Ken) Furphy put me in a room with him; I think he was trying to get me a bit more professional or whatever,” remembers Bradford. “Because Johan, he’d have one glass of wine after the game, wherever we played, and then he’d say, ‘David, I’m going to bed.’ So I’d say, ‘OK Johan, I’ll see you later.’ And then I’d walk in the room later and it would be full — I mean full — of smoke. It was like you were on fire or something. Because he was a chainsmoker.” 

“I used to say, ‘Holy shit, Johan, can you not stop smoking?’” says Bradford. “And he’d say, ‘No, it’s fine David. You drink, I smoke.’” 

Cruyff did eventually quit, giving up smoking for good in the ’90s. Bradford grows somber when recalling the memory; Cruyff would die of lung cancer in 2016. He perks up a bit, though, when he offers his final recollection of his ex-teammate. 

At halftime of a game against the Toronto Blizzard, Cruyff sat at his locker chain-smoking, as he so often did during breaks in play. “He turned to a group of us,” says Bradford, “and told us that (Toronto’s) keeper had been playing off his line the entire game. He told us he was going to punish him for that.” Early in the second half, Cruyff collected the ball in his own end, galloped toward goal and sent a chip sailing over the keeper’s head and into the goal. In a recording of the strike, you can see Bradford on the edge of the frame, slowing his run. Years later, he remembers doing so because, as he puts it, “I knew exactly what he was going to do.” 

“It’s my fondest memory of him,” says Bradford. “How could you ever forget it? I got to play with fucking Johan Cruyff. It was ridiculous.” 

I tried, over the years, to arrange an interview with Cruyff. At the end of my chats with his teammates, nearly all of them would ask me to give Johan their best if I ever spoke with him. I came close, but my email exchanges with his assistant dried up in February of 2016. When he died a month later, I understood why. Cruyff’s passing affected me in a way that few deaths have, perhaps even more than the deaths of some people I actually knew. 

Afterward, I began to collect a few of his things, including a game-worn Dips jersey from the 1980 season. It hung in my closet for years, until I looked at it sometime in 2018 and realized there was a better place for it. I packed up the jersey and sent it to the National Soccer Hall of Fame, where it is now displayed. I have other bits and pieces as well, gifted to me by his teammates over the years. My favorite piece of Cruyff’s gear came to me through Steve Danzansky. Last year, months after our interview, he asked me to swing by his house. When I arrived, he placed in my hands a beautiful Adidas travel bag emblazoned with the Diplomats logo.  

“This was Johan’s,” Danzansky said. “Or maybe it was Gordon’s? I can’t remember.”  

Back at my house, I took a closer look. I found the number “14” scrawled in faded Sharpie next to the logo. I unzipped the bag, and the stale smell of cigarettes wafted out, probably 40 years after its last use. I can’t be certain, but I’m fairly sure I know who it belonged to.