JERZY DUDEK’S PERFORMANCE ON MAY 25, 2005

I’D LIKE TO TELL YOU A STORY of joy and wonder and stupidity. It’s a sports story, and I’ve been thinking about it because I am writing to you from May 2020, a moment when sports have—for the first time in my life—stopped.

I miss sports. I know sports don’t matter in the scheme of things, but I miss the luxury of caring about stuff that doesn’t matter. The late Pope John Paul II is reported (probably falsely) to have said, “Of all the unimportant things, football is the most important.” And I yearn for the unimportant things at the moment. So here is a football story that begins in southern Poland, only about sixty miles from where Pope John Paul II was born.

It’s 1984, and a gangly ten-year-old coal miner’s son named Jerzy Dudek is living in the tiny coal mining town of Szczygłowice. The mining company has organized a trip for miners’ spouses to go underground and see where the miners work. Jerzy and his older brother, Dariusz, wait outside the mine with their father, as Renata Dudek journeys thousands of feet down into the mineshaft. When she returns, she starts kissing her husband, crying. Dudek would later recall, “She called us over and said, ‘Jerzy, Dariusz, promise me you will never go down the mine.’”

Jerzy and his brother just laughed. “We were thinking to ourselves, ‘Well, what else are we going to do?’”

By then, Pope John Paul II, whom young Jerzy idolized, was living in the Vatican, a couple of miles away from Rome’s Stadio Olimpico, which that year hosted the finals of the European Cup, a big soccer tournament now known as the Champions League, where all the best teams in Europe play one another. That year, the final pitted hometown club AS Roma against my beloved Liverpool Football Club.*

Liverpool’s goalkeeper at the time, Bruce Grobbelaar, was eccentric even by goalie standards. He warmed up by walking on his hands and hanging off the top of the goal. He often drank a dozen beers on the team bus after a Liverpool loss.

But Grobbelaar is best known for that European Cup final in 1984. The game went to a penalty shoot-out in which, for some reason, Grobbelaar decided to feign wobbly-legged nervousness as one of the Roma penalty takers ran up to shoot. Put off by Grobbelaar’s spaghetti legs, the Roma player skyed his shot over the crossbar and Liverpool won their fourth European Cup.

Back in southern Poland, young Jerzy Dudek loved football, although leather balls were hard to come by in his impoverished community, so they usually played with rubber balls or even old tennis balls. He ended up becoming a goalkeeper because he was tall, but he didn’t start out especially skilled at the position. His first coach told him, “You dive like a sack of potatoes.”

By seventeen, Dudek was in training to become a miner, and as part of his vocational training, he worked in the coal mine two days a week. In many ways, he liked the work. He enjoyed the camaraderie in the mine, the feeling of mutual reliance. The mine company had a football team, and Jerzy began playing for them. He couldn’t afford goalie gloves, so he wore his father’s work gloves. To make himself feel like a real goalie, he drew an Adidas logo on them. He got better, stopped diving like a sack of potatoes, and by the age of nineteen, he was making just over a hundred dollars a month as the goalkeeper for a semipro team while still working for the mine company. But by twenty-one, his progress had stalled. He would later say that he felt himself melting “into the grayness.”