When Diligence Catches Up with Time

You have to admit it: Klose — the man who once threw a front flip with such effortless grace — has grown old. When that goal which will surely go down in history, the one that ties Ronaldo’s World Cup record, finally went in, the exuberant front flip became a landing on his backside. But this little interlude only earns a brief sigh before your full attention returns to the goal itself.

As far as Klose is concerned, I’m a fake fan. I can’t remember ever sitting through even one full club match of his, and I have no idea where he went or what he did after his dazzling turn in 2002 — even at the South Africa World Cup, the tournament that made me fall completely for him, I didn’t know he was already 32 before it kicked off (I’d assumed he was in his twenties).

Fake fan or real, it doesn’t stop me from rooting for Germany while fervently hoping Löw will put him on — earlier, and then earlier still. Against Portugal, with the match so lopsided in Germany’s favor, Löw kept Klose nailed to the bench until he had used up his last substitution. I can’t imagine what Klose felt in that moment — bitterness, desolation, or anxiety? After all, he was a single goal away from Ronaldo’s record, and the opponents were down to ten men and being routed. What a glorious moment for padding the stats?

But a record-tying golden goal can’t arrive on such a mediocre stage, as mere icing on the cake. It wouldn’t mean much, it’d be too flat, and it would scatter on the wind. Klose — who won’t even take penalties, clinging all the while to the pride of a “true striker” — probably didn’t want his record handed to him as icing either. And so came the call to duty against Ghana, and a first touch that produced a near-decisive goal so easy it needed only the gentlest poke of a toe — had that point slipped away and the opponents taken all three, how terrifying the outcome would have been.

When Chen Huailin tells the story of NetScreen, he always says, with a wistful air: “Old soldiers never die; they just fade away…” Klose is like that — tournament after tournament, seeing off one old comrade after another, releasing the last of his light and heat. This is almost certainly his last cup: we surely won’t see him in Russia, and the European Championship in France is basically out of the question. So: play one match as one match, score one goal as one goal. Fading away and blazing brightly need not conflict.

While watching the South Africa World Cup, I kept wondering — where did all the strikers of his generation go?

Inzaghi, born 1973, retired in 2012.

Del Piero, born 1974, is now far away in the A-League.

Ronaldo, born 1976, retired in 2011.

Van Nistelrooy, born 1976, retired in 2012.

Shevchenko, born 1976, retired in 2012.

Raúl, born 1977, is now panning for gold in West Asia.

Even Owen, born 1979, retired back in 2013.

And Henry, Trezeguet, Rivaldo…

Every striker of his generation seems to carry a bigger name than he does. Even at the instant that record-tying goal went in, the phrase that popped into my head was: a classic Inzaghi-style poacher’s tap-in. And if you look back at his 14 previous World Cup goals — roughly half with the head, half with the foot — there’s the Klinsmann-style leaping header, the Raúl-style close-range finish, the Vieri-style shove-the-defender-aside-and-blast-it, even the Ronaldo-style dribble out of a crowd of keeper and defenders before rolling it into an empty net… All of which shows how little “self” Klose has — set against strikers of sharply defined character, he seems a little short in every department. If I had to name a reason for that gap, the only one I can think of is talent.

No denying it: his talent really was inferior to that of his peers. While his contemporaries were dazzling the world before twenty, or in their early twenties, he was twenty-four before he luckily set out on the road of a top-flight league. In an age when a player of twenty-nine or thirty was already routinely called a veteran, the time left to him was in truth not much — but he made up for all of it with diligence.

I can’t find any news of him training at four in the morning the way Kobe did; I can only quietly infer that he never stopped working to improve himself. Compare his performances at the 2002 and 2006 World Cups: the raw kid who could only score with his head became a man who could score with head or either foot, from anywhere. Against Ecuador, he even dribbled around the keeper.

Diligence made him complete, and it also kept his top-flight career from screeching to a halt in his early thirties, stretching it all the way to the venerable age of thirty-six. In fact, he ought still to be a core player at Lazio (I haven’t watched Serie A outside of Juventus matches in a long time, so I’m not certain) — otherwise you can’t explain why Löw, a manager who loves fielding young players and has devoted himself to a “youth storm,” would still bring along this old man whom even Götze could call “Uncle.”

I’m so obsessed with Klose — I suddenly became a die-hard fan during the last World Cup — precisely because of this diligence, this “old soldiers never die” spirit. Sometimes I think it has a great deal to do with my own age. The 70ers ahead of me are already bowing out one by one, while the 90ers behind me are turning aggressive. For a society as a whole, the gaps of the previous generation determine the gaps in talent of this one — if quality of life, breadth of vision, and the like count as part of talent. The 50ers had their golden years wrecked by the Cultural Revolution, and by the time reform and opening-up arrived they were tangled in too many obligations; the 60ers happened to catch the restoration of the college entrance exam and were in their prime, unencumbered, when reform arrived. So where their children — the 80ers and 90ers — stand at the starting line, or, if we just talk about talent, is vastly different. At Tuke Circle, I’m constantly struck by the enormous energy of several of the pre- and post-90s people on my team — barely out of college, and already able to hold down an entire area for a startup on their own. Sometimes I pull them aside and say, “By the time you’re my age, you’ll certainly have achievements far beyond mine” — both proud of them and quietly bucking myself up: “If I don’t get moving, they really will leave me far behind.”

And so a man like Klose suddenly became a monument of my own, a totem. If you don’t have talent, you still have diligence; if you don’t have opportunity, you still have time. As long as you’re willing, a man in his thirties can still work as hard as a man in his twenties, quietly guarding his own dignity, quietly waiting for the chance that belongs to him.