Amy Lawrence
WHEN World Footballer of the Year George Weah considered boycotting an exhibition match in America, it was no prima donna tantrum.
Weah’s motives to pull out of a game were based on global emotions. When he presses his talented feet on to a football pitch, he is as much ambassador for Liberia as he is attacker for AC Milan.
It was this overwhelming sense of dual purpose which ultimately persuaded Weah to don his boots in the United States, albeit against his principles. They had turned their back on his stricken homeland, displaying apathy towards an ailing nation which he couldn’t understand or accept.
But Weah’s head ruled his heart: “With all the problems we’ve got at home, I have always got to remember to go out on the field and do my best whenever I can, so that people will say, `George Weah, Liberia’.”
His movement on the football field speaks eloquently for African footballers, his voice away from the pitch pleads the cause of his war-ravaged country. “I am not a politician,” he says, “I just have strong feelings for my country I cannot hide.”
Weah’s dedication to promoting his devastated country extends beyond preaching and playing. He is benefactor, as well as captain, of Liberia’s national team.
He dips into his own pocket to provide kit for the squad, air fares for exiled players, and match-winning bonuses to inspire his colleagues – as if playing alongside the most popular man in Liberia isn’t incentive enough. (After all, not many 30-year-olds have a set of postage stamps released in their honour.) When his country appeared in its first African Nations Cup, a proud Weah was in tears.
He estimates he has spent 20% of his earnings in European football on his family and friends, and monthly phone bills home cost several thousand rands.
For Weah, personal wealth is not as important as spiritual health. When Arsne Wenger brought the 22-year-old powerhouse of potential from Cameroon’s Tonerre Yaounde to Monaco in 1988, Weah stuggled to balance enthusiasm for his personal break with fears about the broken land he was distanced from. “I didn’t know whether my parents were alive or dead,” he recalls.
His mother went to Ghana as part of an exodus of refugees and was looked after by the family of Abedi Pele, playing down the road at Marseille. Wenger had brought another three Liberians to France to help Weah to settle and the four friends would stay up at night listening to the BBC World Service for the precious little information which seeped through the news blackout. “It destroyed them all,” remembers Wenger. “George didn’t play well that year.”
Painting out a career against such a distressing backdrop, moving forward while retaining your roots, took tremendous mental strength. Wenger speaks warmly of his protg: “He was really determined to be successful and had a strong belief in his quality. But at the beginning nobody thought he could be somebody because he was a bit clumsy and slow.” Every week Weah would tell his manager he wanted to play, and every week the reply was that he had to wait and to work on his development. He was raw, and Wenger laughs at the memory of his debut: “A disaster, he was absolutely useless.”
Some months later he had a run in the team which, in Wenger’s eyes, established him as the best player in the world at that time. His form owed much to an instant rapport on the pitch with Glenn Hoddle. “We played with only defenders plus Hoddle and Weah and we scored four goals every time,” recalls the man now picking the team at Arsenal.
Wenger plays down repetitive speculation that Weah might join his new team, perhaps in the summer when Ajax’s brilliant young striker Patrick Kluivert is expected to move to Milan. Perhaps even sooner if the powers that be at the San Siro take a dim view of his alleged butt last week which left Porto’s Jorge Costa with a broken nose. It will be surprising if the Italian champions allow such an important player to leave, especially as it took them long enough to find a man capable of filling Marco van Basten’s boots.
On the opening day of this season’s Serie A scudetto, Weah reaffirmed his position as Milan’s supreme striker with one of the finest individual goals ever seen. Weah carried the ball from one goalmouth to the other, bypassing eight Verona opponents, in 14 seconds. It wasn’t only Italian observers who were hysterical in their praise. Weah celebrated in typically modest fashion by enjoying a quiet dinner with team-mate Edgar Davids.
Away from football he is unassuming and unaffected by the trappings of stardom. When he was crowned Fifa World Footballer of the Year in January, he invited his mentor Wenger on to the stage and gave him the award. “That was a symbol of his generosity,” says the Frenchman.
Weah only wishes other international figures could join in the spirit of giving he finds so natural, notably Bill Clinton. America, having created Liberia in 1847, is a nation powerful enough to quell its increasing capacity to self-destruct through brutal civil war.
“Every Liberian looks up to the United States,” says Weah. “What have we got to show for it? Nothing. If I could speak to Bill Clinton, I’d tell him that America has just not been fair to the Liberian people. To make us believe in democracy and human rights, the United Nations should go in and take over. The alternative is just letting us die as a people.”
Like a modern-day Muhammad Ali, Weah is as motivated by injustice as sport. The reigning African Footballer of the Year also devotes time to Unicef programmes, and returns to his roots as often as possible. A footballer last sold for $10-million can be seen in the streets of Monrovia, surrounded by swarms of Liberians, wearing jeans and a Bob Marley T-shirt. He knows he is an inspiration simply by going there. But that isn’t enough.
While the killing continues – it is suggested over 200 000 people have died during seven years of fighting – and hunger and poverty still afflicts his compatriots, “George Weah, Liberia” will persevere on the field, with football, and freedom, in mind.