From David Beckham to Tiger Woods to Maria Sharapova, today's top athletes have great skill, great fame, interesting private lives and of course eye-opening paydays. And yet, their stories all seem to fade to a kind of celebrity humdrum when you compare them to Bert Trautmann. Now there was a life!
Trautmann, who died Friday at home in Spain at 89, was best known as the goalkeeper for Manchester City from 1949-64. That stage of his career tends to obscure the earlier and later phases of a life which, taken together, would hardly be credible as fiction.
A Luftwaffe paratrooper in the Second World War, Trautmann fought on the Eastern Front and in France. Captured by the Russians, he escaped, a historian of Man City recounted; later, captured by the French resistance, he got away again. Finally, as he was fleeing US captors, he stumbled into a British soldier who greeted him cheerily: "Hello Fritz, fancy a cup of tea?"
Soon he was playing football in a prisoner-of-war camp in England, and by 1949 he was Man City's goalkeeper. In that long brilliant career, he was most famous for the 1956 Cup Final, which he finished in pain, not realising that he had broken his neck in the 75th minute.
When his playing career ended, he managed in England, Germany, Burma, Tanzania, Liberia and Pakistan. Match all that, David Beckham.
