A New York giant from the Valleys who made Pele cry...
GIORGIO CHINAGLIA rocks back in an armchair and talks about the celebrity fans who followed him at the height of his fame in New York.
He reels them off name by name, each and every one straight out of a Who’s Who of 20th- century Americana, from Muhammad Ali to Henry Kissinger, Robert Redford to Barbra Streisand, Frank Sinatra to Steven Spielberg.
And then he tells of what happened when Mick Jagger hitched himself to the Cosmos bandwagon as arguably the glitziest of their soccer groupies.
‘When Mick came into the dressing room, somebody said, “Who’s that?”,’ Chinaglia says, rolling his eyes to the heavens. I said, “Are you nuts? That’s Mick Jagger, you moron’’.
‘We got along just great. Not long after, I met up with him again in Bermuda when he was on his honeymoon with Jerry Hall.
‘I went to Frank Sinatra’s wedding and to one of his birthday parties. It was great to see all these statesmen, movie stars and singers watching us play.’
In 2006, the Italian police wanted to question Chinaglia over allegations of money-laundering but, at his trans- atlantic home in the chic Floridian resort of Naples a year ago, he was in his element.
Producer Steve Groves and I met him by appointment down on the Gulf of Mexico to make a programme for BBC Radio
Wales, the story of an immigrant boy who graduated from the second row of a school rugby team in Cardiff to become a superstar of first Italian, then American soccer.
Chinaglia — pronounced Kin-al-ya — could justifiably lay claim to having been soccer’s first truly global rock star and reinvented himself as an outspoken pundit on a New York soccer radio show, where he was never short of stellar guests.
‘I speak to Sir Alex (Ferguson) all the time,’ he said. ‘He is a good friend, so is Bobby Charlton. Jose (Mourinho) rings me up.’
And when the word got round of his death on Sunday at 65 a few days after heart surgery, Sir Alex was among the first to call the US radio station with his condolences.
Others, including Mourinho, Manchester United chief executive David Gill, his Chelsea counterpart Ron Gourlay and the Italian great Roberto Bettega, followed suit.
Chinaglia’s Naples interview proved every bit as outrageous as his reputation, not least as the man who supposedly made Pele cry. As the favoured son of Steve Ross, president of Warner Bros, who owned the Cosmos, Chinaglia (left) ran the show. Coaches were hired and fired largely on the sayso of a boy who learned how to fight his corner when the family moved from Tuscany to an inner- suburb of Cardif f , where papa Chinaglia, Mario, got a job in a steelworks.
Not long after the Cosmos added the Brazilian to their constellation, Chinaglia had the nerve to do what nobody had ever done before and tear Pele off a strip.
‘We hadn’t done well in the last game,’ said Chinaglia. ‘I took 18 shots at goal and five times I hit the post. I was unlucky but Pele says to me, “You shoot all the time”. I said, “Yes, I shoot all the time because that is what they pay me for. I am Chinaglia, the one and only. You shouldn’t be standing next to me. You should be on the left side and then you will do better with more assists”. Pele was the best player in the history of soccer but that wasn’t going to stop me giving him a piece of my mind.’
Legend has it that Pele left the dressing room in tears, not that Chinaglia, whose nickname at the Cosmos was ‘The Godfather’, would have batted an eyelid.
For all his fame and notoriety in Rome with Lazio before New York and the Cosmos, Chinaglia never forgot the early days in Wales and a troubled apprenticeship with Swansea Town, as they were then, which ended, like a lot of other things, in a bust-up.
Because of his reputation, no British club was interested in signing him so he and his family moved to Italy, where he played for two Serie C teams, Massese and Internapoli.
He joined Lazio in 1969 and played 14 times for Italy before a row with the coach Ferrucio Valcareggi at the 1974 World Cup finals ended his international career. He signed for the New York Cosmos in 1976 and scored an amazing 242 goals in 254 appearances.
His rebellious streak might have served him well had he stuck with the original plan at secondary school to become a second-row forward.
‘I had one game of rugby at school in Cardiff,’ he said. ‘I didn’t want to grow up with big cauliflower ears so I said never again. Back then there were fights in the schoolyard at least twice a week — the Welsh boys against the foreigners. Then one day I had a fight with one of the teachers.
‘They sent for my mother and she’s screaming at me, “You’re a disgrace”. After the cane, they told me I would be expelled, which I would have been if it hadn’t been for the soccer teacher. “No,” he said. “You can’t do that. He’s the best player we’ve got”.’