Climbing the Himalayas
Twice Over

Klára Muhi in Conversation with Tamás Almási

 

During the Cold War, Western and Eastern Europe carried hostilities over to the arena of sport. Perhaps its most potent symbol was Ferenc Puskás, a legendary footballer of the 1950s and 1960s, captain of the Golden Team as it is called in Hungary, or 'Mighty Magyars' as they were dubbed by the English newspapers after their famous 6:3 victory over the English national eleven in 1953. The goalscorer of the century was stranded abroad amid the turmoil of the 1956 revolution, but he soon picked up a new career by signing for Real Madrid. Many Hungarians never truly forgave him. Tamás Almási recently brought out a 117-minute documentary about the man known affectionately as 'Öcsi' or 'Kiddo'.

Klára Muhi: You made Puskás in response to a commission, but your personal passion for its subject is palpable—and the film has had a good run at the box office, too.

Tamás Almási: Sometimes I'll be driving back home and find someone sounding their horn, and there are three people I've never seen before hanging out of a car yelling "Your Puskás is great!" No award can beat that. It is rare for me to get asked to do something by a producer. I'm almost ashamed that I didn't get the idea first: I adore football and have played since boyhood. For me, Puskás has been 'Öcsi' ever since.

Puskás was still alive when you started on the film; your job can hardly have been easy.

This did complicate things. The invitation came in January 2006, by which time it was impossible to interview him as he was no longer able to speak. Clearly, had I been able to talk to him a very different film would have emerged. Most likely I would never have taken on the job since I'd have had to confront many ethical issues and problems of authenticity. Puskás had been suffering from Alzheimer's, and, although his family and doctors have a different view, the fact is he had already started to show the first signs of it—or at least a severe memory disorder—in the 1970s. It would have been difficult to reconstruct this fantastic career if Puskás had been able to contribute, since he would have barely been able to relate the basic facts.

The film is very discreet about Puskás's illness.

We did not include a single shot or archive material that was humiliating or even slightly dubious—and we have plenty such footage. Such as "Öcsi" going with his male nurse to a football stadium named after him. By this time the illness was advanced, and he just dribbles a ball when all of a sudden it bounces away. This helpless man stretches out a foot for it as if he were thirty of forty years younger. As an active football player, it broke my heart. For a long time we kept that clip as a rough cut, but then I dropped it, even though it looked like a possible ending. But then there was another picture which sprang to mind the moment I was asked to do the film. I had heard that Öcsi's hospital room overlooked a football pitch, and my thought was that I could use that as an opening for the film: an elderly man, someone we could not see too clearly but can sense it is him, looking down over some boys playing on the pitch and seeing them as himself when he was a boy. I have around 6,500 digital photographs, and I found a superb one from the 1930s which admittedly doesn't show Puskás himself but, with a bit of careful support from the soundtrack, nevertheless conveys what I would like to get across. I decided to bring back that sequence to close the film as well.

I didn't get the feeling that the film needed a live interview.

Extracts from his letters and diaries were a major resource in building up a picture of Puskás's personality. It was no easy matter getting hold of them. Apart from the family, there are three collectors of the correspondence. It was typical of him that he wrote regularly for years on end to people that he did not know; who had nothing to do with money or politics, and, in many cases, not even with sport.

They are simple, artless, honest letters with a sprinkling of spelling mistakes...

You must remember that Puskás only finished six years of primary school and most of his adult life was spent abroad where he had no need to write in Hungarian. His writing was copperplate and his thoughts were lucid. He was well aware of his own position.

Comments in letters to his friends about Hungary's political transition in 1989–90 are thought-provoking.

"It's good that this change of regime is with us; but why the tearing hurry? Things that we couldn't sort out in 40 years, we now want to in a year of two!"

But the old regime—which here he seems almost to defend—did him a lot of harm. In 1956, at the end of a successful tour in South America, he was placed in a position where he did not dare return to Hungary. He was banned from playing at the very height of his career.

Puskás never played politics. The film includes a Party assessment dating from the 1950s which is quoted as saying: "He is unwilling to recognise the leading role of the Soviet Union." But whoever we spoke to—fellow footballers, family members, foreigners or Hungarians—said that it was impossible to talk politics with Öcsi. He just was not responsive. He never beat his breast, claiming that he had been driven away from his homeland. The film includes an interview that he gave to the Italian RAI TV channel in which he was explicitly provoked to say something bad about Hungary. All Öcsi said was that life had changed a lot since he left, and as he was living abroad he was unable to make a judgement about what was happening.

Maybe he didn't play politics, but he was a beneficiary of politics on many occasions. After all, any career as a sportsman in the Stalinist climate of Rákosi's Hungary in the early fifties was part and parcel of being in the Party's good books. Where did he get that instinctive talent, or indeed the sheer guts, to be able to chat to politicians, who in other contexts were figures of terror, as if he were speaking with his pals?

Puskás soon became a star among those he associated with. He grew up in Kispest close to the local team's football ground. His father was a football coach, and Puskás's talent already stuck out a mile when he was a boy of six or seven. On top of that, Öcsi was big-hearted by nature. I chose not to put this in the film, but he was prepared to take a sweet from his mouth and offer it to someone else, and he would also divide up a slice of bread and dripping. As a kid he got used to being waited on hand and foot. When he was just 10 or 12, the local tradesmen paid to have a pair of football boots made for him, because just before and after the war, in the 1930s and 1940s, it was the local butcher, shopkeeper and baker who provided the financial backing for many teams. Öcsi would get regular pocket money, and all the while the other lads adored him. A kid like that can have a heart of gold, but he also gets used to being entitled to all that because of his talent. In some way this explains why he was able to deal just as naturally with a figure like Mihály Farkas, the feared Hungarian Minister of Defence, as he did with a Spanish minister or a chimney sweep who lived next door. Puskás simply had no interest in differences of rank.

It's very odd that he almost unfailingly landed in some dictatorship or other; or is this just the result of some editorial slant that runs through the film?

There's no denying that when I read through the story of his life this was the first thing that struck me. Puskás was a coach in a huge number of countries; the Arctic and Antarctic must have been just about the only parts of the earth where he had not been employed. After the Rákosi regime in Hungary, his first new home was Franco's Spain, then in the Seventies he moved to Greece when the colonels were in power. Then in Egypt, for instance, Puskás could

only come third with his team because matches were fixed in favour of the teams of the police and the military. And he worked in Pinochet's Chile and Paraguay, which were also dictatorships at the time.

The most dramatic point in the film, as far as I'm concerned, is in 1956, when Puskás has to kill time in no man's land, in Vienna. He was banned by UEFA from playing competitive football for two years following pressure by the Hungarian authorities. Puskás did not collapse under the strain. On the contrary, he used the time to lose weight and become fully fit, miraculously regaining top form.

After he emigrated, he told a journalist: "In Hungary I was a celebrated, wellknown, pampered star; here I am an anonymous nobody." At 31 years of age, already overweight and in a foreign country he had to start everything afresh— past his zenith. There really is hardly any parallel for that in the whole of football history.

Your film doesn't go much into the relationship between Puskás and Hungary after 1956.

After Puskás left in 1956, they kept quiet about him in Hungary. They virtually air-bushed him out of the national consciousness; they simply ignored his

existence when he was at his peak. Then they very deliberately distorted news about him. One of the bases for that manipulation was an interview in the seventies by András Sugár in which Puskás, who by then had been living outside the country for around 20 years, was undoubtedly speaking Hungarian with a slight accent. On top of which the reporter questioned him about the legendary Hungarian victory at Wembley, and Puskás is heard saying: "That six-... , six-... , anyway, when we beat the English..." The 6–3 score just did not come to mind. It was entirely typical of the situation at the time that before it was broadcast the interview was shown to a member of the Politburo responsible for information. It was given the nod; obviously they knew that it was the best possible counter-propaganda against a former hero who was detested by the Kádár regime. The interview was broadcast and the whole country loathed Puskás. There was purportedly a commentary that was prepared which claimed that Puskás no longer liked his homeland, had forgotten how to speak Hungarian and so on. So a whole generation grew up only knowing him in that light. For people now in their thirties and forties, who were not alive during the fifties and have no knowledge of the circumstances in which Puskás left the country, the image of Puskás has been subject to major manipulation. "We stayed here, at home, out of a 'thirst for adventure', while he lined his pockets and forgot Hungarian on top of everything." It is a monstrous lie, but that was what Puskás got from his first appearance on Hungarian TV.

Puskás and the powersthat- be—it's a big subject that your film has no wish to dwell on.

In the 1950s, the leadership was very keen to collaborate with Puskás, but he only did so as far as was absolutely necessary. He never kowtowed. Then a period of hushing-up, fabrication and dirt-throwing followed. In the 1980s and 1990s all those who had betrayed him and hated him began licking his boots. They started using him in really cheap marketing for just about anything. It's a wonder he wasn't asked to do bras as well. Öcsi, of course, was the sort who would go anywhere he was invited—he was 'crazy' like that; straightforward and honest. I have shots that if I had put them in the film would have made the whole country curl up in shame. By the 1990s millionaires would invite the by then very sick Puskás to their places, seat him at the head of the table and carry on with their business as usual around him. I used none of that footage because I had come to understand in the meantime that this would make it a film about Hungary rather than about Puskás. After the film's first screening, some people asked why there was nothing in the film about the time when he worked for the Hungarian Football Association including two years as Manager of the Hungarian Eleven, and I told them that it was because it would have shown us all in a poor light.

He was buried here in Hungary, but the burial has also been left out of the film.

And three of our cameras were there to record it. With huge ceremony, he was given a state funeral in St Stephen's Basilica in Budapest on 9 December 2006. The government ordered a national day of mourning, and the funeral was covered live by several TV channels and radio stations. But again, to have used any of that would only have served the cause of mundane politics, and in any case would have turned it into a grim farce.

Why?

Well, wasn't it? I try to imagine Puskás himself watching his own funeral, holding a glass of spritzer and just laughing out loud. The name Puskás is the most widely known Hungarian word in the whole world: like it or not, it is a Hungarian hallmark. I was well aware that whatever I might do, it was in some way going to be a film about public perceptions, simply because it was about Puskás. My ambition was to present a fantastic career, which was also a hopeful one; a kind of symbol that this too was possible. The plot of Öcsi Puskás's life could hardly have thickened better if it were a Hollywood script: the hero faced up to the demons of his fate and he won. Many of my films have their heroes facing up to their demons and dying. This in itself might be the subject of a film; after all, this is Hungary's history: the recent past. What is more, where there are no winners to show, or if there are, it turns out within two minutes that the winner is really a loser, or a traitor.

One thing the film makes clear is that Puskás truly had no wish to leave Hungary, but in the confusion after the 1956 revolution he was essentially stranded outside the country.

That was how it was. Around 200,000 people left Hungary in 1956—some because they had taken part in the revolution or had worked for the secret police, but some simply because they were fed up with leading a life like that. Öcsi Puskás, on the other hand, had a passport and was abroad with official permission, as a sportsman. For a year and a half he killed time in Vienna, with a two-year ban hanging round his neck. He had serious thoughts of going back to Hungary, but he had been downright humiliated personally, with all sorts of malicious lies spread about him. Newspapers wrote that, as team captain, he had not divided up the money they had been given fairly. His basic sense of honour would never have allowed anything of the sort. Anyway, the other members of the Golden Team had been banned, too, but any who returned home were allowed to play six weeks later. Even so Öcsi, by then a striker for Real Madrid, gave serious thought to taking part in the 1958 World Cup as a player in the Hungarian national team.

Not all the things you have just said are apparent from the film.

There were a lot of details that I decided not to include because I wanted to do a portrait of a man of very special qualities, with a god-given talent for sport, rather than to make a simple soccer film centred on him. What I was investigating is what it is that turns an individual into a topos, a byword. There have not been all that many who grew up on Hungarian soil and had qualities that could vie with Puskás; maybe the middleweight boxer Laci Papp, another man with a big heart, who never played politics but who was nevertheless treated very shoddily by politics. Unlike Puskás, Papp was not able to reach the very top—or, to be more precise, he was not allowed to do so even though in 1956, when the rest of the Olympic boxing team stayed outside the country in Melbourne, he was the first to return to the Western Train Terminal in Budapest. It could be that he was not quite as open to all-comers the way Öcsi was; but then, by choosing to live abroad, Puskás was able to learn to accept other cultures and customs. He learned the language of all the teams he was associated with. Once, as they were preparing for their eighty-second trip to Chile or Paraguay or Saudi Arabia or Egypt, his wife Bözsi would ask: "But Öcsi, why there?" He would always say: "Bözsi, there are people there too." And because he was liked everywhere he went, Puskás was perfectly well able to be the most Greek of Hungarians, and also the most Spanish of Hungarians. What is worth keeping in mind is his positive approach. One of the biggest curses of public life in this part of Europe is an unwillingness to believe in ourselves and our successes. There is a general failure to believe we can do anything, but nothing will work without that. Öcsi, by contrast, firmly believed in winning, and he was able to pass on that conviction to the whole team. His openness, his faith in victory, and just the way he was able to sustain his god-given gift and still remain human, because there are many who trip up on that—those are the three things that governed the style, the material and structure of my film.

Why do we feel Puskás to be so totally Hungarian, despite everything that was done against him in Hungary? He hardly lived in Hungary; was of ethnic German parentage; and, as far as I learnt from the film, his grandchildren don't even speak a word of Hungarian.

What we really ought to ask ourselves is who can truly call themselves a Hungarian in this once multinational country, where the ethnic ties are so mixed in every family. Not long ago I was abroad watching Hungary play Malta, and the supporters in one section of the ground put up a huge banner which read '100 per cent Hungarian.' I just chuckled to myself: that's exactly why I think Puskás, who was a German, a Spaniard and a Greek as well as being a Hungarian at heart, sets an important example.

One of the Greeks you interviewed had half-seriously traced Puskás's ancestry to being a cross between Zorba and Odysseus.

Yes, indeed. Marvellous! That is why those words were put at the end of the film, because it is so typical of how Puskás was seen around the world.

I haven't got a clue about football, but another thing that struck me was just how magical football was in times gone by. Péter Esterházy has written that an era vanished along with Puskás, because he was not a star in the sense that we now understand it but more of an extraordinary character.

That sort of football really has had its day. What we have these days is more in the nature of entertainment. Footballers nowadays are more a sort of gladiator. Football has changed a lot since Puskás's time, but, in my view, it is still able to mimic the world and the society around it. I would like to make a documentary specifically about this, using people who have something to say about the relation of football to society and of football to history. The heyday of football really began in the 1930s. Then radio, film and the press all lent a hand to boosting its popularity, which is part of the reason why it had such a powerful impact in Hungary in the 1950s. And don't forget, in the Socialist states it had a big role in building up a country's image.

Puskás would have provided good material for a feature film. Did you ever consider that? A pure genius gets stuck abroad, outside his own country, at what is truly a historic moment, and the thing that is tragic for him is at one and the same time a stroke of luck.

I doubt I could make a good feature film from that; I am still too close to the figure to be able to conceptualise him in those terms. I can almost hear him talking. The way I'm sure others do. Anyway, something that would be very close to my heart would be a very Hungarian feature film, with lots of sociology and history, but that would simply be over people's heads elsewhere.

Are you quite sure that Puskás was the world's greatest footballer of the fifties and sixties, or is that just something Hungarians like to believe?

I think it would be more accurate to say he was the greatest football personality. After all, there were a number of other real geniuses with a ball: Pelé, di Stefano, Maradona... But as a person and footballer combined Puskás was the greatest, I'm quite sure of that.

You also have Pelé, the greatest living footballer, saying some words.

Yes, he contracted to give us twenty minutes, but as it turned out it was difficult to get him to stop after 40 minutes. In fact, Puskás apart, I think he is pretty well the only one who is able to carry off his legendary status with real grace. But Puskás was even greater than Pelé precisely for the reason you have already alluded to: he was able to reach the peak twice over. Climb the Himalayas a second time. To reach the summit twice over, that's almost incredible.

 

Klára Muhi
is a film critic and member of a research team for media and film pedagogy. She is a partowner
of and co-creator at Inforg Studio, an experimental and avant-garde workshop.