The evening Beckenbauer dined with the ’86 champions and Grondona thought there was an intruder at the table

When the World Cup Germany 2006 He had promotion commitments across the planet in his countdown, Franz Beckenbauer He arrived in Argentina with a delegation from FIFA. He Kaiser He was part of the organizing committee and was one of the few to have lifted the Cup both as a player and as a coach.

On the agenda was a comradely dinner with exclusive guests: the coach Carlo Bilardo and several world champions since 1986. The core of people who have access to those areas, the elite. And also Orestes Katorosz, the unclassifiable. The then president of the Argentine Football Federation (AFA) Giulio Grondona, he thought he had snuck in, but when he saw the hug Beckenbauer gave him, he became suspicious. At least until he stumbled upon it.

“What did you do the other day, how did you manage to attend Beckenbauer’s party?”Grondona asked Katorosz the first time he met him. “We are known”he told him in a completely normal way and showed him the photo that immortalized him with the Kaiser in a Cosmos training session.

“At that moment I felt like I was an intruder, because at that meal there were all the number ones, the greats. And suddenly Franz saw me, greeted me, not with a full hug, but with that half hug that takes you by the side. He stood up and we posed for the photo. They asked me to pose for the photo, for the promotional… And here is the photo”, he recalls and gives proof of it Clarion.

Katorosz’s life has that, the ease of being on both sides of the line that divides celebrities from ordinary people. It cannot be placed on one side or the other, it would be a mistake. It’s in both. How can someone who hasn’t been a footballer take part in that sport’s biggest event? The story is documented.

“Pelé’s Cosmos” It also had Beckenbauer as a preview of the stars who ended up in an uncertain football in the United States in the prehistory of Major League Soccer (MLS) which today tries to amaze with Lionel Messi. The first stone was the Brazilian coach Julius Mazzeywhich convinced Hours for their landing.

“My inspiration has always been the great Luis Artime. I was a goalscorer, I was nine in the area and goals were a spectacle and in the United States more than anywhere else. I came to the Cosmos recommended by people who had seen me score goals in the championship in which “I was playing, United States amateurs. I confronted Professor Mazzey and told him I was a spectacle.”Katorosz contextualizes.

Beckenbauer played for the Cosmos for two years. The Katorosz affair was short-lived. After some training sessions, he was not selected. It seems impossible that the Argentine could have left a mark in the Kaiser’s life, but the contact had some peculiarities which with certain key words meant that some time later, even at that AFA party, the reunion had a concrete anchor. New York night.

“I lived on Fifth Avenue and 76th Street in New York, in the poorest part of town. Uptown, across from Central Park – it was really cool back then, right? And he partied every day in a luxury apartment. No sporting example, I have never been one in this sense. At 5 I was drinking whiskey or champagne with friends, at a party or whatever and I took a shower, grabbed my bag and, boomI went to New Jersey to the Giants stadium,” he recalls, and at the same time tacitly explains the reasons why he wasn’t chosen.

He typically arrived at training at 7, but when he missed a combination of public transportation he used, he was late. Katorosz remembers the journey and the combined stations with astonishing precision.

“And then it happened that sometimes I would arrive 15 minutes late and there Franz would look at me with a smile, as if to say “New York Girls”… It’s just that I talked to him about unconventional things. We talked about Argentine girls, New York women, Germans, French women. And we agreed on one thing: what caught our attention was the fact that North American women told you: “Can I buy you a drink?”‘ It was normal for the mine to have the initiative, they didn’t have the prejudice that it had to be that male the one who invites. We were surprised by this direct, simple and less backward attitude than that of Europeans. And I told him that in Argentina they were tremendously more backward. They told you: ‘Oh no! What will you think of me?”, evokes a memory before deconstruction.

The obligations at the Cosmos for a player of Beckenbauer’s stature were very different from those at any other club in his career. The German had more time to explore the city, which also had no passion for football, neither that nor any other in the United States. It’s easy to imagine Kaiser as a tourist and a rare bird like Katorosz as a possible connection outside the balloon.

“One of the things that overwhelmed Franz was the grandeur of New York. Even though he had experienced so much of the world, the European cities and everything he knew, it wasn’t like he was there. But at this stage of the Cosmos, he had time walking around like any other citizen. And I saw it as suffocating, beautiful, oppressive… Intimidating, that’s the more accurate word. How powerful, with huge buildings. The night of New York, in the center of the city, in Center. It was as if those kinds of comments about how dangerous she might be were scary. And, of course, I always had a conversation to explain it to him,” he boasts.

Is it possible that this bond was indelible for the German? Who could deny Katororsz after the death of Beckenbauer, who also has photos documenting the closeness between them? He himself holds suspicions.

“I wasn’t a teammate for years in the Cosmos, but we talked and had those conversations in a very sensible way. When I saw him a few more times, I had to remind him a little and then we remembered and everything was fine. That time, in 2006, the German embassy invited me and the AFA people here were furious because they basically succeeded with great zeal. There were those round tables of ten people full of people. As I told you we met, a few words, a hug and everyone kept their mouths shut.“, complete.

There is another Argentine, Ángelo DiBernardo, who played more games with Kaiser. He did it officially, yes. But the one with the anecdotes and photos is Katorosz. He is the only one who shared, even if briefly, the pitch, the locker room, the club, the night and the conversations with Beckenbauer.