There are the stories, so many of them for someone only 24 years old, enough to fill a book. And now there is one about Faustino Asprilla of Colombia, an as-told-to biography published in mid-May.
“I’m not going to tell you what’s in it,” Asprilla said. “If I tell, you won’t buy it.”
A couple of weeks before publication, Asprilla did not even know the book’s title, which is “Tino: the Life and Soccer Miracles of Faustino Asprilla.” Some Italian journalists who have covered this enormously talented and controversial forward during his two years in Parma suggested the title should be “I Was Born Daft, and I Will Die Daft.”
As if to prove their point, Asprilla was wearing a heavy jacket and sweater as he talked with reporters from Italy, Sweden, Germany, Belgium and the United States on an 80-degree day in Parma. If the temperature had been only 40 degrees, he would likely have showed up in half as many clothes.
And that isn’t the half of it about Asprilla, whom a British tabloid called a “Porn Loser” after he was seen dancing with German erotic movie star Petra Scharbach in a Parma disco last fall.
“I don’t understand what all the uproar is about,” Asprilla said. “In Colombia, I have met a lot of women more beautiful than her.”
And it’s not as if that were the only good anecdote to tell about Asprilla, for whom soccer should be thankful. His irrepressible playfulness both on and off the field enlivens a sport being dulled by the robotic personalities who have become exalted in the modern game’s defensiveness.
Last fall, Asprilla fell out of a boat while rowing on a lake with teammate Luigi Apolloni three hours before a European Cup match in Degerfors, Sweden, then scored two goals in the final three minutes to give Parma a 2-1 win.
He and his wife and their then infant son-now 18 months old-were asked to move from an apartment in the center of Parma to a house in the country after neighbors complained about the volume of the salsa music come from Asprilla’s stereo in the wee hours of the morning.
He walked out of Colombia’s training camp after failing to score in the team’s first two qualifying matches for the 1994 World Cup-including a missed penalty kick-and losing his place in the starting lineup. The Colombian Soccer Federation was about to punish Asprilla’s walkout with a life ban until coach Francisco Maturana and his teammates intervened.
One game after returning to the lineup, Asprilla scored two goals in the historic 5-0 win over Argentina in Buenos Aires last September.
Earlier in the year, he scored two goals in Parma’s 2-1 win at Atletico Madrid in the semifinals of the 1993 European Cup Winners Cup and then was called by Colombian President Cesar Gaviria. Said Gaviria to Asprilla: “You must keep going like this. You are an ambassador of Colombia now.”
The ambassador was benched for Parma’s 3-1 win over Antwerp in the Cup Winners Cup final a month later later because of an injury sustained under unclear circumstances during his return to Colombia for his mother’s funeral.
Asprilla needed 27 stitches in the calf to close a cut he said happened when he fell near a swimming pool and sliced his leg on a bottle. The truth, apparently, is that he kicked a bus after one of his not infrequent driving mishaps, which included six crashes during his first two weeks in Italy. Whatever, the problem was aggravated in management’s eyes when Asprilla tooled around Parma on his moped with a cast on his leg.
He was cut to the quick by the decision not to let him play against Antwerp. “I wanted to score to dedicate the goal to my mother,” Asprilla said, vowing he would not return to Parma this season.
He got over the slight and went on to score 10 goals in league play for the Parma team that finished fifth in the Italian League to qualify for next year’s UEFA Cup. Three of those goals came in the league match with Torino four days after the two in Degerfors. The hat trick-one on a header and one with each foot-prompted this review in one of Italy’s three sports dailies:
“Invite Spielberg because in Parma there is a science-fiction character. . . . The only way to stop the Colombian is with shackles.”
For all that, Faustino Hernan Asprilla Hinestroza attacts as many brickbats as bouquets in the Italian media. Some result from cultural misunderstandings, since Asprilla is the only Colombian in the Italian League and one of just two Colombians playing in a major European League (the other is Bayern Munich forward Adolfo “The Train” Valencia).
Journalist Andrea Schianchi of La Gazzetta dello Sport, the largest sports daily, has come to know Asprilla well enough that the player’s voice is on Schianchi’s answering machine message.
“His mentality is different,” Schianchi said. “It is difficult for him to be concentrated for nine months. For him, football is a game, not a war. That is the mentality of the South American professional.”
Parma coach Nevio Scala has tried not to subvert Asprilla’s personality while getting him used to the demands of the European grind.
“For me, it is very important to play well, to entertain the people, and not only to win,” Asprilla said. “When I arrived here, one game would be good and the next, so-so. Scala has given me consistency.”
Asprilla was speaking Italian in a voice so low it defied the microphone in front of him. His natural exuberance has been tempered with a new reticence that came partly from being a stranger in wealthy, ingrown Parma, where his every move is noticed.
Asprilla came after Parma bought him for $4.5 million from Atletico Nacional Medellin, where he had played three seasons. He earns $700,000 a year in a contract that expires in 1998.
Some would say he earned that salary with one goal in 1993, the direct kick that ended AC Milan’s 58-game unbeaten streak in league play. Asprilla is the first Colombian to have considerable success in a European league.
Stunning speed and long legs make Asprilla, nicknamed “The Octopus,” a particular threat in the open field, where he can sidestep tackles and move quickly toward the goal. He is an excellent shooter with either foot, capable of scoring impossible goals, like the one against Lazio where he performed a half-somersault before kicking a ball out of mid-air.
He celebrates each goal with a cartwheel. It is a further expression of the joy that with which Asprilla tries to infuse every minute of a game he learned to play from his father, Diego, a sugar cane factory worker who was nickamed “The Speedy One” during his playing days.
Asprilla, the sixth of seven children, made his professional debut for Cucuta Deportivo in 1989 and moved up to the big time-Atletico Nacional Medellin-in 1990. Like the several Colombian national team members from Atletico Nacional, Asprilla is haunted by that club’s connection to the late Medellin drug cartel boss, Pablo Escobar.
“I never had any relationship with him,” Asprilla said, “and I’ve had it with being asked about Escobar every time a European journalist talks with me about Colombia.”
If Asprilla produces a couple more soccer miracles, he could be the talk of the World Cup, where he and his country will try to remake their oft-battered images before the eyes of the world. That is the epilogue his story needs.
