Excerpt from the chapter A Surreal Run-in on El Camino Real
Cameroon entered the quarterfinals in that World Cup, a first for an African team, and lost to England, but only after playing excellent football that entertained the football world. The 1990 World Cup held in Italy was rather boring in general, except for some bright spots like the heroics of Roger Milla and his gifted teammates on the Cameroon team. Many things had changed during the four years after that—Roger Milla had turned forty-two years old and felt his age while playing with much younger players; the Soviet Union had crumbled and ceased to be a country, and Russia had inherited the spoils of it including the football team without the Ukrainian players who made the Soviet Union team formidable; Cameroon had replaced Valeri Nepomniachi with a French coach; and their national team was no longer considered an underdog, as football fans expected them to win because of their strong showing in beating top-class teams four years earlier.
Roger Milla knew that his team was staying not very far from Stanford University Stadium and decided to take a walk to the campus to see how things looked there. He didn’t ask team management for permission, as he knew it would be denied because of security concerns. He was no longer a total unknown as he had been when he landed in Italy four years earlier, and many football fans still remembered his face. He simply walked out after taking directions from the hotel concierge. He found the behavior of Americans to be strange, as they didn’t pay much attention to players even if they were identified as members of the Cameroon team. He didn’t know whether it was because Americans were not friendly, or because they didn’t like football, or because they respected the privacy of others; he could move around the hotel without being bothered by anyone. That was not the situation he usually encountered in Europe or Africa. Ever since his two goals in the match against Romania in the 1990 World Cup, once he was identified, people would try to connect with him somehow, and he loved their adoration as well, something he missed in America but that allowed him to move around easily.
When he turned onto University Avenue from the small street where the hotel was located, he saw a large, busy road choked with cars, with people going home after watching the Brazil–Russia match. When he walked up to that road, El Camino Real, meaning the Royal Road, the historic highway between Los Angeles and San Francisco that passes by one edge of the Stanford University campus, Roger Milla did not understand any of its historical importance in building modern California by Spanish missionaries. Of course, none of those details were written anywhere, nor did the road have anything majestic about it, and it looked like any unremarkable multi-lane street in America. Roger Milla saw a lot of people milling around, and he tried making eye contact with riders in those slow-moving cars and with those walking on the closed part of the road, curious whether anyone would identify him at all. He received some suspicious stares, but none of that resulted in an exclaiming shout-out of “Roger Milla!” or fans walking on the street rushing toward him.
When Roger Milla’s hopes of getting some sort of acknowledgment from a random fan diminished, he started looking at the fine cars that were slowly moving in either direction on El Camino Real. They were from all over the world and represented major brands, and the models indicated that they were owned by people who had serious money. Roger Milla was awakened from his thoughts about cars when someone tapped him on the shoulder and feebly asked, “Are you Roger Milla?”