The Archive: Pelle Lindbergh's life

STOCKHOLM, Sweden -- It was May 24, 1959, a day for Sigge Lindbergh, 43, to walk proudly through South Stockholm.

He walked through the circular gate, under the "Hammarby" sign, and headed straight for the clubhouse. There he asked for the sign-up sheet. With a flourish he wrote his son's name, Per-Erik Lindbergh, deciding at that point that if Pelle (a common nickname for Per-Erik) wanted to play hockey, to play soccer, to box, to skate, to ride bicycles, or to take part in any other sporting activity, it would be under the name of the Hammarby Club.

Pelle , even if he had been in the mood for it, was in no position to object.

May 24, 1959, was the day he was born.

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Pelle Lindbergh will be buried tomorrow after a funeral service at Sofia Kyrken, the Lutheran church that towers over the neighborhood of his birth.

He comes full circle, and the circumference turned out larger and more glorious than Sigge Lindbergh could have dared dream for his only son.

Pelle Lindbergh represented Hammarby as a teenager on a trip to Ontario. He was Sweden's goaltender in world championships in West Germany and Austria, in an Olympiad at Lake Placid. He captured a strange, faraway city last year as he led the Philadelphia Flyers to the Stanley Cup finals and became the most successful European goaltender in the history of the National Hockey League. Nine days ago, when the 26-year-old Lindbergh crashed his Porsche into the steps of a Somerdale, N.J., school, he brought tears to cities 4,700 miles apart.

On Sunday the official notice of the funeral appeared in Stockholm newspapers. Underneath his name, his fiancee, Kerstin, and his mother and father were listed. So were the families of his two older sisters, Ann-Louise and Ann-Christine.

Then there was room for a personal notation by the family. All the other notations, for the other deaths, consisted of Bible verses or inspirational quotes.

Lindbergh's contained one word.

"Varfor?" Why?

The rest of Stockholm has given up the empty search for an answer. In the neighborhoods that lie four subway stops to the south of downtown, one can buy a smile with a word: "Pelle."

Like Reggie or Doctor J or Arnie, only the first name is necessary.

There are other Swedish athletes more famous. There is Mats Wilander, who gave his homeland the Davis Cup last year. And there is Patrick Sjoberg, who won the silver medal in the 1984 Olympic high jump and broke the world record this year. But for a man who had not played in this country since 1980, Lindbergh's death had an extraordinary impact. Not so much for what he did, but for who he was.

And where he came from.

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Tomas Magnusson is the assistant coach of Djurgardens, the club for which Thomas Eriksson, the Flyer defenseman, once played. Magnusson was 2 years older than Lindbergh, but they always played on the same level. Magnusson also shared something else with Lindbergh; they were Soders. From the South Side. Sons of working men.

Sweden's heavy taxes are designed to make equals of everyone. Indeed, they have given the nation the highest standard of living in Europe, with free hospitalization and college tuition guaranteed for all. There is a local saying that goes, "If you want to make a small fortune in Sweden, start with a large fortune."

But security does not equal happiness. Sweden also approaches the world lead in alcoholism and suicides, both exacerbated by gray, persistent winters that force the sun - when it shines at all - down before 4 p.m. in November. The detached, noncommital stares of Wilander, Bjorn Borg, skier Ingemar Stenmark and a flotilla of other sporting ambassadors have reinforced the cliche of the somber Swede. But none of them were Soders. For Soders, life is a cabaret.

"The word for player in Swedish is spelare," Magnusson said. "But in South Stockholm they have another word - lirare. It has a more flamboyant connotation.

"The athletes from there, especially the ones who play for Hammarby, had more fun. They were more individualists. Sometimes they were hard to coach, but they showed their talent. You saw their soccer players use a lot of heel kicks, for example. The hockey players liked to move the puck behind their backs, between their legs. Pelle was like that. He enjoyed himself."

Hammarby's soccer fans were the first in Sweden to bring marimba bands to their old stadium, Kanal Plan. Just like the Brazilians in the World Cup. ''People were horrified at first," Magnusson said. They didn't drink that much after games, but only because they drank so much before.

Their all-time hero, and one of the great players in world history, was Nacha Skoglund. He was Soder in more ways than one. Skoglund's incredible skills beat every opponent but one - alochol. He made fortunes playing in Sweden and Italy, but soon the gut grew bigger and the money ran out. At 42, Nacha Skoglund was found dead, of complications from cirrhosis, on a street in Stockholm.

Lindbergh never drank much. The fact that he was legally drunk at the time of his crash is the cruelest footnote of all, because the anti-booze crusade in Swedish sports rivals the vigilante campaign against drugs in baseball. Billboards all around Johanneshov, the 9,000-seat hockey stadium in South Stockholm, show various players preaching sobriety, and there are at least 30 symbols of the campaign - an upside-down bottle with the inscription Spola Krolen (Don't Drink) - all around the rink.

But Lindbergh, as chronicled, did love his cars and his boats. When he went from Hammarby to the black-shirted establishment team, AIK - roughly equivalent to moving from the Dodgers to the Yankees - every Soder seemed to understand. Hammarby only played in the first division of the Swedish League, and AIK was in the Elite division. This way, Lindbergh would be seen by the men he desperately wanted to impress, the NHL scouts.

That was fine. But when he got an under-the-table raise in the process, everyone waited to see what kind of Volvo Lindbergh would buy. It would be a Volvo, right? Nope. Lindbergh somehow got hold of a secondhand, monster Cadillac. "You could barely see the top of his head when he was driving it," said Sture Olsson, hockey writer for the newspaper Aftonbladet.

The reaction? People laughed. Pelle always was good for that.

On Saturday night, a sizable crowd gathered at Kuarnen, the bar that serves as Hammarby headquarters. There were slot machines here, dart boards there. After a while, the Soders got so happy that they threw the darts from their seats.

A good-humored man named Robert Lindberg sat amidst the ruckus and remembered Pelle.

"Before I became a Soder, I lived in a suburb called Huddingte," Lindberg said. "One night Huddingte played Hammarby. Pelle was great that night, had us beat, 3-0. And their fans kept yelling: ' Pelle LIND-bergh, rah, rah, rah! Pelle LIND-bergh, rah, rah, rah!

"Near the end of the game, one of our guys took a shot and Pelle tried to make a flashy save. He came up with the puck. Then he dropped it behind his back - and into the net. The light went on and I got up and yelled, ' Pelle LIND-bergh, rah, rah, rah! ' My God, you thought their fans were going to murder me."

South Stockholm? South Philly?

"But that's the way he was," Robert Lindberg continued. "He was more than just an athlete. He was a performer. He gave people the extra thing."

And people responded. Competing goaltenders don't always speak to each other, but two of Pelle 's rivals, Reino Sundberg and Rolf Rimmerwall, were his best friends. A film director, Jan Halldorf, cast Lindbergh, a comic actor only in real life, as the lead in a small movie, "Vana Mig Inte Ruggen" ("Don't Turn Your Back").

Not all coaches understood him. One who didn't, Leif Boork, coached the 1984 Canada Cup team. Lindbergh didn't play in the Cup that year. The official line in Philadelphia was that he wanted to concentrate on rebounding from a sub-par Flyer season, which was no doubt true. But another reason was Boork's insistence that Lindbergh fooled around too much in practice, that "he would never make it in the NHL with that attitude." Sweden played poorly in the Cup, and Lindbergh won the Vezina Trophy for the Flyers. Upon his return to Sweden in the summer, Lindbergh gleefully told Olsson, "I guess I showed that ass (Boork) that I could play."

Lindbergh's last summer was, by all accounts, his happiest. He tentatively agreed to marry Kerstin the next summer. The Soders, who hadn't heard much from him since he left for America, revered him more than ever.

And one fine day he revved up his 200-horsepower boat and headed for the Saltsjon, one of the straits that separates Stockholm's many islands.

With him was Sigge Lindbergh, troubled now with a heart condition. The two stood on the deck and looked at the shipyards where Sigge had worked all his years.

Pelle opened a bottle, and, as various Swedes contemplated the gloom of their vanilla society, the two Lindberghs celebrated all that life had given them with their first drink together.

"I'm glad we were finally able to do this," said Pelle Lindbergh as he sailed proudly around South Stockholm.