The PlayerBy Jonathan Vankin
Reprinted from Metro: Silicon Valley's Weekly, July 9, 1992.Page 4
ENGLAND'S FOOTBALL ASSOCIATION was founded in 1863. The Football League organized 25 years later. They were formed to promote a game called that came to be called "soccer." That was the formal name, occasionally written, rarely used in conversation. "Football," historically, referred to any number of archetypical goal-scoring games, played in England for centuries. Rules varied from town to town; the only constant that a ball, a bladder, a stone or some other available object was to be advanced by one team as deeply as possible into the opposing team's territory and placed in some broadly delineated goal. Handling the ball was allowed.
To stop this advance such tactics as punching, kicking, throwing rocks and thrashing opposing players with sticks were generally permissible. While this must have made playing defense much easier, it gave the game an unsavory reputation. In the 16th century , football was banned from the court of Queen Elizabeth I because it was simply too violent and thought to attract ruffians.
It was a game played by common folk. When the industrial revolution swept England, these same common folk were imprisoned in factories and coal mines for 16 hours a day, seven days a week. Football went the way of all recreational activities. It moved into the middle and upper classes. By the 1800' s boys at Eton, Harrow, Charterhouse and other tony English boarding schools, played football under the supervision of their schoolmasters. The free-for-all style favored by the game's salt-of-the-earth progenitors was disdained as unseemly. Competitive sports were intended to build character , and character development required strict rules. Those schools formulated the rules of soccer-though everyone still called the game football. Their major innovation was the "no handling" rule, carrying the ball apparently too easy and somehow ungentlemanly.
Other schools continued to allow handling, and from those institutions football took a different direction and gained considerable popularity of its own. One such school was called Rugby, which promulgated a form of football which bears its name and is played professionally in England and several other countries. But the non-handling rule had a greater number of adherents.
By the late 19th century , social reformers in England had gained some political clout. They were able to ease oppressive factory conditions. Working people won a modicum of liberation. The "weekend" was invented. Among other things, it was a time to play football. But upper classes still had the power. The Football Association's purpose, with its national "Challenge Cup," was to impose bourgeois rules on the workingman's game. The Football Association at first adhered to a code of strict amateurism, but public interest in attending the best matches was so great that thousands were willing to pay admission charges. When money began changing hands, the players smelled economic opportunity . Most of them bad no alternative outside of the factories, mills and mines. With formation of the Football League in 1888, football became a full-fledged trade. Professionalism increased quality, matches became more exciting, England fell into football fever .
It took almost a half -century for the football craze to traverse the Atlantic, and by the time it arrived in America it was not quite a craze. The American Soccer League (there was already a popular version of football in the U.S., one that allowed handling of the ball) formed in 1933. The league was more semi-professional than professional for most of its life, though in 1974 it made a bid for legitimacy by naming basketball star Bob Cousy its commissioner. The International League started and sputtered in 1960, followed in 1967 by two competing leagues, the United States Soccer Association and the National Professional Soccer League. Both had big money behind them; many of the same wealthy men who owned teams in more established American sports founded franchises. The NPSL attempted to develop its own identity , importing European and South American players.
The USSA took an easier route. It imported entire teams. The first (and last) USSA champion was the Los Angeles Wolves, owned by then-Lakers owner Jack Kent Cooke. They were, in reality, England's Wolverhampton Wanderers.
The following year, the two leagues merged, creating the North American Soccer League. In its inaugural season the Kansas City franchise led the league in attendance, averaging 8,065 per game. L.A. brought up the rear at 2,269. But the NASL picked up with the coming of Pele, the world's greatest and most charismatic player, to the New York Cosmos. Pele, who in 1958 was the youngest player ever to appear in a World Cup, was a bit over the hill by the early 1970s, but he had a winning smile and against American competition (including more than a few other slightly over-the-hill foreigners) he still shined. For a while, ABC had a contract to televise NASL games.
Mismanagement and an inscrutable American indifference to soccer as a spectator sport dissolved the NASL a couple of years ago. Some of its more perseverant franchises joined the ASL, to form the APSL. As late as 1991, the APSL had 12 teams. Mer the 1991 season, the league and the United States Soccer Federation ( overlord to all organized levels of the sport) hoping (perhaps praying) that the 1994 World Cup will focus a spotlight on soccer. ordered significant upgrades in franchise budgets and stadium facilities. Only five teams could survive the burden.
One of the fatalities was the Albany Capitals. Albany, New York is a sooty upstate city of warehouses, shopping malls and very old buildings. By some anomaly Albany is the capital of New York, though visitors have been known to cite its main virtue as its proximity to New York City, a three-hour jaunt down a shoulderless, pockmarked highway called Taconic Parkway (which was probably a super-highway in the 1920s when it was built but for modem cars is just a hazardous, extremely narrow road).
Whatever else can be said about Albany, it is a sports-mad burg, in a minor-league kind of way. A New York Yankees farm team draws good crowds there, as do the Albany Patroons of the Continental Basketball Association. Even arena football (a game which will receive no further explication here) is well supported. Soccer made Albany a four-sport city , of sorts. In their final year , the Capitals had a good season. They advanced to the APSL championship game. There they were defeated by the San Francisco Bay Blackhawks. Armand Quadrini, a soccer enthusiast whose principal income came from his construction firm in one of Albany' s suburbs, owned the Capitals. Quadrini offered the head coach's position to Paul Mariner, who'd played and coached, as an assistant, there for three years since abandoning his attempt at upscale wheeler-dealerdom. Enthused, Mariner optimistically declined an offer to return to Malta and traveled to the World Cup draw in New York at Christmas, to meet with Quadrini and negotiate a contract. But the negotiations, as Mariner put it, "stumbled." Mariner ran into Laurie Calloway, who intimated darkly that the Albany frahchise was soon to go the way of all flesh.
While the Blackhawks employ a full squad of full-time players, Albany kept only six. The rest of the team flew in for games only. The Capitals' made their home in a creaky, minor-league baseball park called Bleecker Stadium. Even the minor league baseball team in Albany abandoned Bleecker a decade ago. Quadrini could not afford to comply with the league mandate to improve the amenities and expand the budget. Early in 1992, he politely informed Mariner that the head coaching job was no longer available. In fact, the team was no longer available. Welcome to American professional soccer.
AMERICAN SOCCER PEOPLE chafe when they hear their sport ridiculed like a kid wearing sneakers to the senior formal. The American sports media are a conservative and cranky lot, not quick to surrender airtime or column inches that could be spent on coverage of baseball, basketball or any of the sports already proven to be circulation and ratings builders. But their ignorance of soccer goes beyond profiteering. There's a subtext of antipathy, perhaps xenophobia.
"Sometimes you let your feelings get carried away with you," muses Blackhawks coach Laurie Calloway, "and you think it's just jealousy. When a sportswriter hears that this is the number one sport in the world and his favorite sport is baseball I think there's a certain envy. 'How can it be the most popular sport if I don't understand it?'"
It is tempting to deliver a passionate defense of soccer, but unnecessary . Here is how the Blackhawks' game against the Tampa Bay Rowdies concluded:
Two overtime periods failed to break the tie. The game went to a "shootout" tie-breaker. Five players from each team took turns dribbling the ball from 35 yards out and shooting against the opposing goalie. The best three of five would determine the winner. Goalies in soccer, unlike in hockey, are infrequently tested. The shootout puts the goalie on the spot.
After five rounds, the game was still tied. There was no three-out-of- five winner. On the seventh round, a Blackhawks midfielder named Paul Holocher dribbled in against Rowdies goalie Bill Andracki. Holocher is a second-year player who was one of Mariner's benchwarmers. He had never started a game for the Blackhawks until that night, when the team was missing five of its regular starters to the national and Olympic teams, and in Derek Van Rheenen's case, to suspension. Holocher is also a graduate of Santa Clara University. He played his college soccer on that very same baseball field and a klatch of his schoolmates was in the stands.
Holocher, who'd scored one goal already in the game (his first of the season) feinted left, dribbled far right of the goalie's six-foot crease and sliced a sharply angled kick that narrowly evaded Andracki's backwards dive. But was the shot in under time limit? The Rowdies besieged the referee, protesting that Holocher took too long to get the ball off his foot, that the linesman had already raised his flag. The Blackhawks hustled off the field, where the only light by this point in the evening came from semi-adequate floodlights, dim and yellowish.
The whole atmosphere had a musty glow, a futuristic dystopian aura with the fleeing Blackhawks, swarming Rowdies in flourescent blue-green jerseys, and hapless, black-clad ref as science-fiction scavengers on a comic book wasteland.
Holocher, however, took his time exiting the field, strolling in front of the grandstand his arms raised triumphantly toward the starry sky; sort of a mini lap of honor. As long as it goes in the net, that's all they're interested in.
At the locker room gate a group of fans, mostly young girls, nudged their way toward the players. Paul Mariner shed his black parka, signed his name in pen on a few programs, then turned away. The expressive lines on his face formed something like a sneer.
"To blow a 3-1 lead," he huffed. "That's bullshit."
The shot was ruled admissible. The 'Hawks next game would be on Independence Day, prompting an uncharacteristically witty public address announcer to quip, "Come back on July Fourth for more fireworks." Humor. Suspense. Controversy. Human interest. Happy endings. Cinematic visuals. It is hard to imagine what more a sport could offer.
Having presented the favorable evidence, American soccer, by comparison with the rest of the world, is a minor league sport. "What's the best baseball-not the top level, the next best level?" asks Mariner.
Triple A?
"Right. You could possibly look upon this as Triple A." As he reaches this conclusion, he sits poolside at the sumptuous San Jose Athletic Club. The establishment with its faux Southern manse facade and imposing wooden doorway, a bar with sofa seating and a spacious dining room, is frequented by luminaries and celebrities, to the extent that San Jose, California can manufacture any, and then as much for lunch as for workouts. State Assemblyman John Vasconcellos, he of the nationally noted "self-esteem task force," and San Jose Mercury News three-dot columnist Leigh Weimers (the best San Jose can do to compare with San Francisco's Herb Caen) are, on occasion, glimpsed there. Mariner's membership is a perk of his new employment. After Albany's demise, Mariner returned to England, with no coaching job and no playing career.
"The phone went dead for about two weeks," says Mariner. "Then one particular morning, the phone went. And it was Laurie offering me a job." He would not be head coach, but he would get an opportunity to continue his coaching education, and to call himself a pro soccer player for at least another year.
THE CALIFORNIA SUN is drifting past high noon over the Athletic Club. Mariner sits under an opened parasol pondering the future. He is wearing a bright pink polo shirt, jogging shorts and rubber sandals. He talks about the futures of his Blackhawks' players. He leaves the impression that he is considering his own future as well.
"We've got a bunch of players who are really very talented. It's just the work ethic. You've really got to drive it in to them that if they work hard there is a possibility at the end of the rainbow. You can go to South America. You can go to Europe and earn a lot of money. Unfortunately the money's not here yet. But with the World Cup corning it will be. Hopefully we'll get a strong league and they can stay here and earn a lot of money. "Which is my idea."