The
Player
By 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 and 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."