7. A Foot in the Door
Harsh lessons at Italia go
If we lived in another country, we would ask for political asylum. But since we're American, we'll stay in New York and nobody will recognise us.
Tab Ramos
n the summer of 1968, a 36-year-old Hungarian refugee named Joe Martin turned up on Randall's Island with a hefty stack of plywood and an idea for a new type of soccer, one he hoped would attract the kind of crowds the country's two professional leagues had sought in vain the year before. Inspired by the speed and constant action of ice hockey - living in Ontario he would have seen plenty of it - he ringed the Downing Stadium pitch with a three-foot wall to keep the ball from going out of play. Other elements of the game were also modified: corner kicks were replaced by penalties taken from 23 yards, the goals were enlarged and the offside law scrapped. Martin called his new game American Soccer System, and he had sketched out ambitious plans for it. After the New York debut, his show would move to Toronto and then to 25 other cities before venturing overseas. In a few years, he boasted, teams from around the world would be competing for millions of dollars in prizes.
The world premiere of American Soccer System, a match between teams representing the US and Canada, produced a final score of 14-11 - and an attendance of 243. Martin claimed to have spent $40,000 perfecting his idea, and another $1,000 to use the stadium, but the meagre ticket sales didn't even cover his rental fee. American Soccer System was never played again. The humiliating experience did not stop other promoters with similar ideas from tinkering with the sport, and the collapse of the NASL in 1985 seemed to vindicate Martin's point of view: soccer as played by the rest of the planet could not be translated into American, at least not in a way that made any money. Even the most familiar indigenous sports underwent periodic rule changes - some quite dramatic - to address perceived shortcomings and sustain fan interest. That soccer should remain sacrosanct as competition for the entertainment dollar grew ever fiercer struck some as terribly naive.
So it was that during the 1980s the game came to mean something rather different to many Americans. It was played indoors on a small, boxed-in pitch, and by rules completely its own. Its aims were little different from American Soccer System - to speed up the game and increase scoring. Subtle artistry and flair would seldom be celebrated in this new enterprise, yet to those turned off by soccer's potential for lethargy, the new invention was far more palatable.
Playing indoors was hardly a novel idea. The harsh winters of the northern US had taken the game inside as far back as the 1880s, when Boston newspapers reported on contests of 11-a-side. Charles Stoneham's radical proposals for the ASL in 1928 had included forsaking outdoor play during December and January for more hospitable venues. Though the idea never came to fruition, the creation of large indoor arenas in the 1920s and 1930s helped other leagues to escape the elements for brief periods, devising rules to suit both the venue and the whims of the promoters. One such tournament, staged in Madison Square Garden in 1941, saw teams of seven compete ferociously on a bare concrete floor. Two players were taken to hospital and the crowd of 8,000 was treated to what one newspaper described as `the fiercest free-for-all fight seen here in many a moon'.
After one or two other brief experiments it was 17 years before indoor soccer returned to the Garden, by which time the organisers had at least accepted the need to cushion any awkward landings (with topsoil from the National Horse Show). In 1950 Chicago's National Soccer League held an indoor competition popular enough to feature on local radio and TV. Other ethnic leagues also took their teams inside and on favourable days played in front of thousands. But these were largely wintertime diversions, not to be treated with the same gravitas as the genuine article. It was only as the impact of televised sports became apparent during the 1960s - and bona fide soccer emerged as a loser - that the indoor game developed into a serious commercial proposition.
The NASL had tested its teams indoors as early as 1973, keen to derive maximum value from the year-round contracts it was offering its players, but there was no exceptional zeal behind the venture. Support for the outdoor league was still blossoming, and Pele had yet to arrive. Many give the credit (or blame) for spawning the game's bastard child to a pair of indoor exhibitions the league organised for the touring CSKA Moscow side in February 1974. For the first match, in Toronto, the NASL cobbled together an all-star team, which the Russians easily defeated. The second, in Philadelphia, involved the league champion Atoms.
It's easy to forget how rare American-Soviet sporting confrontations were outside the Olympics. Professional ice hockey's first visit from a Soviet team - an occasion far more widely acclaimed - was still two years away, while big-league basketball abstained from such challenges right up to the fall of the Iron Curtain. This left American flag-wavers with relatively esoteric events such as the figure skating world championships to compare East with West.
Partly because of this, and partly because the Atoms had become an overnight sensation in a city with few recent sporting successes to its name, the Russian match drew a crowd of nearly 12,000, an impressive figure for a contest whose rules were largely unfamiliar. An artificial pitch was laid over the ice rink, and the match was split into three 20minute periods. With six players on each side and unlimited substitutions, the game resembled ice hockey as much as soccer. The Atoms fielded a number of guest players and performed creditably, conceding three third-period goals to lose 6-3. Ultimately, though, the result proved less significant than the conventions by which it had been played. To many, this was better than the sport they had seen during the summer.
That was certainly true of Ed Tepper, a local businessman and owner of an indoor lacrosse franchise who had turned up ostensibly because he was interested in something other than plywood for his team to play on. Tepper later claimed the match convinced him of the potential of indoor soccer, though two years later he became president and general manager of the Atoms, suggesting at least some attraction to the established game. But after the club met its ignominious end in 1976, Tepper joined forces with another disillusioned ex-NASL figure, Earl Foreman, who had forsaken the Washington Whips in favour of a franchise in the American Basketball Association several years earlier. The two may have believed they had discovered professional sport's next big opportunity, yet their intuition was far from reliable: Tepper's lacrosse league folded in 1975, and Foreman's struggling basketball entity ended up being sold back to the league. Meanwhile, the NASL had staged a successful indoor tournament as a preamble to its 1975 season.
The first rumblings of a big-time, dedicated indoor league came from two other former NASL executives, Rick Ragone and Norm Sutherland. `The indoor game is a great product for television,' they declared in September 1975, announcing that their venture, the Major Soccer League, would begin the following summer and go head-to-head with the NASL. The league never materialised, but the conditions to create it remained: there were dozens of arenas with empty dates to fill, and lots of cheap college talent frozen out by the NASL's Anglophilia.
Even without the Major Soccer League, by the spring of 1978 - with eerie parallels to a decade earlier - it looked as though three new leagues would be competing for the sports fan's dollar. The Major Indoor Soccer League, the brainchild of Tepper and Foreman, announced it would start in November. Another offering, the Super Soccer League, with links to Ragone and Sutherland's aborted effort, was to begin six months earlier. It was fronted by Jerry Saperstein, whose father Abe had founded basketball's Harlem Globetrotters. Meanwhile the NASL, ears suitably pricked, announced its indoor tournaments - largely contested by reserves and young American hopefuls, and only some of its teams - would be replaced by a fully-fledged winter league.
In the end, the MI SL had 1978 to itself. Unable to prop up all its transient franchises, Super Soccer collapsed, while NASL owners, against the wishes of Phil Woosnam, opted to sit out a year and see what happened to their rival. The USSF, delighted to collect a
round $25,000 from each of the MISL teams, hastily christened the new game soccer and welcomed it to the family. With only six franchises, the MISL began in relative anonymity, but coasted with self-assurance into uncharted waters, cheerfully devising rules without the restraint of FIFA or the USSF. At a meeting in a Philadelphia apartment Tepper stood in a doorway and declared that the eight-foot frame would determine the height of the goals. Ice hockey dasher boards and Plexiglas screens would ring the tiny pitch - in certain situations, players could be bundled into them without penalty. Serious transgressions would result in banishment to a sin-bin. Unlimited interchange meant managers could bring on an entire new team if they so desired and replace it a few minutes later.
There were no international superstars to raise the MIS Us profile, but the league did pull off an early publicity coup by signing a disgruntled Shep Messing to spearhead its New York franchise. True to form, the voluble goalkeeper promptly declared the outdoor game dead and soon abandoned it. Most of Messing's team-mates came from the Rochester Lancers, delighted by the prospect of close-season employment, but few other teams signed up names even the most devout NASL fan would recognise. The appeal of the MISL's brand of soccer, though, and its proprietors' masterstroke, was that in such a hybrid game accomplished internationals were no more experienced than fresh-faced youngsters. As long as the action kept moving, technical deficiencies could be readily accommodated. Errant shooting could produce a goal on the rebound; hammering the ball against the dasher board made for an effective pass. Even the poorest player could endear himself to the crowd by charging an opponent into the wall.
And, of course, it had goals, more goals than anything calling itself soccer had ever seen. The league's top marksman, Slavisa Zungul (rechristened Steve), who two years earlier had been helping Yugoslavia to a European Championship semi-final, scored 90 in 32 matches. The best goalkeeper let in more than four a game. Contests routinely ended 8-3 or 9-6; the championship final finished 7-4. The MISL's bright red ball took more abuse in one match than most NASL models did across an entire season, whacked as it was against everything from the intrepid goalkeeper's outstretched limbs to the occasional head of an unwary fan. Indoor soccer, with its wailing sirens, flashing lights and thumping music, represented almost everything traditional soccer was not: it was frenetic, undemanding, brash - and unapologetically American. The real thing, Foreman maintained, would never succeed in the US because it was 'too European'.
That this might not actually be soccer was of far less importance than whether fans would come out to watch it. In many places they did. What initially seemed at best a credible accompaniment to the NASL's summer fare had by 1980 grown into a 12-team, coast-to-coast enterprise that threatened to upstage the outdoor game. The bellwether New York club, the Arrows, obligingly claimed the first four league championships, by which time two and a half a million fans a season were passing through MISL turnstiles.
The NASL had little option but to join in, which it did in 1979, replicating the MISL formula right down to the size of its goals. Yet only ten of its 24 teams took part, mostly the weaker ones. Even without the possibility of a lucrative Cosmos visit, the league competed well with its rival, so much so that struggling franchises in Memphis and Atlanta often found themselves with bigger gates indoors than out. The latter even threatened to jump to the MIS L.
By 1983 the rot had set in. A foundering NASL scaled down its summer fixtures to accommodate more indoor ones and continued squaring off with the MISL for talent and attention. While attempts by Howard Samuels and others to end the feuding failed, the USSF meekly shrugged its shoulders. For those who bothered to notice, the game in America had all but capitulated to its mutant offspring, to little if any outcry from the public and scarcely a whimper on the sports pages. Even the participants didn't seem terribly bothered. Rick Davis, probably the most visible native-born player in the country, left the NASL for the MISL after the Cosmos tried to trim his wages. 'You still kick the ball with your feet,' he said of his new vocation. 'You still can't touch it with your hands, you're still trying to score goals by shooting the ball and heading the ball, you still have defenders, midfielders and forwards ... and unless they've changed something, to me that's soccer.' As the number of NASL teams shrank and budgets tightened, others had little choice but to join him.
Once again, American soccer lay in the hands of the wrong people. There were no working arrangements or compromises between the two leagues, only escalating competition for fans and players. In the end, the MISL's intransigence caused problems for itself as well as the NASL. The Arrows went bankrupt in 1984, shortly after the new title-holders, the Baltimore Blast, revealed that they had lost millions of dollars in spite of filling their arena to capacity for nearly every home game. Tickets had been too cheap, promotions too costly.
Yet it was the MISL's brand of soccer that proved to be the 'sport of the Eighties'. Its rock-concert atmospherics were soon mimicked by the established professional leagues, and even the Super Bowl. Minor copycat circuits germinated across the country, giving birth to the likes of the Garland Genesis and Philadelphia Kixx. Some stood even the most sacrosanct rules on their head; for a time, one league doubled and trebled the value of goals scored from certain ranges.
By 1986, as the MISL entered its eighth season, the last vestiges of optimism that had helped to propel the NASL for more than a decade had vanished. Entrepreneurs abandoned any expectation ofa decent financial return from soccer, and turned their attention to hybrid offerings in other sports, most notably the Arena Football League, an indoor gridiron concoction inspired by one man's visit to an MISL all-star exhibition. Signs of outdoor recovery were modest. The Pacific northwest formed a four-team semi-professional competition, but team names like FC Seattle and FC Portland pointed towards rather provincial ambitions. Hopes were briefly pinned on a United Soccer League, romantically based in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and pieced together partly from remnants of the ASL, among them the peripatetic but enduring Jacksonville Tea Men. It wheezed into life in 1984 with nine teams in the east and south, preaching fiscal responsibility and the promotion of American talent. But with no mainstream media exposure and trifling fan support, it stumbled through its first season, then saw seven of its teams fold. Six matches into its second year, the USL ran out of money and collapsed.
That left the college game, with all its idiosyncrasies, as the country's most prominent offering. The 1986 final between the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and American University of Washington DC saw the two teams play for 90 minutes with scarcely a scoring chance, then engage in 76 minutes of extra time, the longest match in college history. Indiana and Duke universities had played almost as exhausting a contest for the 1982 title, the year France and West Germany had contested the World Cup's first penalty shoot-out. Some college coaches continued to import the bulk of their talent from overseas or pushed for closer adherence to FIFA's laws, while others persisted with outmoded tactical formations and substituted players as if through a revolving door. Arguably the most successful college coach of the era, Indiana's Jerry Yeagley, frequently made his four or five at a time.
It may have been oddly fascinating, but it was largely irrelevant. The college game's showpiece event, the NCAA Division I championship final, never attracted more than 10,000 in the Eighties. On campuses across the country, soccer was still played before a sparse collection of parents, friends and scouts from rival teams. Dreams of filling the mighty football stadium with hordes of newly converted fans were gradually abandoned. Some institutions consented to build modest soccer-only facilities with proper pitches and a few rows of seats.
During this bleak period, one momentous occasion cast an unexpected beam of light on the game, an event which would play a much more pivotal role in shaping its destiny than the self-absorbed colleges. More than 1.4 million fans - an average of nearly 44,500 - scrambled to sites on both coasts in support of the 1984 Olympic football tournament. All manner of att
endance records fell. At a college gridiron stadium in Palo Alto, 30 miles north of San Francisco, 78,265 turned up to watch the US play Costa Rica, topping the record home attendance for an American national team - by 45,000 - and the celebrated 77,691 set by the Cosmos. Nor was it simply about the home team. The gold medal match in which France beat Brazil 2-0 drew nearly 102,000 to Pasadena's Rose Bowl.
It seemed unfathomable. The country might have been gripped by a particularly virulent strain of Olympic fever, hosting the event for the first time in more than half a century and returning to competition after boycotting the 1980 games, but for it to have suddenly capitulated to the world's favourite sport seemed ludicrous. The most plausible explanation was that the public had been enticed simply by the prospect of witnessing an Olympic event. With soccer tickets among the cheapest and most plentiful of the Games the competition became strangely attractive - even on the east coast at Harvard University and the US Naval Academy where, bizarrely, first-round matches took place.
Soccer fans were ecstatic. Here, they exclaimed, was evidence of America's continued appetite for the game, evidence that Pele had not worn a Cosmos jersey in vain. But they were also furious. ABC television's wall-to-wall Olympics coverage all but ignored the event, favouring gold-medal performances from Americans and the traditional staples of athletics, gymnastics and basketball. Though its presenters sometimes teased viewers with references to the latest enormous soccer crowd, its coverage of even the gold medal match was best measured by a stopwatch.
The Olympics could not rescue the NASL, but the Games did give impetus to a long-held dream of the USSF. Shunned two years earlier in applying to host the 1986 World Cup - a process which nearly bankrupted it and sent president Werner Fricker reaching into his own pocket - the USSF had not abandoned hope. Looking towards the 1994 tournament, FIFA took note of the popularity and organisation of the Olympic tournament, but the credit for this belonged not to the USSF (whose penury soon forced them to abandon New York for rent-free offices at US Olympic Committee headquarters in Colorado) but to Alan Rothenberg, the millionaire Los Angeles lawyer assigned to run the event. For the time being Rothenberg returned to his law firm and the NBA's Los Angeles Clippers, of which he was president, but FIFA did not forget his name.
Soccer in a Football World: The Story of America's Forgotten Game (Sporting) Page 29