LOCAL SOCCER AND THE WORLD CUP
By William Urban
When I was growing up there were only three sports — football, basketball and baseball. Tennis wasn’t quite a sport; more a pastime for elites or kids who didn’t like get knocked down. Bowling was just fun, as was swimming. Track existed, but after the city-wide grade school Olympics were discontinued, everybody lost interest. The local school for blacks wasn’t invited, and if it had been, its high-stepping marching band would have won first place every year.
As for watching sports on television, there wasn’t much of that. If you wanted spectator sports, you traveled to the big city or turned on the radio. If your town had minor league baseball, as mine did, you were lucky.
As a result, I never expected to like soccer. I was introduced to the game by a German exchange student who later took me to a couple matches in Hamburg. I can’t say I was impressed much — get the ball to a wing, center it, and see if anyone can get a head on it. The rules seemed designed to suppress scoring, as indeed they do.
It was only after I came to Monmouth College that I became involved with the game. In the late Sixties a third of the student body came from the east coast, and, naturally, a few had played soccer in high school. In order to form a soccer club, they had to have a faculty advisor. I was available.
Happily, the local YMCA director, Marc Waggoner, was willing to assist in caring for injured players. It was impossible to treat sprained ankles and keep an eye on the game, and nothing is worst for a coach than to be called to deal with a crisis on the field without a clue of what had happened. Marc started the current Y soccer program, using soccer club members to coach the teams. John Garrett, I remember, continued to coach years after graduation. Though Marc left in 1971, the program continued.
It was hard to make the game popular. Young people were there, enthusiastically so, but school budgets were limited and die-hard football fans were hostile. Even when junior high football was discontinued regionally, there was no interest in replacing it with soccer. I was able to get the soccer club made into a varsity sport only by agreeing to serve as coach without pay. Fortunately, Bobby Woll and Bill Reichow treated me very well in the years that followed.
That did not mean that everything was easy. The equipment manager, Murph, got us recycled basketball uniforms and Rebekah Kloppel put numbers on tee-shirts. Over the years Juan Fernandez, Iskandar Najar and George Converse shared the coaching duties; Lyman Williams and Peter Kloeppel laid out the field and occasionally served as emergency referees. Even getting a field to play on was difficult. Like the old ball field at Lincoln School, which we used for a while. The college brought over a load of dirt and shovels, and part of every practice session was given to making the field more level.
I made good friends, especially Jorge Prats, the legendary Knox coach. He once took a joint team to Barcelona. I couldn’t afford to go, but the Monmouth players had a great time.
There were almost always one or two women on the team. Where else, I reasoned, would future women coaches come from? Later, in 1992-3, together with Fred Keller I helped get the women’s soccer club started. When the team went varsity in 1994, I was teaching in Europe, but we were lucky to get Simon Cordery as coach, then Barry McNamara.
Which brings us to the World Cup. I was a bit prejudiced. When I lived in Italy I saw a number of international matches in person, when I was in Germany a good friend had me over to watch the games on what seemed to be a huge color set — it must have been 24 inches or so. Well, Italy went out. Mexico — well, it was hard to cheer on a team when the government was holding a Marine in prison for what should have been a non-offense. The USA? Well, Klinsmann was right in saying that the team wasn’t playing up to its potential. A bit more of that flurry of enthusiasm at the end of the Belgium game would have made quite a difference.
Klinsmann emphasized fitness, physicality. I sympathize with that. I rarely had players who knew anything about the game before coming to Monmouth College, so the only chance we had to stay in any game was to hustle more, to welcome contact, and to never quit.
Klinsmann had introduced that to the German team in 2006. It showed in the quarter-final with Brazil, which had not lost a home game since 1975! It took a few minutes to get adjusted, then the goals just started falling in. The game also illustrated the importance of morale — when things start going wrong, everyone just stands around. Still, 7-1 could have been worse. Germany played ball control, only rarely pressing forward to score.
Soccer doesn’t lend itself to TV. The beauty of the game — everyone except the goalie playing the ball up and down the big field, back and forth, and ballet-like combinations — doesn’t fit on the screen well. To be in a stadium with a huge crowds is an incredible experience. It may seem that little is happening, but everyone knows that in a matter of seconds, there could be a frenzied assault on the goal; and scoring is so rare that everyone is filled with anticipation or terror. The combination of individual skills and teamwork, with no particular emphasis on height or weight, should make soccer the premier American sport.
Meanwhile, the “beautiful game” remains more popular abroad, especially among the poor, while in the US it has long been limited to the rich and immigrants. It has its faults: referees have to decide whether a foul should be ignored or punished harshly, and the offside rule limits scoring. However, weak teams love the present system, and they have most of the votes. Fans of weak teams know that an upset is always possible, and while the World Cup worked its way down to traditional superpowers, Costa Rica almost made it into the quarter-finals.
Review-Atlas (July 10, 2014), 4.
