Long range goals, p.1
Long-Range Goals, page 1
LONG-RANGE GOALS
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LONG-RANGE GOALS
THE SUCCESS STORY OF
MAJOR LEAGUE
SOCCER
BEAU DURE
Copyright © 2010 by Potomac Books, Inc.
Published in the United States by Potomac Books, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dure, Beau.
Long-range goals : the success story of major league soccer / Beau Dure.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-59797-509-4 (alk. paper)
1. Soccer—United States. 2. Professional sports—United States. 3. Major League Soccer (Organization) I. Title.
GV944.U5D87 2010
796.334’640973—dc22
2010000807
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper that meets the American National Standards Institute Z39-48 Standard.
Potomac Books, Inc.
22841 Quicksilver Drive
Dulles, Virginia 20166
First Edition
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
Preface
Introduction: Past to Present
1 Before Kickoff
2 The Launch
3 After the Boom
4 Concrete Steps and Change
5 The Lawsuit
6 The Low Point
7 Building Back
8 More Groundwork
9 In the Spotlight
10 Hardball
11 Beckham and Blanco
12 Beckham and Beyond
Afterword
Notes
Index
About the Author
PREFACE
In 1994, the World Cup came to the United States. As a young copy editor and sports columnist at the Morning Star in Wilmington, North Carolina, I decided to track down some information about a professional soccer league that was supposedly in the works around that time. I got back a packet of vague plans and lists of interested cities. It all seemed exciting and yet so distant.
In 2006, after several years of writing columns and features for USA Today and Knight Ridder Tribune News Service, I started to work in earnest on this book, realizing that no one had written a full-fledged history of Major League Soccer, the league that had once seemed so far off.
Not that it’s really possible to write a full-fledged history of any league. Telling the stories of the great characters on the field and in the offices will require many books, not one. To give just one example of someone who will be mentioned only in passing: it’s humbling to sit face-to-face with a man like Maykel Galindo, the Cuban striker who turned a short moment of opportunity into a great career with MLS, and hear him talk about the hardships he suffered along the way . . . with a smile on his face.
And the ending hasn’t been written. The league is still in business. That’s the story.
If soccer were a religion, then I had had an adult baptism. Like many kids who grew up in the 1970s, I was fascinated with the PBS show Soccer Made in Germany, but unlike the kids of Kearny, New Jersey, who would grow up to be U.S. soccer mainstays (such as John Harkes, Tab Ramos, and Tony Meola), I didn’t have the New York Cosmos next door to inspire me. I was vaguely aware of the Atlanta Chiefs’ existence, but my family never made the trip to see them play. I played youth soccer and was a decent sweeper at the Under-14 level, but I switched to cross-country and chess in high school for reasons I’ve long forgotten. Although I was more curious about the game than most of my peers, to the point of asking my mother to send a clipping of the 1982 World Cup standings each day she wrote me at summer camp, it was still an idle fascination.
At Duke, I enrolled too late to see the men’s team win a national championship, but I saw some good players and great games. Little did I know how much significance that opposing coach (Bruce Arena) and goalkeeper (Tony Meola) at the Duke-Virginia game would have in the years to come.
As thrilling and rowdy as Duke games could be, I didn’t really get wrapped up in a soccer team’s fortunes and misfortunes until MLS started. Yet MLS had little to do with the team I followed—the Carolina Dynamo, which played one level lower in the U.S. Interregional Soccer League (USISL) and the A-League, which merged with the USISL. I attended every game I could for a couple of years during which the Dynamo were the class of a rough-and-tumble league. It didn’t matter that they played on a high school gridiron football field. Or that you could easily prove that they weren’t the best team in the world. For that season, for me, they were.
But the Dynamo could have used more fans with such an irrational attachment. Too many fans at the games fit the “soccer mom” stereotype, driving our kids to a safe, well-organized activity, not responding to Yari Allnutt’s call to turn up the intensity. At one game, while the crowd was wrapped up in the antics of “Dynamo Dawg” or whatever mascot the team employed at the time, I was one of the few witnesses to a spectacular goal by Brian Loftin, who would later have his own experience with league-building as commissioner of the indoor Xtreme Soccer League (XSL). A mini-ball was tossed out onto the field for Loftin to hurl into the stands. Seeing a one-man standing ovation, he pegged it right into my midsection, and it took all my amateur goalkeeping skills to hang on. By then, someone had alerted the kids that a goal had indeed been scored. Lacking hard-core fan support, the Dynamo eventually sold off their talented players—Allnutt, Loftin, John Ball, Scott Schweitzer—and dropped back to the amateur level, where the club is successful to this day on a modest scale.
I attended my first MLS game in 1996 in Tampa, Florida, watching the Tampa Bay Mutiny take on the Colorado Rapids. What I remember most about that game was that the suburbanites gathered near me were quite relieved to see the fans beating drums seated on the other side of the stadium, far away. That one moment showed me the problem MLS would have in uniting its fan base. Ultimately, to be a fan means to have that irrational attachment, one that makes you beat a drum or not particularly care that the person next to you is beating a drum.
Fast-forward to 2006 to see those irrational attachments in action. Before a pivotal late-season game against New York, D.C. United honored its 1996 championship team. Most—not all—fans warmly greeted 1996 coach Bruce Arena, though he was still under fire for his performance with the 2006 U.S. team in the World Cup and, not incidentally, was coaching the visiting Red Bulls. But the crowd awakened echoes in aging RFK Stadium upon greeting Raul Diaz Arce, the Salvadoran striker who had scored 23 goals in that first season. When Marco Etcheverry strolled out onto the field, the stadium roared. Somewhere in the space occupied by the Screaming Eagles and Barra Brava, the two largest United supporters’ groups, fans waved a portrait of the Bolivian playmaker.
This league has fans. This league has players. And this league has history.
This book compiles much of that history from hundreds of newspaper accounts, MLS media guides, my own recollections, and exclusive interviews conducted in 2008. I also happened to find a videotape with something labeled “Great soccer”—which turned out to be the 6-4 Kansas City–Columbus game of 1996. But this history is far from complete. In 14 short years, too much has happened to compile in one book. Business students will want to explore the role Soccer United Marketing has played in reversing the league’s bottom line. Lawyers are already examining the single-entity structure that MLS successfully defended in court. Fans and players have plenty of anecdotes that either I don’t know or couldn’t include. If this is the only MLS book on a bookstore shelf in 2011, that’s disappointing.
There are already plenty of people to thank for their roles in keeping the league’s history alive. The league itself does much of the work, with a communications department now led by Dan Courtemanche, Will Kuhns, and Lauren Brophy. On the unofficial level, David Litterer has been the keeper of U.S. soccer history online since the early days of the Internet. For pre-MLS history, Litterer works with two accomplished researchers. Colin Jose is quite literally a Hall of Fame historian, having been historian of the National Soccer Hall of Fame from 1997 to 2007. He and collaborator Roger Allaway, his successor at the Hall of Fame, have unearthed the forgotten records of the American Soccer League (ASL), among other accomplishments.
Among the other people to thank for their research, inspiration, and illuminating conversations:
Andrei Markovits and Steven Hellerman wrote Offside: Soccer and American Exceptionalism, explaining once and for all why this sport has had such a rough ride in this country.
David Wangerin picked up the torch from Markovits and Hellerman to write a compelling survey of the U.S. game, Soccer in a Football World.
Among the other great books on soccer and culture: How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization by New Republic editor Franklin Foer, and Soccer Against the Enemy (or Football Against the Enemy, depending on where you buy it) by Simon Kuper.
Documentary makers have picked up the story in the History of Soccer series and the disco-infused Once in a Lifetime: The Incredible Story of the New York Cosmos. The latter is also a book by Gavin Newsham.
Kenn Tomasch has kept meticulous data on various U.S. sports leagues.
The 150th pick in the inaugural MLS draft, Garth Lagerwey, is a fellow Duke alum who answered many of my questions and was happy to share his honest opinions. He should write a book like this one of these days, at least about his five-year playing career and current job as Real Salt Lake general manager.
MLS is well served by beat writers who have kept the daily news coming, starting with the dean of U.S. soccer reporters, Michael Lewis. We’re also lucky in this sport to have the insights of Sports Illustrated’s Grant Wahl, whose 2009 book The Beckham Experiment shed light on the league’s most famous player.
And MLS is lucky to have such a dedicated unofficial media. We have blogs such as the staggeringly comprehensive Du Nord and BigSoccer.com’s tandem of Dan Loney and Bill Archer. Andy Mead travels more miles than most truck drivers to take professional photos and occasionally publish the lively Emerald City Gazette. The league’s rivalries are intense, but the willingness of supporters to share information is truly admirable.
Many thanks to the following players, coaches, league officials, and interested parties for being so generous with their time for interviews: Mark Abbott, Freddy Adu, Jeff Agoos, Bruce Arena, Sean Bowers, Jimmy Conrad, Landon Donovan, Don Garber, Ivan Gazidis, Sunil Gulati, Garth Lagerwey, Alexi Lalas, Doug Logan, Richard Motzkin, Ben Olsen, Jim Paglia, Eddie Pope, Alan Rothenberg, Mark Semioli, and Eric Wynalda.
I’m especially grateful to everyone who helped bring this book to market. Allaway, an experienced editor as well as a soccer historian, read an early draft. So did Wahl, whose book provided vital material for the final chapters. My agent, Ian Kleinert of Objective Entertainment, provided expert guidance to a first-time author. At Potomac Books, Kevin Cuddihy saw potential in the book, Don McKeon and Bud Knecht gave the rough draft skillful edits, and Elizabeth Demers shepherded the book the rest of the way.
Also thanks to the many editors who have indulged my soccer interests over the years, particularly Deb Barrington, J. Michael Falgoust, Roxanna Scott, Don Collins, Steve Berkowitz, Janice Lloyd, and Adam Hirshfield at USA Today, Tom Peterson and Gregory Clay at Knight Ridder Tribune (now McClatchy-Tribune), Ann Alexander, Allen Johnson, and Cindy Loman at the News & Record, and David Brown and Scott Nunn at the Morning Star. Special thanks to Gary Kicinski and Monte Lorell for giving me time off to revive a dormant book idea and finish it.
Thanks to all those who argue with me at BigSoccer.com—and before that, at the North American Soccer mailing list—to help me see MLS issues from a variety of perspectives. Just remember that you’re all wrong.
Thanks to the staff at Starbucks in Vienna, Virginia, and the Patrick Henry Library for providing great places to work.
And thanks most of all to my family. In 1996, MLS kicked off, and I met someone who was nice enough to consider a sports bar with a Premier League broadcast as a viable dating venue. I couldn’t have imagined that we’d be taking our first son to a D.C. United reserve game 10 years later, or that I would start writing this book as our second son was born.
INTRODUCTION:
PAST TO PRESENT
Taylor Twellman stood facing his locker, checking messages on his phone. The New England striker, temporarily forgetting the spatial awareness that made him one of the top goal-poaching forwards in MLS history, was oblivious to the post-game media throng that had crammed into the narrow space between rows of lockers at RFK Stadium, the aging Washington venue steeped in soccer history.
Before MLS Cup 2007, played November 18, Twellman had joked that he would give only quotes in the style of Bull Durham, the great baseball film in which Kevin Costner’s savvy, world-weary Crash Davis tutored Tim Robbins’s brash young Nuke LaLoosh on the finer points of feeding clichés to the media. Twellman is far too colorful to stick to the script. He never lacks for self-confidence, but like a good boxer hyping a fight, he balances arrogance with playful wit. Reporters know to seek him out.
Most people associated with MLS are grateful for any media attention. Like NASCAR drivers, they sense a responsibility to their core of fans. While most leagues shun bloggers, several MLS teams have given credentials to independent, amateur journalists who work alongside newspaper reporters. The league might limit access to a global megastar like David Beckham or a young phenom like Freddy Adu, who faced a legitimate concern of over-exposure and overscheduling, but everyone else is easily approachable. Even Landon Donovan, whose media exploits include an appearance on MTV’s Cribs with his TV-star wife and his notoriety as Mexico’s nemesis, is generous in granting interviews and speaks openly in the locker room, shifting into Spanish when asked. Bruce Arena, who parlayed early championships with D.C. United into an eight-year run as national-team coach, can intimidate reporters with his caustic wit but never shuts them off.
The media jockeying for position in that cramped space at RFK, which had been refurbished for baseball’s latest attempt to usurp a stadium much better suited to “the world’s game” than the one-time national pastime, would soon push the limits. The home locker room temporarily housing the Houston Dynamo was more spacious, but the New England Revolution occupied the visitors’ space. Some of us stood only a few inches away from Twellman but gazed elsewhere, like commuters on a packed subway car. Twellman focused on his phone while we waited. Finally, he sensed one or two reporters were also focused on that phone.
Twellman whirled around and demanded a bit of privacy for another minute or two. The chagrined reporters, having nowhere to retreat, averted their eyes while Twellman went back to his messages.
His point made, Twellman took only a few seconds to turn back and open the floor for questions. A dozen reporters thrust forward tape recorders, then turned their eyes to me, the only one willing to break the ice and ask a few questions.
“I’ve got no emotion in me,” Twellman said. “I’ve lost every final every which way we can. The way I look at it, we’ve got absolutely nothing to lose next year. Get back here, we should play four forwards and try to score 12 goals.”
Twellman had managed to swing some sarcasm toward New England’s critics, who often accused his team of playing too defensively in big games, but he was speaking out of heartbreak. For the third straight year and fourth of the past six years, he and the Revolution had played in MLS Cup. The Revs lost in overtime in 2002 and 2005, then penalty kicks in 2006. This time, Twellman’s goal had given New England the lead for 41 minutes before Houston responded with the dagger of Joseph Ngwenya’s scrambled goal and the axe of Dwayne De Rosario’s powerful header.
No one would dispute New England’s place among MLS elite over those six years. The annual runs through the playoffs were no fluke. Under the direction of Steve Nicol, the philosophical Scotsman who had a glittering career playing for Liverpool, the Revolution had left the struggles of its early years far behind. Nicol built a core of combative, fiercely loyal players—Twellman, fellow forward Pat Noonan, goalkeeper Matt Reis, midfield intimidator Shalrie Joseph, defender Jay Heaps, and playmaker Steve Ralston—and filled in gaps around them with shrewd draft picks.
The strategy worked. But it was working slightly better for Houston, which had kept a cadre of players together under different circumstances.
Dominic Kinnear, Scottish-born but raised in California, was saddened when his San Jose Earthquakes packed up and left the Bay Area for Texas in 2006. The move was unfair on many levels. The Earthquakes had trouble finding a suitable owner or stadium, but Houston had neither of these things. And the Bay Area’s soccer lore was so strong that MLS had chosen San Jose’s Spartan Stadium, narrow field and all, for its 1996 debut.
Upon moving to Houston, the franchise stumbled immediately. The club’s original name—Houston 1836, taken from the year the city was founded—angered many Mexican supporters who remembered that the city’s founding coincided with the defeat of Mexico’s army. The team rechristened itself the Houston Dynamo.
Despite all the upheaval, many Earthquakes relocated to Houston with Kinnear. De Rosario had scored San Jose’s winner in the 2001 final. Defenders Eddie Robinson and Craig Waibel, goalkeeper Pat Onstad, target forward Brian Ching, and winger Brian Mullan had been with the team for its second title in 2003. Two longtime Earthquakes had returned—Wade Barrett had spent a couple of years in Europe, and Richard Mulrooney rejoined his former teammates early in 2007 after a few years elsewhere in MLS.
