I was reading something about far-right politics in Europe…
Jean-Marie Le Pen died, didn’t he? Let me look it up...
I used to know a guy named Jean-Marie; interesting name for a man. Who are other famous Jean-Maries on Wikipedia?...
Jean-Marie Pfaff was a great Belgian goalkeeper of the 1970s, and only 5 foot 11…
Wasn’t Shep Messing also relatively short?
That’s how I came to be reading about Shep Messing, former
New York Cosmos goalkeeper whom I hadn’t thought about in many a year. His
Wikipedia page linked to this 2015 piece in The Guardian, where Messing recounted
his experience on the 1972 U.S. Olympic men’s soccer team.
It’s challenging to convey how impromptu and counter-cultural soccer was in this country when I was a kid. There were huge areas of the country that had never seen a soccer game. My family moved from Charleston, WV to the D.C. suburbs when I was in 3rd grade. I’d never seen or heard of soccer, then suddenly it was something the kids played during recess, thanks to crude goals set up on the school grounds, and the leadership of a boy from Mexico and another from England (a benefit of living in the salad bowl of the Washington area).
The current state of U.S. soccer, which is still way behind
the Western European nations, is so far advanced in coaching and development
compared to my day. We were largely on our own. In the 1970s, it was hard to
find an adult who knew enough about soccer to teach us anything. Most of my
coaches were competent at organization and motivation, skills they probably
gained in some other sport -- but ignorant about soccer technique or strategy.
It was huge to encounter a traveling youth team from Germany
or Scotland or anywhere beyond our shores. I learned more playing one game against
kids my age, raised in a real football culture, than in a year of listening to
my American coach. An unfortunate psychological effect, for me at least, was
that the moment I heard an opposing team speaking a foreign language, or even English
with a foreign accent, I felt my team was in for an ass-kicking.
But there was such freedom in this marginal status! Such relief from
expectations. Our parents, even if they showed up for the games, could hardly
tell what was going on, if their child was doing well or poorly. The stoners
and poets and other non-conformists played soccer in 1980.
This Shep Messing interview gets at what I mean.
There was no grand master plan in US soccer back then.
“It is so hard to compare eras and generations for US soccer,” Messing said. “You’re not talking about guys who were playing in a stable, professional league. This was really amateurs. So to go to play at Azteca against Mexico and to Jamaica and Trinidad and the Central American countries, we did not have that body of experience. Our experience was, in my case, Harvard-Yale or Harvard against Columbia. We had no preparation, nothing to prepare. It was brutal. But we didn’t have any pressure. We were a bunch of college bandits.”
Picture this: Messing hitchhiked from New York to St. Louis to
attend the Olympic team tryouts!
A dark note: Messing recalls that he and his track-suited
teammates used to hop the fence and skip the ID check when leaving the Olympic
Village.to go out on the town in Munich. Observing them was the way the PLO
terrorists saw the security weaknesses, and they donned track suits and hopped the
fence to get into the village.
This interview was conducted by Michael Lewis, who I gather
is not the Moneyball/Liar’s Poker guy, but oh my goodness, he has written a lot
about U.S. soccer in the 1970s. I have not yet reached the bottom of this
rabbit hole…
