"Thank Goodness for Rock n Roll Soccer"

America's longest-running football/soccer publication, Soccer America, has reviewed 'Rock n Roll Soccer'. Here's Mike Woitalla's full appraisal:

One of my favorite soccer memories: I was 13, sitting next to my grandfather who was visiting us from Germany, in Aloha Stadium watching Team Hawaii play the Las Vegas Quicksilvers.

I noticed that Opa, not a man prone to demonstrating excitement, was practically giddy.

“Michael, that’s Eusebio!” he said. “The world’s best player ever besides Pele. … See No. 5? That’s Wolfgang Suhnholz. He played for Bayern Munich!”

This was in 1977. After the North American Soccer League had so much success in many parts of the country, it started franchises in the middle of the Pacific and in the middle of desert -- when Vegas was a third the size it is now, had never had major league sports, and no soccer culture.

“What the hell were they thinking?” writes Ian Plenderleith in 'Rock 'n' Roll Soccer: The Short Life and Fast Times of the North American Soccer League.' After one season, The Quicksilvers moved to San Diego and Team Hawaii became the Tulsa Roughnecks."

Reckless expansion was of course a main factor for the demise of the NASL, which folded after the 1984 season.

But, boy, am I thankful that the NASL did some crazy stuff. Not just because of the memory of seeing my grandfather so delighted, or because I got to watch Pele play, or had Team Hawaii players visit my school.

The NASL inspired the generation of players who made the U.S. national team respectable, like New Jersey boys Tony Meola, John Harkes, Tab Ramos and Claudio Reyna, who went to New York Cosmos games. It spread the seeds that led to soccer’s current state -- neck and neck with basketball as the most popular team sport among American children.

“In 1967, 12,000 schoolchildren went through the [Atlanta] Chiefs soccer clinics, while 42 area high schools had begun to play the game,” writes Plenderleith.

But what Plenderleith does most expertly -- and is previously less covered than NASL grassroots’ impact -- is show the NASL’s impact on the global game, and how some of that stuff doesn’t seem so crazy in hindsight.

“Old World” soccer purists may have mocked halftime armadillo races, players entering the field on Harley-Davidsons, or the San Diego Chicken doing a pirouette, flopping and playing dead next to a fouled player. (Minnesota Kicks coach Geoff Barnett: “The referee goes nuts and comes over to me shouting, ‘Get that f****** chicken off the field!”)

But as Plenderleith writes, the NASL was “a league that got too much right to ignore.”

“The NASL introduced the idea that a soccer game could be an event and a spectacle, not just two teams meeting to compete for points. You weren’t herded into the stadium by policemen waving wooden batons. You were a customer …”

Some of the “manufactured atmosphere” -- which could also be considered “marketing techniques aimed at wooing a new generation of fans” -- may have been over the top. But …

“Once the game started you could watch a version of soccer easily recognizable as the real thing, but which promoted scoring, played down defensive duties, and refuted the virtues of a hard-fought 1-1 draw. …

“In the 1970s, Pele, Johan Cruyff, Eusebio, George Best, Gerd Mueller and Franz Beckenbauer all played in the same league. … It was a big money glamour league that aimed to entertain, while generating cash. In that respect, it was the Champions League and the English Premier League rolled into one.”

Plenderleith lays out a solid case for how the NASL was ahead of its time. FIFA may have fought the league’s attempts to tweak the rules, but later made changes that resemble some of those attempts. Publishing a wide range of game statistics, marketing to women, names on the back of jerseys -- that happened first in the NASL.

Clive Toye, the former New York Cosmos general manager, says, “We were constantly being visited by executives from English clubs to see what we were doing, asking why we were doing it.”

From all that the NASL got right to where it went astray, this colorful and important era of American soccer is in good hands with Plenderleith, a skillful writer and thorough journalist.

For those of us who lived through the NASL, 'Rock 'n' Roll Soccer' brings back wonderful memories and enlightens us on aspects of the league we may not have realized. For those too young to remember the NASL, it’s a chance to comprehend how soccer took a foothold in the USA and meet the fascinating characters who made it happen -- with laugh-out-loud moments, to boot.

Rock 'n' Roll Soccer: The Short Life and Fast Times of the North American Soccer League by Ian Plenderleith (Thomas Dunne Books 2015) 350 pages.

The Wondrous Stupidity of Teams in Hawaii and Vegas

At the height of the Ronald Reagan era in the mid 1980s, Elvis Costello released the album ‘King of America’, including a song that sneered at the United States for being “a brilliant mistake”. I steal this phrase for the title of chapter six of Rock n Roll Soccer: ‘Brilliant Mistakes: Quicksilver teams in Vegas and Hawaii’, which examines the joyous folly of NASL franchises in improbable soccer cities. Two classic examples were Team Hawaii and the Las Vegas Quicksilvers, both of whom only lasted one season, in 1977. They came and went quicker than the Sex Pistols, though given the size of their stadiums, at least they were in no danger of selling out like a major label punk band.

Quicksilvers - easy come, easy go,
like chips at a Vegas casino

The players I talked to all fondly remembered their trips to Hawaii and Vegas, where they’d be warmly welcomed and would often stay for several days. Details of the actual games, though, are sketchy. It’s possible that a lot of players stepped out the worse for wear after a day on the beach or a night in the casinos. The only thing absolutely certain besides the small crowds and sore heads was the debilitating heat. Alan Merrick recalls his boots melting and falling apart. Las Vegas player Alan Mayer remembers that even as a goalkeeper the climate was intolerable. ‘You’d come in to the locker room and dunk your feet, with your shoes still on, straight into a bucket of cold water,’ he says. ‘At that time they didn’t have all the protective wear that keepers have today. So if you slid on Astroturf you got burnt, and you got burnt pretty well. The burns you got, I can still feel them today, they were atrocious.’

Here’s another short extract, likening the NASL’s life to a once happily married man who falls victim to the lures of that anomalous settlement in the Mojave desert.

From a writer’s point of view, naming the NASL’s team in Las Vegas the Quicksilvers seems almost too good to be true. The unpredictable, mercurial league that had tried its hand at steady growth now found itself eager to grab every opportunity to expand while the going was hot. In the early 1970s, the NASL was like a steady married man who’d settled down with a frumpy but reliable girl following a turbulent youth  filled with heady heartbreak [the late 60s]. Then, all of a sudden, the steady married man went on a trip to, let’s say, Vegas, and was reminded of how exciting things used to be. The married man forgot about all the accumulated stability he had worked so hard to build back in his home town, and found himself gambling inadvisable sums in a casino, while drinking reckless amounts of alcohol. There were strippers sitting on his lap, and all kinds of temptations and distractions that came with the strippers. Sure, it was just a brief fling, and all details would stay within Vegas, but once Mr Steady had renewed his taste for the high life, would the lapse into decadence become a pattern that would usher in eventual divorce and ruination?