The Soccerball Years, part 1

As a child there were five professional sports teams in my home town of Atlanta, Georgia. The Braves played baseball. The Falcons played American football. The basketball team was the Hawks. Surprising everyone, as winter sports are not popular in the South, we had a pro hockey team called the Flames. Lastly, and perhaps most dear to the hearts of fourth graders across the metropolitan area, was the Chiefs, our soccer team.

Atlanta has always been a relative hotbed of soccer. My high school had a team as early as the 1950s. It took until the late 1970s, though, for soccer to take a place in the wider public imagination and become an increasingly popular activity for middle-class parents to sign their children up to. My parents enrolled me in the local church league. We didn't know much about tactics. Most matches consisted of eighteen kids crowding round the ball and kicking each other in the shins, while the goalies sat on their haunches and looked for four-leafed clovers in the pitch. We had fun, though, and we enjoyed fooling ourselves into being experts at a game which mystified our parents.

Although I did not know it at the time, the Atlanta Chiefs of my pre-teen years was actually the second club to operate by that name. The original club had been one of the founding teams of the North American Soccer League in 1968. It had, in fact, had won the league's first championship. No one remembers this now, of course, but two surprising legacies of the original chiefs are still extant. One of the star players that year was Kaizer 'Boy Boy' Motaung. After a single season in Atlanta he returned home. He enjoyed his experience with the Chiefs enough to use the name for the new club he founded, the Kaizer Chiefs (and in fact he used not only the name but the logo of his old team as well). Over twenty years later, the Kaizer Chiefs sold Lucas Radebe to Leeds United. He quickly became a fan favourite, and inspired a group of local musicians to name their band after his old club. So now when I watch my boys bounce around their room listening to a Kaiser Chiefs album, I secretly enjoy it as an unintended memorial to my first football love.

The original Chiefs folded in 1973, practically unnoticed by anyone. The NASL continued without them, and despite nearly a decade of obscurity, suddenly found itself to be the major American sports fad of the late 1970s. The league began to expand its membership and in 1979 Ted Turner moved a franchise to Atlanta and renamed it after the original Chiefs. This incarnation lasted only three years but left a lasting impression on the children of the city. After all, soccer was our sport.

Getting to matches was difficult. My parents, like most parents, thought that soccer was boring. They did not understand the rules and they did not understand how a sport could allow play to go for so long at a time without anyone scoring. Saying that, it was my parents who saw the Chiefs first. They were invited by one of my father's clients to a evening match when the Cosmos were in town. They went, brought me home a Chiefs pennant (which I still have) and were able to tell me they had seen Pele. That's right, my mother, who doesn't even know there is such a thing as an offside rule let alone posses the ability to explain it, has seen Pele play. I could cry. As far as I can remember they never went again. I suppose it was only going to be downhill from there.

I did get to see the Chiefs myself, finally, thanks to the efforts of my friend Marthame. Marthame was the most soccer mad of any kid in Atlanta in 1979 without doubt. He could have explained the offside rule, that's for sure. Marthame always had his birthday parties at Chiefs matches, and one of these coincided with a 'meet the players' promotion. After queueing for ten minutes I got my picture taken with the Chiefs keeper. After some research I am pretty sure this player was one 'Tad Delorm,' but he could have just been a reserve. Whoever he was he had a wonderfully 'porny' mustache and the facial expression of someone who would rather be doing almost anything other than posing with nine-year-olds for souvenir Polaroids.

The match itself was played in the cavernous Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium with a capacity of over 50,000. I remember finding it hard to follow the play on the pitch - we seemed a million miles away, and they style of play was not what I was used to (as in eighteen players crowding around the ball and kicking each other in the shins). Whenever I had a question Marthame was always there to answer it, always with enthusiasm. The half time entertainment was, believe it or not, a short exhibition of rugby. Really. I can remember the announcer explaining to the crowd that the players were not allowed to throw the ball forwards but could kick the ball forwards if they chose. Considering that the adult half of the crowd that day was undoubtedly confused by the soccer already, a rugby match was probably one novelty too far.

Despite soccer never really becoming 'mainstream,' the Chiefs still managed to draw decent crowds. It was a natural step, therefore, for Ted Turner to enter the Chiefs into the NASL indoor league in 1979. The games were played in the Omni, where the Hawks and Flames played as well. Although Americanised to the point where its relationship with proper football is at best tenuous, indoor soccer has had a commercial success that outlived the NASL. It continues to be played in several small professional leagues across the country today. The games are fast, have little room for complex tactics, and involve much more scoring. Certainly as a child I found it easier to follow. Marthame liked it too, and his parents would organise groups of children to go with him to occasional matches.

I have three memories of the indoor Chiefs matches. One was that there was a banner hanging from the ceiling proclaiming the Chiefs status as NASL Indoor Eastern Division Champions, 1979. Considering the fact that no other Atlanta team had won anything in my lifetime that could be sewn on a banner, I was suitably awed. There was also a woman who was at every match I attended who had a wooden football rattle. She swung it around so much I found it really annoying. No one has ever produced a football rattle at any match I've been to here in England so there is no telling where she got it from.

My most vivid memory of the indoor Chiefs matches, though, was the Atlanta keeper, Graham Tutt. I wish I could say that I was fascinated by him because of his playing record. I wish it was because I knew that he had played for Charlton Athletic in the old First Division from 1973-76 before a traumatic eye injury sidelined him for eighteen months. The real reasons were much more mundane: (1) His jersey number was '00,' which I thought was 'really cool.' (2) The King Tut exhibition had just caused a huge media sensation in America and having 'Tutt' for a surname was also 'really cool.' (3) The Omni had a huge, four-sided scoreboard that hung suspended from the ceiling. Every time Tutt kicked the ball had to be careful to avoid it. Once he did hit it, and I thought that was 'really cool.' I was ten years old, okay?

After three outdoor and two indoor seasons the second Chiefs were wound up as well. Although attendances were good, soccer struggled to succeed on television. It continued to do so until my generation became old enough to become a demographic grouping advertisers wanted to reach. Today's Major League Soccer reaps the harvest the NASL sowed.

After the Chiefs folded most of the players who could move on to other teams did so. Graham Tutt, however, stayed in Atlanta and played for the equally ill-starred Georgia Generals. After that he began running training camps for children and playing amateur soccer. Little did I know that as an adult, our paths would one day cross again.....(continued in the Soccerball Years, part 2)