The Soccerball Years, part 2

Anyone who has ever stood near me for more than a few minutes will know I am full of excellent ideas on how to improve the Premiership, the FA, the Conference, Bath City FC, and the sport of football in general. People are so struck by the brilliance of my ideas, their freshness and their cogency, that they often ask me if I have even been involved in managing a professional team before. Okay, none of that is true, but I did work, briefly, in the head office of one of Atlanta's professional soccer clubs in late 1989: the Atlanta Attack.

When I arrived back home to Atlanta from university for my first Christmas holidays I resumed my previous summer job of delivering pizzas in the evenings. At some point during the first few days of my arrival I decided to call up the Atlanta Attack office, out of the blue, and ask if they would hire me for a few weeks as a day job. Looking back, I can't believe I was bold enough to do this. I would be too embarrassed to do this now. I think I had reached the point where I had shrugged off my childhood shyness, but not yet developed the caution of adulthood. Amazingly, without even so much as a interview or a CV, they said yes. The next morning I put on a coat and tie and reported to the Attack head office.

I imagined that a professional sports team's head office would be located in the arena where the team played and be a hive of frantic activity with players and coaches rushing in various directions, while middle-aged men in suits shouted into their telephones and gulped down stale coffee. Much to my surprise, the Attack head office was in a office high-rise in the well-to-do, but rather sleepy neighbourhood of Vinings. The office itself consisted of four or five rooms, housing a total of seven staff. As the receptionist was off sick, I was addressing envelopes and answering the phones within a few minutes of arriving. No one had had time to learn my name yet, or find out if I was even literate, but I was effectively controlling the office communication in this pre-Internet era. I loved it, and found taking messages and learning who was who as I went along a thrill.

One of the first calls I took was from a player wanting to speak to the Attack head coach, Ketih Tozer. I can't remember the players name, but he was young, English, and sounded miserable and desperate. He told me he was playing for 'Penn/Jersey FC.' This was one of the clubs in the struggling outdoor American Soccer League. I had been to a match to see the league's Washington club a few months earlier. It was a really dreadful experience. I felt sorry for him. I said, 'Do you mean the Penn/Jersey Eagles from the ASL?' 'Yeah,' he replied, genuinely shocked. 'How do you know that?!' Thinking that a thorough grounding in obscure soccer clubs was just the sort of skill that was going to make me invaluable at the Attack I said, 'Oh, I just know a lot about soccer.' I wrote out the message on a slip of paper for Coach Tozer, being careful to note the call came from a Penn/Jersey Eagles player.

Unless you are an indoor soccer fan you probably don't know the name Keith Tozer. If you are an indoor soccer fan you are probably getting goosebumps now. You are thinking, 'Wow, Nedved worked with Keith Tozer!' Okay, first of all, I didn't work with him. Like all great coaches, he had that sort of determined, tunnel-vision look in his eyes that made you know that if you were not involved in some way with him winning something, he wasn't interested. And there is no doubt about it, Keith Tozer is one of the greatest indoor soccer coaches ever. He has won five league titles (in three different leagues) and has held the record for career coaching wins ('winningest' as we say in America) for nearly twenty years. Since 1996 he has been the head coach of the US Futsal team ('futsal' is a European type of indoor soccer without walls that FIFA runs international tournaments in) and since 1992 he has done something no other indoor football manager has been able to do for long: keep a job. Indoor Soccer is so unstable that it is rare for franchises to last more than a few years, and entire leagues come and go with frustrating rapidity. Despite this Coach Tozer has been running the Milwaukee Wave for seventeen years (and the club is now an impressive twenty-five years old, and about to start play in their fourth league later this year!).

I didn't know any of this at the time, of course, because I was a young, stupid college kid.

There were two other notable people I took messages for. One was Jerry Wilson. I can't remember his exact title but he was the man running the club. He was very friendly in a loud sort of way. Even though he seemed to be going a mile a minute all of the time, I can remember several times when he took the time to thank me when I had been helpful.

The other person was Vice-President of Operations, Graham Tutt. At the time I was very impressed to be working with Graham Tutt. He was the one player I could name from the Atlanta Chiefs of my childhood (see the Soccerball Years, part 1). What I did not know is that Graham Tutt had started his career as the keeper for Charlton Athletic. He had been a goalkeeping phenom, getting his first start at age 17 in 1974. It was only after a horrific eye injury that he started playing overseas, settling in Atlanta after a stint in South Africa. He was by all accounts a brilliant goalkeeper. At their club's centenary in 2005, Charlton Athletic voted him Goalkeeper of the 70s despite his only making 78 first-team appearances. I only remembered him because he was English and had an unusual name, which is yet more evidence that I was just a young, stupid college kid.

Over the years I have begun to realise just how stupid I had been. There I was in a small office suite with someone who had played for one of the big London football clubs, who had overcome serious adversity, and who had played through some of the more interesting years in American soccer history, and I hardly spoke to him. And unlike Coach Tozer, Graham was all smiles and charm. He was friendly and approachable. But he was also somewhat famous and exotic (back then English people seemed exotic to me) and I lost my nerve.

The only person more exotic than Graham Tutt at the attack was the team star, Drago. Drago (his full name is Drago Dumbovic, but 'Drago' by itself was certainly more memorable) was from Yugoslavia and had a shaved head. Back in 1989 shaved heads were rare, and anyone from a communist country was even rarer. He scored lots of goals for the Attack, and he was easily the most well known player on the team (to be honest, the only player most of the public had ever heard of). He had come to the Attack recently from the Hershey Impact (you don't really need to know that, but I just wanted to point out that 'Impact' is perhaps the stupidest team name ever). Drago was one of the friendliest sports stars I've ever come across. It would be easy to scoff and say that indoor soccer players are not really 'stars,' and that would be a valid point. Most of the other players I came across, though, behaved as if they were famous sportsmen even if they were totally anonymous once they took their kit off. Drago was always smiling and even put a smiley face next to his name when he signed an autograph for me. He appeared to go out of his way wherever he went to be approachable.

On my first day one I took a call from him. 'This is Drago, can I speak to Coach Tozer?' He spoke with a heavy Eastern European accent, which went well with a name like 'Drago.' Coach Tozer wasn't there so I took a message. I didn't know why Drago was calling, of course, but I was going to find out a few days later. Storm clouds were brewing at the Attack, and I was about to get a front row seat.

To be continued in The Soccerball Years, part 3, coming soon.