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.

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)