elder brothers?

Tonight, ESPN will air the latest in their 30 for 30 documentary series: The 16th Man, a piece about the 1995 South African rugby team that won the Rugby World Cup in front of a galvanized home nation of supporters. It’s a timely topic, not just because of the recent success of the Hollywood film Invictus, but obviously also because it offers a point of comparison to show just how far (or not far, depending on your view) the nation of South Africa has come since then. To get a taste for the inherent complexity of post-apartheid South Africa, you may also want to consider recent reports that major cities are planning to effectively “hide the homeless” by temporarily relocating homeless populations who normally live near the major stadiums to the urban fringe. The conflict and healing continues today, no doubt.

It began with Escobar

But enough about rugby — I can’t really comment on a sport I know nothing about. While I’m excited to see the Springbok story told with real game footage and less gratuitous grunting noises (thanks for nothing, Clint Eastwood!), I must say that I’m rather looking forward to a future episode in the 30 for 30 series: The Two Escobars. You see, in my view you can easily classify everything that’s happened in our country’s footballing history as either pre- or post-Andres Escobar. Much in the same way our modern calendar is classified into B.C. and A.D., you can describe the modern incarnation of US Soccer by everything that happened before and after that fateful opening match on June 22, 1994.

Much in the same way our modern calendar is classified into B.C. and A.D., you can describe the modern incarnation of US Soccer by everything that happened before and after that fateful opening match on June 22, 1994.

In the opening match of the 1994 World Cup – hosted for the first time on US soil — the Americans defeated a heavily favored Colombian side that had legitimate championship aspirations. The deciding moment in that game was a devastating “accidental” own-goal by the Colombian captain, 27-year old Andres Escobar. The US was able to beat Colombia, hang on for a tie against Switzerland and advance to the knock-out stages of the tournament. Colombia was eliminated from the competition during group play.

And when Andres Escobar returned to his home country, he was promptly assassinated. For each of the 12 bullets that was used to kill him, the assailant reportedly yelled “Gol!” as he fired each round.

Win some, lose some

After the whirlwind of the ’94 cup, soccer in the United States went through a bizarre 12 year stretch that saw the viability of the sport tested to its limits. Following the World Cup, soccer disappeared from television altogether, only to resurface in half-baked format when the MLS began its inaugural season in 1996. When the MLS was launched, the league was full of uncertainty. No one knew what to expect following the precedent of the defunct North American Soccer League (NASL), whose famous financial collapse in the 1980’s was the punchline to many jokes questioning the validity of soccer as a mainstream American sport. Soccer quickly became a favorite media punching bag for blowhard media personalities and old-school journalists who didn’t understand the sport, took great pleasure in feminizing it as a means of discrediting it, and found it to be frankly un-American.

The issues in American soccer came to a head between 1998-99, when the debacle at the ’98 World Cup in France damaged the men’s game while the captivating theatrics of the ’99 Women’s World Cup took the women’s game to new heights here in the United States.

At the 1998 World Cup, an aging US Men’s National Team got absolutely pummeled in the group stage, losing all three of their matches while managing to score only one goal – a Brian McBride header that just barely crossed the goal line. I was studying in Madrid at the time, and felt immensely embarrassed by the loss. But what struck me even more was how the loss was received by the fans back home, who barely seemed to notice what was going on now that the Cup was being held elsewhere.

Merely one year later, the Women’s World Cup was held in the United States, and people turned out in record numbers to see our golden generation of female footballers conquer the world. Jennifer Lopez performed at halftime of the final. Record numbers of viewers watched live and on television. And Brandi Chastain, the defender who, like Andres Escobar, had scored in her own net during the tournament, found redemption in form of a converted penalty kick to clinch victory for the USA.

It was the summer before my senior year of high school when Chastain famously scored the winning PK and landed the subsequent immortalized cover of Sports Illustrated. I couldn’t get past the bizarre dichotomy between the men’s and women’s teams — their respective failures and successes, coupled with the corresponding level of general interest and malaise. So what did I do? I wrote a giant feature article for my English class exploring the state of soccer in America circa 2000. The premise of the article was based on two preliminary questions I sought to answer:

• Andres Escobar and Brandi Chastain both scored own-goals in World Cup matches involving the United States. One was celebrated on the cover of Sports Illustrated and became a national icon. The other was savagely murdered. What does this say about our country’s interest/obsession/feelings about soccer versus the rest of the world?
• If Iran scored its greatest victory ever against the United States, but no one in the US seemed to care, did it really matter at all?

If you’d like to take a trip back in time and read about what I thought about the state of American soccer 10 years ago, you can read the full feature article here. Isn’t it crazy how far we’ve come in the past 10 years?

“Everybody Loves A Winner: Soccer in the United States” (January 2000)

One point of clarification: This really was written back in 2000 when I was in high school — before 9/11, YouTube and Wikipedia. Therefore, some of the facts and opinions are slightly skewed. The one major factual error worth noting is that Alexi Lalas never played for AC Milan — he played for Padova in the Serie A. The game in which he was greeted with the “Yankee Go Home” sign was during a match with AC Milan — apparently I was confused when I wrote that section.