I once played soccer. Or should I say myself and the rest of a high school gym class in the mid-'60s was shown the elements of playing soccer. I don't remember any of us playing even a simulated game, and if we were to, there was no goal to shoot at. This was the '60s, and soccer in the United States was more alien than a Martian.
We were shown that you move the ball with the inside of your foot, not your toes. This was completely foreign to us. We were shown the overhead toss in, the header, and the body trap. Not using your hands was nearly impossible. A five-year-old in Argentina was better than any of us.
Well, maybe not the Hungarians kids who were actually on the soccer team. Stuyvesant, despite being an urban Manhattan dwelling built in 1904 and wedged between 15th and 16th Streets between First and Second Avenues, did participate in all Public School Athletic League a (P.S.A.L.) sports, even bowling and fencing, in which for some reason we always seemed to win the City Championship.
There was a football team, despite not having a home field, and a soccer team, likewise with no home turf to kick that ball, There was a swim team with no pool. I have no idea where these guys practiced.
There was even a rifle team which used the 71st Regiment Armory's shooting range for practice. I tried out for that team, but that was before I was wearing glasses. I did not present a good grouping.
I was on the track and cross country teams, with track practice on the oval track over the gym, or in Van Cortlandt Park. Sometimes we worked out on the drill floor of the 71st Armory where the National Guard met. The Armory is long gone. It is now an office building, 3 Park Avenue at 34th Street. I would go to stamp shows that used to be held there.
Thinking of those Hungarian kids on the soccer team, there were the Gogolak brothers, Pete and then Charlie from Hungary, who each went to different Ivy League schools and became place kickers for N.F.L. teams. Pete was the first soccer-style kicker in the N.F.L., first playing for the Giants, Google tells us they are both still alive ay 80 and 77, likely showing the grandkids the finer points of how to play soccer.
In 1966 I was staying a week with the Piermont family who annually rented a house in Milford, Connecticut a few blocks from the water. One of the families took us to a New York Giants practice held nearby at their training camp at Fairfield University. It was no big deal then to watch the workout, the highlight of which was watching Pete Gogolak practice kicking the ball through the uprights soccer-style, with the instep, rather then the toe. This was revolutionary. Kicking a ball with your instep was like whacking a tee shot using Big Bertha with the entire sweet spot.
I think 1966 was going to be Pete Gogolak's his first year with the Giants. One of the adults who brought us there watched Pete and said he shouldn't come out in a uniform. He should trot onto the field in a tuxedo, kick, score points, and go back to the bench.
Needless to say, soccer-style kicking is all you see. One year Pete's career was interrupted with a bad back he had gotten shoveling snow as part of his Army Reserve duty at Fort Dix, in New Jersey. It was the Vietnam era, and men were being drafted left and right. If you agreed to be in the Reserves, you could keep from being called up, but you had to do basic training and weekend meetings each month, in addition to two weeks at camp in the summer. No pampering for athletes.
As soccer-style kicking became more common, and more kids started plying soccer, high schools had reliable place kickers who could put the ball through the uprights. Suddenly, field goals became possible.
I will admit I've been enjoying the World Cup competition. It's live, not "plausibly live," like Olympic coverage, and provides a reason to have the TV on at 10 o'clock in the morning. I do wonder how many players actually know the words to the country's national anthems, coming from so many different country and soccer clubs themselves.
As I've been watching the games that start at 10 A.M. I've come to realize that by 11 o'clock it's halftime. Soccer is a timed sport that really doesn't take much more than its scheduled time to play. Two 45 minute halves and you can go home in a little more than two hours, unless of course it's a match that's tied that allows no ties. Then, two 15 minute overtime periods, and ten penalty kicks, 5 a side. But those overtimes are exciting, and the penalty kicks more so. Even if the penalty kicks are tied after 5 attempts each, they proceed to sudden death penalty kicks. First miss loses after each team gets a chance.
The reliable swiftness of play is not lost on Jason Gay, the WSJ sports reporter who had a gem of a column on Friday, Soccer's Greatest Beauty: It Takes Two Hours. Jason recognizes the same thing: soccer games move along, unlike our football and of course that most glacial of games, baseball. Jason jokes that he's graduated medical school in the time it took him to watch a college football game.
I'll never actually go a soccer game, and I'm not likely to even try dribbling a ball with my feet, but I can't help but admire the skill these guys have in moving the ball, how far and how hard they can kick it. They seem to keep the ball inbounds as they race with it down the sidelines, almost as if there's a magnetic force keeping the ball from going over the end line.
In the mid-1960s CBS seemed to be behind the creation of a North American Soccer League that they would televise. It didn't work. They didn't understand that the game didn't really stop, so there was no way to break for commercials. A scandal arose when it became revealed that CBS was sending signals to the referees to somehow stop the game so a commercial could be inserted.
Despite the hugeness of the soccer goal, an immense 24' wide and 8' high, there is little scoring. There are not a lot of shots on goal as there are in hockey, but the games have some similarities in setting up plays. Perhaps it is the low scoring that makes the games exciting. 1-0 often wins a game. And if it's 1-0, all it takes is the team with no goals to score a goal. They don't have to crawl back from blowouts. There are numerous scoring chances, but the defensive play usually gets the ball rocketed back upfield.
At this point, with the United States eliminated by Holland, I'm still finding the games worth watching.
However, I'm still going to shave, and I'm not getting a tattoo.
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