Such commercial opportunism was by no means limited to soccer, of course. Steep ticket prices and a surfeit of television money had helped basketball's NBA to a record $195 million profit in 1992-93, with sales of its licensed merchandise exceeding $12 billion. TV rights to the NFL now amounted to about $4.4 billion, even though ratings had marginally declined - networks simply ordered that play be stopped more frequently for commercial breaks. (The broadcast of a 60-minute gridiron contest, which takes about three hours, typically contains anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour's worth of advertising and trailers.) And though average NFL ticket prices had nearly doubled in ten years, attendances continued to rise.
This loyalty (some would say gullibility) was fanned by the sudden proliferation of sports broadcast media, and in particular ESPN, the all-sports cable channel whose modest beginnings in 1979 scarcely hinted at its future as the dominant voice of US sports culture. By 1994, ESPN was available in almost 70 per cent of American homes and had secured the rights to an impressive array of competitions. Gone were its low-budget presentations of professional slow-pitch softball and prepackaged highlights of Australian Rules football; in came the NFL and major league baseball. In consolidating its output and focusing on events with the broadest appeal, ESPN in effect marginalised many sports, even those - soccer among them - it continued to indulge with air-time.
This was part of a broader trend. Sports Illustrated, which once imaginatively reported on pursuits as varied as fencing, judo and contract bridge, now restricted itself largely to the achingly familiar and popular. Hardly a month of the basketball season passed without Michael Jordan appearing on its cover. 'I'll be the first to admit,' allowed one SI editor, 'that I'm contributing to the narrowing of the interest of the American sports fan.' Thus, the World Cup put the American media in a quandary. Though anything with a reputation as the world's biggest sporting event could not help but demand their attention, the sport was still soccer, dreary and incomprehensible, and something few could comment on lucidly. It also interfered with the traditional summer rituals of baseball, the NBA play-offs, US Open golf and Wimbledon.
Until the dawn of the event, interest remained sporadic and sketchy, which was a source of considerable frustration to Alan Rothenberg, judging from a June 1993 issue of Sports Illustrated:
Since January of last year, Rothenberg has sent several memos to his public relations staff bemoaning the Cup's low profile in the press and his own poor standing among the 100 most powerful people in sports, as ranked by the Sporting News. After dropping from No 86 in 1991 to No 95 last year, he wrote: 'I expect to be listed in the Top 25 as of January 1993, Top 10 as of January 1994, and No. 1 as of January 1995. Start working on it now.'
Some media outlets persisted in giving the World Cup short shrift (the Sporting News chose to ignore it altogether), but by June Rothenberg's efforts to promote himself and the lofty international status of his tournament had won most of them over. Though much of the reporting was facile - meaningless comparisons with the indigenous mega-events of the Super Bowl and World Series, frequent references to rioting fans and a concluding word or two on the slim chances of the US team - it still pushed soccer to the front of the sports pages. Furthermore, ABC and ESPN had agreed to show all 52 matches - remarkably, without commercial interruption - filling the airwaves with more live coverage in a month than the nation had seen from the previous 14 tournaments put together."
Sportswriters were as fiercely divided about soccer as they had been in the days of Pele's Cosmos or Dick Young's 'commie pansies' jibe. Though some approached the World Cup with an open mind and a handful even claimed to be devotees, others were steeped in far less charitable views. At times their antipathy amounted to little more than jingoism ('This may be the world's most-beloved sport, but the world has always been overrated,' sniffed a columnist on the Orlando Sentinel) or, in the case of Sport magazine's Scott Ostler, xenophobia:
They keep going to games, thinking that with all that kicking going on, and with those big nets, a lot of goals will be scored and it will be terribly exciting and fun. When that doesn't happen, the fans express their disappointment by fighting, drinking, getting tattoos and rioting.
But not all the sceptics were so jaundiced. Some merely defended themselves from the rather shrill clarion call sounded by a growing band of soccer evangelists convinced that anyone professing dislike for their game was narrow-minded and worthy of scorn. If somewhat crude, the attitude of Tom Knotts in the Washington Post towards such lobbyists was not unreasonable. 'I'm getting tired of the soccer weenies lecturing me on what I'm missing,' he fumed. 'You love the game. Fine. Great. Go for it. Work yourself into a frenzy over corner kicks ... but spare me your condescending rhetoric. I don't think we're talking a cure for cancer or anything.'
The build-up did reveal a few supporters in unlikely quarters. In June, ABC-TV's news programme Nightline aired a feature on the World Cup, probably the first time a network news division had paid serious attention to the event. This, though, was not nearly as remarkable as the nearblasphemous confession of the show's erudite host, Ted Koppel, that he 'would choose to watch a good soccer match [rather than] baseball's AllStar game any day of the week'. Yet Koppel, who had played for Syracuse University in the late 1950s, found precious few kindred spirits. John McEnroe made sympathetic noises as a broadcaster at that summer's Wimbledon, but it only seemed to underline Koppel's apparent heresy.
The attitudes of Oprah Winfrey and Diana Ross towards the game were doubtless less enthusiastic, yet it didn't prevent them being hired to get World Cup 94 off to a celebrity-studded start in Chicago. The opening ceremony, rarely one of sport's prouder moments, produced a catalogue of embarrassments: master of ceremonies Winfrey fell over and sprained her knee; the B-52s provided a dire musical interlude; and, in the piece de resistance, the giant inflatable goal into which Ross was meant to 'score' toppled over, after the pop star failed to hit the target.
False notes during the ensuing match, a dull 1-0 win for Germany over Bolivia in searing lakefront heat, were less evident, save for a cruelly officious red card for Marco Etcheverry. Returning from injury as a substitute, the Bolivian star's World Cup finals career came to an end after a four-minute appearance. But there were few unoccupied seats among the crowd of 63,117, and no sign of the German hooligans who some had anxiously expected to ruin the day. Colourful street banners and an abundance of 'welcome' signs had attempted to raise the interest of a public far more interested in the progress of its Cubs and White Sox, but most remained apathetic. A hotel doorman told one reporter he hadn't noticed much interest in the tournament but claimed 'there would be more if Americans were in it'. Another bystander, watching a group of German fans parading their tricolour through the streets, was overheard to enquire: 'Are you guys Republicans?' And any chance the occasion had of capitalising on a slow news day disappeared when the media event of the year unfolded across a Southern California highway within hours of kick-off: the infamous 'low-speed chase' instigated by gridiron superhero OJ Simpson. Simpson's eventual capture and arrest would create an unfortunate backdrop which the World Cup and all its sporting rivals found impossible to upstage.
Nevertheless, the full house at Soldier Field proved to be the first of many. Well before Simpson's freeway escapade, 3.5 million of the 3.65 million available tickets had been bought, two-thirds of them in the United States. Never before had a single event so effectively unified the disparate strands of the country's soccer community: immigrant fans, soccer moms and dads, wistful NASL devotees, college and high school coaches, and all those millions of youngsters. The World Cup had never seen such numbers. That more than 56,000 could nearly fill a Massachusetts stadium on a stifling Thursday afternoon to watch Bolivia play South Korea was little short of astounding.
Those more worried about whether the tournament would re-establish the attractive football so conspicuously absent in Italy four years earlier were also pleasantly surprised. In the group phase goalscor
ing increased by about 13 per cent on 1990, with only two of the 36 first-round matches ending 0-0 (Bolivia v South Korea unfortunately being one of them). It was almost as if the world had recognised the need to produce something more edifying for their sceptical hosts.
The other element vital to the tournament's success was, naturally, a competitive host team. Many predicted a soccer apocalypse were the Americans to repeat their three-and-out performance of 1990. In the final preparatory match, they had claimed a 1-0 victory over Mexico in front of 92,000 largely hostile fans in the Rose Bowl, but it was only their fourth win in 17 attempts. Milutinovic continued to shuffle his line-up. In 30 matches, he had never once named an unchanged side, offering ample international experience to youngsters in the squad while allowing his European contingent to mature overseas.
The Americans kickedoffinthe Pontiac Silverdome against Switzerland before a crowd of more than 73,000 which produced a partisan level of support the home team had rarely, if ever, encountered: flags waving, banners encircling the upper deck, and chants of U-S-A! filling the air. It wasn't enough to stop a free-kick from Georges Bregy giving the Swiss a 39th-minute lead, but the US soon equalised with a free-kick of their own, a spectacular effort from Eric Wynalda that cannoned in off the crossbar and created, according to Soccer America, a 'deafening roar, surely the loudest an American player on the field had ever heard for an American goal'. Struck by a mysterious attack of hives he later attributed to a sports drink, the ailing Wynalda lasted only 13 minutes of the second half before being substituted, but in the muggy 40-degree heat - the Silverdome was not equipped with air conditioning - both teams wilted and the match ended 1-1. Dooley, Stewart and Harkes were largely out duelled by Alain Sutter and Stephane Chapuisat, but the result helped to put many of the four-year-old observations about American naivety to rest. For the first time since Belo Horizonte, the US had gained a point at the World Cup.
One of the strongest performances came from the team's most flamboyant member, centre-half Alexi Lalas. In high school, the gangly Lalas had led his ice hockey team to the Michigan state championship, and his prowess on the rink helped to fashion his physical, uncompromising presence on grass. Casual observers, though, knew rather less about the way Lalas played than they did about his bright red hair and dangling goatee (the New York Times called him a 'heavy-metal Ronald McDonald'), and his free-spirited and eloquent persona quickly established him as a media attraction. Against the Swiss, he played to his strengths, combining effectively with Balboa to keep the dangerous Chapuisat at bay and largely answering those critics who had drawn attention to his technical deficiencies.
Like the rest of his team-mates, Lalas had a profound self belief which would help carry the team into the second round and, fleetingly, take some of the nation with it. Four days after the Silverdome sweat-fest the Americans produced one of the most sensational results of the competition, defeating a Colombia side many had earmarked as contenders. The afternoon's excitement, in front of 93,000 in the Rose Bowl, was sparked by an own goal from Andres Escobar which separated the teams at half-time. When in the 52nd minute the fleet-footed Earnie Stewart latched on to a lofted pass from Tab Ramos and clipped it into the net, heads began to turn: the Colombians had already lost to Romania, and were now perilously close to a premature exit. Augmented by a strong performance from 37-year-old Fernando Clavijo, the central defensive barrier of Balboa and Lalas held firm. By the time Colombia finally scored, in the 90th minute, the match was over.
The 2-1 victory may have been attributable more to the sloppy play of jaded opponents who, in the words of their coach, 'came to the party, but didn't dance', but the US had taken advantage and all but secured a place in the second round. Grim memories of Florence and Rome suddenly drowned in a sea of flags. With some justification, the New York Times proclaimed: 'American soccer desperately needed a moment this exalted and galvanizing, something that would urgently lift the game from the back burner to the front of the country's sporting consciousness.'
While some players allowed that their victory had 'shocked the world', few expressed any surprise ('I'm uncomfortable with the word "upset",' Wynalda maintained). Many in the media thought differently, claiming - or perhaps wanting desperately to believe - they had witnessed the kind of national sporting 'miracle' that occurred once in a generation, the latest incarnation of the 1980 Olympic 'miracle on ice'. Had this been a corresponding'miracle on grass'? 'Hell no,' insisted Lalas. 'A miracle is a baby surviving a plane crash or something like that.'
Clive Toye, the one-time NASL architect now working as a USA 94 official, was left beaming. 'It was no fluke,' he insisted. 'Colombia had more possession of the ball, Colombia didn't play badly. It was just an absolutely bloody phenomenal game by the US players.' In the Washington Post, though, Britain's Rob Hughes, a guest columnist, saw things rather differently:
Never before, in six World Cups, had I seen a team so obviously superior in quality, touch and control lie down and allow defeat to brush over them. The Colombians were a real dog, all four paws submissively in the air ... Milutinovic has made absolutely the most of [his team's] abilities by instructing them to squeeze the space of arguably craftier opponents in midfield. They do it well, but it becomes soldierly, stereotyped, and therefore when they meet a team with Colombia's skill, but with far more desire to match the American physical input, they will be undone.
Explanations for Colombia's sorry performance soon came to light. Before the tournament their colourful goalkeeper Rene Higuita had been jailed for illegally accepting money to help arrange the release of a kidnap victim, while death threats kept Gabriel Gomez from playing against the US. Yet it wasn't until the murder of Escobar two weeks later - a tragedy at which some of the more virulent soccer-bashers couldn't resist taking a morbid swipe - that everyone could sense the duress under which the Colombians had played.
Not since Uruguay 1930, though, had the American game scaled such giddy heights, and a surprisingly large audience witnessed the historic transformation. ESPN's telecast registered 2.7 million viewers, better than for any soccer match it had ever shown. The figure might have been risible compared with the 50 million American homes that tuned in to the deciding game of the NBA championship that same night, but international soccer had never come as close to attracting the interest of mainstream sports fans as it did in the days that followed.
Not only did photographs of jubilant, flag-draped American players reach the front page of many newspapers, but the phrase 'World Cup' passed the lips of millions of readers for the first time. Celebrities began seeking out tickets. ABC News made a trip to Kearny to document where Harkes, Ramos and Meola had grown up. Even sports radio phone-ins, usually home to the most dogmatic of fans, began accepting calls from excited US supporters. 'We're a trendy country,' noted Leigh Steinberg, an agent for the national team players who now found himself besieged with endorsement requests. 'All of a sudden, soccer is hot.'
Some ofthe euphoria faded four days later, when a disjointed American performance ended in defeat against Romania. Meola was beaten to the near post by an 18th-minute strike from Dan Petrescu and in the merciless heat of the Rose Bowl (the temperature at pitch level registered 46 degrees) the visitors' experience and tactical discipline proved insurmountable. Romania finished on top of Group A, leaving the US to qualify somewhat fortunately as one of the four best third-place finishers. They were rewarded with a Fourth of July date against Brazil.
Sixty-four years had passed since their first World Cup appearance, but in some respects American soccer had still not familiarised itself with the international game. Three-time champions though they were, the capacity of Brazil to inspire awe in their hosts was limited. 'To be honest with you,' Lalas confessed, 'I don't know any of the guys on their team. They're not my idols. People tell me they are great.' How great they were was still to be determined, but their defeat of the US, though only by 1-0, was certainly the most predictable result of the second round. Thoroughly o
utplayed, and unable to fashion so much as a shot on target, the US fought an incessant rearguard action to hold down the score, and as late as the 73rd minute their packed defence combined with a generous measure of good fortune to keep the match goalless. Shortly before half-time Ramos suffered a fractured skull after being elbowed in the face by Leonardo - for which the Brazilian was barred from the rest of the tournament - but his red card seemed largely to even things out. The elusive Romario, who supplied Bebeto with the winning goal, proved a constant menace, and Clavijo was dismissed near the end for pushing him off the ball.
Confident assertions from the American camp that we can play with anyone' now seemed hollow. And although an unprecedented audience witnessed the performance - the ABC network counted 28 million viewers - it soon emerged than many of them did not love the sport nearly as much as they loved a successful team. For some, like Steve Jacobson of Newsday, the narrow defeat merely underscored soccer's inherent lack of appeal:
The US team played its stripes out Monday and managed to hold the great Brazil team to a 1-0 victory. Hooray for our side, except that the US never put a shot on goal. The Brazil coach called it 'supremacy'. If 1-0 can reveal supremacy, what kind of a game is it?
Other novices among the millions may have formed similar views, but those who cared to look harder found their reward. The noted baseball writer Thomas Boswell had turned cheerleader after seeing a group match in Washington. He wrote in the Washington Post:
Soccer in a Football World: The Story of America's Forgotten Game (Sporting) Page 34
