More People Get a Kick Out of Soccer

Television restricts Henry Jagielski’s view of soccer. The small screen cuts off the field and leaves the white-haired engineer, who learned the game in his native Poland, longing to “see how players play as a team.”

That is why Jagielski, 47, sits beneath lazy-looking sycamore trees at Griffith Park on Sundays and watches the adult Los Angeles Metro Soccer League.

The aeronautical engineer contracted multiple sclerosis 13 years ago, but watching agile players run, slide, leap and feint in the sunshine, watching them maneuver the ball with deft feet, reminds him of his youth.

Holding his cane and wearing a short-sleeved dress shirt and dress pants recently, he scrutinized plays and analyzed them for a reporter.

In groups swelled by European and Latino immigrants, thousands of spectators watch more than 600 adult soccer teams dart up and down fields each Sunday in Los Angeles, according to Larry Brenner, soccer director for the Los Angeles City Recreation and Parks Department. Brenner says the number of teams has quadrupled in a decade.

Wearing Down Grass

Their growth is nowhere more obvious than at Griffith Park, where until three months ago players wore the grass on the 108-yard field down to the dirt, using the field at 7 a.m. weekdays and from 9 a.m. until midnight on Sunday. Workers raised a locked chain link fence to keep players off the field until permitted hours and to restore the grass.

Nationality groups including Argentines, Guatemalans, Poles and Turks organize most teams, and many provide not only entertainment but identity with the local community.

“Many teams have their own newsletter, their own dances and their own fund-raisers,” said Hugo Salcedo, competition director for soccer at the 1984 Olympics.

“At the end of the season they look forward to seeing all their friends because they have a yearly dance at which trophies are given.”

Strong national identities sometimes cause hostilities when patriotic drives emerge.

“We have an Argentine team and an English team in the same league,” Brenner said. “They’re still talking about the Falklands. The English don’t feel so bad, because they won, but the Argentines--that’s another matter.

” . . . A bad decision by the referee or at least a marginal decision creates a great deal of animosity.”

Occasionally, violence flares without nationalistic inspiration. During a recent Los Angeles Municipal Major League game between Polish and Guatemalan teams at Mar Vista Recreation Center, referee Jack Baptista banished a player for hitting him in the face.

“It’s a shame you couldn’t come on a nice day,” said lineman Jamal Abuhani. “I’ve been officiating 12 years and this is only the second time this has happened.”

Baptista said that if a review committee upholds his report, the league will banish the slugging player for life.

Banishment is a strong deterrent for most athletes, who grew up playing soccer and love the game the way Americans love baseball.

The Encyclopedia Americana reports that organized soccer, played in 140 nations by nearly 16 million people, is the world’s most popular sport.

Modern-day soccer began in England, where “the first ball reportedly was the head of a dead Danish brigand. . . .,” the Encyclopedia says.

Quickness, Conditioning

“The earliest organized games were massive confrontations between teams consisting of two or three parishes each, with goals as many as 3 or 4 miles apart.

” . . . The first crossbars were merely lengths of tape stretched between two goal posts. In 1875 the (English) Football Assn. made the bar mandatory.”

Low costs encourage European and Latino immigrants to continue their tradition here. Los Angeles municipal soccer league teams, which can include as many as 25 players, pay a $199 fee and $32 per game for referees.

Although one athlete is 57, the average age on leagues administered by the city is in the 25-to-30 range, so Joe Escudero, 34, exults that his quickness and conditioning permit him to play. The 5-foot-11 respiratory care practitioner weighs 184, the same as he did at age 18.

On a recent Sunday at Griffith Park the mustachioed Bolivian native watched a team sponsored by the Bolivian Cultural and Sporting Club.

As his blonde, year-old daughter, Alexis, toddled along the sideline wearing a T-shirt and shorts, Escudero stood and cheered as a green-and-white-uniformed Bolivian broke away with the ball and scored.

“It’s the best way to get your frustration out and to get out any type of pressure,” said Escudero, who plays on one team on Sunday was waiting to join a second.

“Whenever I feel frustrated or tired, instead of lying down I go out and play soccer. I come home and I feel fine.”

Across town at the Mar Vista Recreation Center, Detective Ben Gonzalez of the juvenile division of the Los Angeles Police Department sat on a bench, a satchel of uniforms and a bag of soccer balls at his feet.

The team of LAPD officers Gonzalez coaches had just won, 1-0, and he was enjoying a breeze and the blue sky. Clusters of families watched a game from shady picnic benches on the other side of the field.

Gonzalez, 39, a Puerto Rican native, said playing keeps his team in shape and that the team recruits college players “to play with us and to get them on the force.”

It may be too late to recruit Roger Selbert, 34, who discovered soccer growing up in Teaneck, N.J., while most of his Istanbul Spor teammates were learning the game in Turkey.

Selbert later played in college and in Denmark while studying for a Ph.D. in international relations from USC. Today he researches the future for Security Pacific National Bank and, on Sunday, wears a blue cap, a green shirt and black shorts and knee-high socks to sprawl in front of the goal and stop the ball, heave it to the sideline or boom kicks down field.

Two Surgery Operations

The father of a 4-year-old son, Selbert has undergone surgery twice in 18 months to repair cartilage in his left knee and to reconstruct his face after he was kicked.

“I thought I would quit when my face healed,” he said, “but I couldn’t.”

Selbert said the game keeps him fit and added, “When you’ve played as long as I have and reached a level of skill . . . who wants to stop?”

Stan Majcher, 40, understands.

“It’s something you’ve got in your blood if you play for so many years,” said Majcher, who manages and plays with the Poland L.A. team in the Municipal League.

“It’s just like here. The kids are attached to football and baseball.

“Poland recently celebrated 85 years of soccer. So when we’re born, we get a soccer ball instead of a glove or a bat.”