The Joy of Six Is Goal These Sockers Seek

It’s the favorite sport of millions who never heard of Babe Ruth or think the Green Bay Packers are a heavy metal group.

They have to put moats around the fields in some places in the world, passions run so high. They cage the spectators, not the players.

But in America, or at least, North America, it ranks somewhere between quoit tossing and celebrity kayaking as a spectator sport.

No one has ever been able to figure out why. Entrepreneurs have sunk millions, gambling that it would someday overtake at least “Bowling for Dollars” in viewer interest. Television strove mightily to make it a prime-time event.

Nothing worked. So, a few years ago, the wise men of American soccer found a Solomon-like solution to their problem: They cut the baby in half.

They took a sport played on a field 110 yards long by 80 yards wide and put it on one 66 yards long by 28 yards wide. They took an outdoor sport and moved it indoors. They chopped the goal size from 8 yards wide by 8 feet high to 4 yards wide by 6 1/2 feet high. And they cut the number of players on a team from 11 to 6.

They kept the ball the same size, and allowed the players to be any size they wanted.

They called it the Major Indoor Soccer League, but the new sport owed more to hockey than it did to soccer. It had offsides passing, a version of blue lines and a penalty box for foul play. They borrowed the foul-out rule from basketball.

This hybrid sport was all geared to one thing--removing the biggest stumbling block to soccer’s lack of popularity in this country, lack of scoring. Americans are just not geared to 1-0 games. They cannot abide any ties, but scoreless ties are considered communist plots.

After half-courting the game to double the scoring, they addressed the next big hurdle: American players. There’s something about a home-grown hulk or two that seems to bring out the best--or the beast--in the American spectator. It also brings out the dollar.

The Dallas Cowboys didn’t become America’s team because of its Croatian field-goal kickers but because of its quarterbacks from the Naval Academy and running backs from Pittsburgh.

The San Diego Sockers may not be America’s team in the MISL but it is the most successful franchise in the game today, working on a winning streak of five straight championships.

And kicking for the Sockers, as they move into the 1987 playoffs this week, is a man so All-American that he comes from a long line of them, people who made all-star teams in the Pac-10, the National Football League and the old American Football League. His uncle was a famous USC Trojan who played for the Rams, Giants and Chicago Cardinals in the NFL. Dad was a star running back and defensive back for Cal, the Oakland Raiders and Buffalo Bills.

Kevin Crow, son of Wayne, nephew of Lindon, was born to play football. With that family background it was hard to imagine his taking any other course.

What was almost as hard to imagine was the kind of football Kevin opted for. Kevin fell in love with the European version of the game at San Diego State. This Crow flew into a soccer lineup. And he’s been there ever since.

“It is the ultimate player’s game,” he insists heretically. “It is more satisfying to play.”

Indoor soccer, like hockey, is so fast and demanding that is is played in “lines.” Teams can play as units for only two or three minutes at a time, then whole-team substitutions have to be made without interrupting play. Pro football is a set-piece, limited-motion game by comparison.

Crow is a defender for the Sockers. In pro football, he’d probably be a cornerback or a safety. The duties are the same: Find the guy with the ball. Go get him or it. Take it away from him--or him away from it.

Defense kind of defeats the purpose of the indoor game. But Socker Crow is getting so good at it that shots on goal are kept to a minimum at his end of the field, where he has pioneered a kind of defense called the “No Goal Patrol.”

The Sockers, basically, are an attacking unit. This leaves the secondary short-handed when the team takes off in the soccer version of hockey’s power play.

“But, we’re developing the art of defense,” Crow says. “Games used to be 14-5 or 15-14. You’d get hundreds of shots on goal. But, we can ‘read’ offenses, too, and deflect attacks. The state of the art is advancing.”

So is the state of indoor soccer. The Sockers will move into the divisional semifinals tonight in Kansas City against that city’s Comets. Still left in the playoffs are the Tacoma Stars, Wichita Wings, Cleveland Force, Minnesota Strikers, Baltimore Blast and Dallas Sidekicks.

The league’s problem is to get more kickers named Crow and fewer guys named Klaus Kretschmer or others whose names begin or end with Z. To that end, and with no help from the White House, the league is restricting imports this year to 18 and two years hence to 12.

They’re only borrowing half the Europeans’ game, so why shouldn’t they need only half their players?