Maybe He’ll Laugh Last : Prankster, Complainer Willrich Is Back to Playing Like Socker Leader Again

Jean Willrich is the San Diego Sockers, says Bob Bell, the team’s managing general partner.

“He (Willrich) feels this is his team,” Socker midfielder Brian Quinn said. “It’s his Sockers.”

Willrich describes himself as a “good personality and a character.” As he puts it, “Here, everybody talks with a different tongue.”

Willrich, the team captain, is an original Socker who joined the team in 1978. Willrich and Kaz Deyna--who hasn’t played much this season--are the only current Sockers with five championship rings. Willrich has played in more games than any Socker. He also has probably pulled as many pranks and had as many complaints as any Socker. It’s hard to be a Socker without those two characteristics.

Willrich is the ultimate Socker.

When the Sockers were in New York earlier this season, the team talked about trying to get Willrich and Juli Veee on “Late Night With David Letterman.”

At the time, Veee said: “After less than a minute of us, they would have asked for a commercial break. And we never would have returned on the air.”

One of their favorite sketches is “Kissing Ice Cream Cones.” While strolling through an airport, Veee and Willrich smack their lips as they bring their cones together. “We used to have longer kisses,” Willrich would say, and the cones--filled with different flavors of ice cream--would reunite for a longer kiss.

“Ahhh,” says Veee. “Ahhhhhh,” replies Willrich.

That would continue for at least two scoops worth.

And it was worth the predictable reaction from people watching this courtship develop in airports in St. Louis or Kansas City or Wichita.

As silly and playful as he can be off the field, Willrich, 34, is all business when he’s playing midfield. That’s when intensity replaces ingenuity.

“He has so much pride when he plays,” Quinn said Tuesday. “And the playoffs are his stage.”

After struggling through an injury-filled season and getting off to a slow start against the Kansas City Comets in the opening playoff series, Willrich has raised the level of his play in the last four games.

In do-or-die games against the Comets, Willrich had a goal and an assist in the fourth game and three assists in the fifth game. The Sockers won both. Against Tacoma, Willrich had two goals and an assist--including the game-winner with 2:14 to play--in a 6-5 opening-game victory. And he scored both the Sockers’ goals in a 7-2 defeat Sunday night.

“Maybe I’m taking a little more charge right now,” Willrich said Tuesday, as the Sockers prepared for tonight’s third game of their playoff series against the Stars in the Sports Arena. “I know this is playoff time. If you’re not ready to play now, don’t play.”

But Willrich--who is the Sockers’ all-time leading playoff scorer with 44 goals in 53 games--downplays his recent scoring success.

“My job is to win,” Willrich said. “I learned over the years that the guys who work do the same thing as someone who scores three or four goals. When I get chances, I take them. When they go in, I’m a lucky guy.”

Luck often comes to the skillful.

“I don’t know what comes first, the chicken or the egg,” said Ron Newman, Socker coach. “His confidence level has increased. We need him to be playing like this. At the start of the playoffs, he wasn’t as spritely or eager as he has been in the past. He did a hell of a job as a leader and on the field when he was the only veteran playing during the middle of the season. Then he went in a shell. Now, he has picked up his game. He needed some success in goal scoring.”

Maybe he also needed to get mad.

On the postgame show after the third game of the series against Comets, Socker broadcaster Randy Hahn commented about Willrich’s poor play. Willrich had only one goal and two assists in the three games. Even more telling, he was kicking more balls into the stands than toward the net. And the Sockers had lost two of three games.

“I was annoyed,” Willrich said. ‘I don’t mind when he (Hahn) talks about the game, and if he says someone makes a bad play. But he said things that are normally unnecessary.”

Said Hahn: “The point I made was every year in the playoffs the Sockers had a catalyst. With all the people out injured, the Sockers needed that hero. My statement was ‘Jean is the type of guy you might expect to be that type of leader and he wasn’t doing it.’ Now I think he’s playing the way the fans would expect him to play in clutch games.”

Willrich talked the matter over with Hahn, and now he says everything is all right.

Now, says Willrich, if only the Sockers could win a sixth championship. And if only Willrich could finally get healthy.

He hurt his right ankle early in the season. Then, in the third playoff game against the Comets, he was kicked in his left ankle. They are both still quite swollen and discolored.

“I call him the Elephant Man because of his huge ankles,” Newman said. “But he’ll play hurt.”

Said Quinn: “He would come back when it (the ankle) was maybe 80%. A lesser man would have sat out three games. He’s tough.”

In a season in which the Socker regulars seemed to spend as much time in the training room as on the playing field, Willrich missed only one regular-season game. He played 51 games and was the team’s second leading scorer with 27 goals and 25 assists for 52 points.

“He’s been playing injured for a long time,” trainer Bill Taylor said.

Said Willrich: “I hang in there and do my job. But I know that when next season comes, if I get injured, I no longer play (in every game).”

Willrich has an added incentive, since he’s in the final year of a three-year contract.

“I don’t know if I look old out there,” Willrich said. “I enjoy the game. I’m still as intense as I was in my first playoff game. Like wine, when it ages, it tastes better.”

Willrich wants to remain in San Diego. Bell said he will be negotiating with Scott Simpson, Willrich’s agent, after the season ends.

“I hope we will sign him,” Bell said. “Jean is the San Diego Sockers. I cannot picture him playing in any other uniform.”

Socker Notes Goalkeeper Jim Gorsek is expected to be out of action for only a week and could be ready to play against Tacoma if the series goes to a seventh game next Thursday. Gorsek--who broke his middle finger on his left hand in Friday’s game against Tacoma--was placed on the disabled list before Sunday’s game and therefore has to sit out at least five games. The earliest he could have played, had he not been placed on the disabled list, would have been a possible sixth game Tuesday night in San Diego. Originally, Gorsek was diagnosed as requiring surgery and being out for the season. Tuesday, team physician and hand specialist Laughlin Vetter looked at Gorsek’s X-rays that were taken in Tacoma and re-examined Gorsek. “Between the time the splint was put on in Tacoma and Tuesday, the bone moved back into place on its own,” Socker trainer Bill Taylor said. Gorsek is expected to be able to play with a splint, tape and a protective device. . . . Coach Ron Newman said he will find out today whether veteran goalkeeper Hubert Birkenmeier will be able to join the Sockers as backup for Games 4 and 5 this weekend. Birkenmeier needs permission from his club soccer team in the German-American League in New York to be loaned to the Sockers. . . . Kaz Deyna--who has been phased out of the Socker lineup this season and is in the final year of a two-year contract--may still be connected with the organization next season. Deyna will serve as an assistant for the team’s indoor soccer academies this summer, said Bob Bell, Socker managing general partner. “We would also like to work something out in terms of keeping Kazie with the Sockers,” Bell said. “We would like to keep him around.”