Lower Salary Cap Will Lower the Curtain on Socker Dynasty

After the fuss and furor created by the giant pandas’ visit to the San Diego Zoo, I can imagine what it is going to be like at the Sports Arena Thursday night.

There, on display for an undetermined length of time, will be a genuine dinosaur. It will be alive and maybe roaring. Perfectly adapted to be dominant in its environment, this beast is about to be victimized by changing times.

This dinosaur is, to be more precise, a dynasty on the brink of extinction.

And this dynasty is an indoor soccer team.

The San Diego Sockers.

Say hello . . . and goodby.

“Soooooocccckkkkeeerrrs. Soooooocccckkkkeeerrrs.”

You’ve heard the lowing cry, at least if you have spent any time watching these guys at the Sports Arena. It always has been a salute to success, but it will come to be a mournful lament to what once was and may never be again.

What will bring about the demise of this dynasty? Old age? An ice age?

A cap.

A cap?

That’s right, a cap. A salary cap. In an attempt to keep the entire Major Indoor Soccer League from becoming extinct, the owners have tightened an already existing salary cap. Salaries, previously limited to a total of $1.275 million per team, will henceforth top out at $875,000.

How does this destroy a dynasty?

Easy. The highest-salaried, and theoretically the best, players cannot be concentrated in one place. They must be spread around the league.

The Sockers have the MISL’s best players--therefore, theoretically, the highest-paid. Thus, their players are more likely to be the ones dispersed around the league.

Juli Veee, at 38 the senior Socker in terms of age and longevity, does not think it is an accident that this newest legislation will have its most devastating influence on his favorite team.

“I think the league’s out to get San Diego,” he said. “Regardless of whether we win again this year or not, I think they want to bust up San Diego. We’ve been dominating this league for how long . . . “

It wasn’t a question because he knew the answer. He was sitting in the north end of the Sports Arena. He looked up at the five indoor championship banners hanging from the rafters at the opposite end.

“Right there,” he said, gesturing at the 1982-83 MISL banner, “was where we took the championship from them. They haven’t been able to beat us, so they want to beat us legally. They’re trying to make it so four or five of our players have gotta make a move somewhere else.”

The specter has cast a pall over the MISL playoffs, which begin Thursday night, when Tacoma will visit for the opener of a best-of-five Western Division semifinal series. This might have been billed as a healthy quest for revenge because Tacoma knocked the Sockers out of the division finals a year ago to snap the string of indoor titles at five.

But no one’s talking much about Tacoma.

And no one is celebrating the fact that the Sockers’ 42-14 regular-season record was a runaway best in the MISL. Los Angeles was second in the Western Division, 11 games behind, and Eastern champion Minnesota also was 11 back.

Instead, the talk is of how to accommodate the guaranteed contracts of Branko Segota, Brian Quinn, Zoltan Toth and Brian Schmetzer and what to do with the expiring contracts of Gus Mokalis, Fernando Clavijo, Hugo Perez, Kevin Crow and Veee and how to make things right with Jim Gorsek, who took a cut to $30,000 this year based on a promise of $84,000 in 1989.

Obviously, the Sockers cannot keep such a collection of players on their payroll because they cannot even pay them what they are making, much less what they maybe should be making after a season such as this.

Putting together a soccer team will be a bit like sending X number of people to a grocery store with exactly the same amount of money and telling them to buy meat, potatoes, vegetables and trimmings. That’s the way it will be buying goalkeepers, defenders, forwards and reserves with the same amount of money. You may spend less than the next person in one area and more in another, but what you come away with is the same whole.

The beastly bottom line is that players who want to stay will be forced to go . . . and I’m talking good players.

“What will it come to?” Veee asked. “Let’s say Clavijo’s contract is up and he wants to stay. And let’s say Kevin wants to stay. What will this do, set one player against another? What are you willing to give up to stay in San Diego? These players have all made their marks here as players on championship teams. It’s foolish.”

Indeed, the Sockers and their championship teams have been making their marks on San Diego . . . and indoor soccer . . . since early in the decade.

That is a dynasty, and this dynasty is in trouble through no fault of its own. No one knows for sure what caused the extinction of dinosaurs, but I know one thing for sure. It wasn’t a salary cap.