Sockers’ Players Invest In Future

“Hi, Constance,” said Brian Quinn. “It’s nice to talk to you.”

Quinn listened for a moment.

“Well,” he said, “we sure appreciate your interest. We’re going to be going after our seventh title, and I sure hope to see you.”

His “pitch” was brief and sincere. This was a verbal form of circling the Sports Arena and slapping hands after every game, win or lose.

Quinn handed the telephone to a sales representative and smiled.

“You’re treading new water,” he said to a visitor, “coming in and seeing athletes do this.”

Hoodlums head for the hills in times of crisis, armies go to the trenches. The Sockers are going to the telephones.

This franchise, the most bejeweled in San Diego with six indoor championships in the past seven years, is entering the most critical week of its existence. Indeed, its very existence is at stake.

A federal bankruptcy court will decide the fate of this team a week from today. It will be asked to accept managing general partner Ron Fowler’s $700,000 bid to take sole control of the franchise. It would pay off creditors at a rate of about 45 cents to the dollar, and erase the debt of too many deficit years piled one on top of another.

Should the court reject the offer or a delay a ruling, the game would be over. Charles Christopher, the club’s bankruptcy attorney, said at a news conference Friday that the franchise would fold. Period.

And so the players have been taking part in this week’s “Phone-a-Thon” to try to rally support. The final night is tonight.

Quinn, George Katakalidis, Raffaele Ruotolo, Fernando Clavijo and Coach Ron Newman were in the sweat box Monday night, making and taking telephone calls.

“If people can sell hula hoops and pet rocks,” Katakalidis said, “we ought to be able to sell indoor soccer.”

Except these guys aren’t really salesmen.

“Obviously, we’re a little uncomfortable, because we don’t have any sales experience,” Quinn said. “But we’re in a position where desperate measures are required. We have to do everything we can. I guess it’s part and parcel of being a soccer player.”

Part and parcel of being a soccer player is loving a sport that can be such a fickle suitor. The Sockers, for example, came off a sweep of Cleveland for the Major Indoor Soccer League championship with pay cuts staring them in the wallet. In fact, players throughout the MISL are looking at 30% cuts to keep the league itself alive.

Obviously, the MISL is in an awkward period as it fights to get out of childhood and establish itself as a fixture in the sports community.

What folks forget, of course, is that the so-called established leagues went through exactly what the MISL has encountered in its 10 years of existence.

Who, for example, can tell me in what league the following teams played? Stags, Rebels, Falcons, Ironmen, Steamrollers, Bombers, Huskies, Jets, Blackhawks, Redskins, Olympians, Packers and Nationals.

All of the above played in the National Basketball Assn. as it struggled through its first 10 years with franchises in and out of 23 cities, including one-year stops in Toronto, Cleveland, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Anderson, Sheboygan, Waterloo and Denver. The NBA had as many as 17 teams and as few as 8 in those first 10 years.

Given such historical perspective, it would not appear that the MISL is quite such a tenuous operation.

It takes time.

The irony, of course, is that San Diego, the showcase franchise in terms of on-the-field success, should be in such a precarious position.

The key to the future is Fowler, a 43-year-old businessman whose list of civic and charitable involvements is longer than the Sockers’ list of championships. His bid to buy the franchise out of bankruptcy, given a favorable ruling in court next week, will save the Sockers for the community and buy him time to seek additional investors.

“The least the indoor team has ever lost in one year is $400,000,” Fowler said. “But we feel with the new salary cap and a more aggressive marketing approach, this team can be a successful one.”

The salary cap will help cut into the $400,000 deficit, but increased and improved marketing will have more impact in the long run.

In a sense, then, it was the players themselves who kicked off the more active approach to marketing. They took telephones in hand and teamed up with sales representatives to reach out to the community.

On that first night, the “Phone-a-Thon” produced 164 season-ticket renewals. The season-ticket count was up to 2,714, already reasonably close to the 3,500 totaled for 1987-88.

“The Sockers,” Katakalidis said, “are definitely going to survive. Definitely.”