Soccer Man

It is high-five time on the practice field at Cal State Dominguez Hills.

Marine Cano, the Toros’ feisty, intense soccer coach, has just watched a team of women players score its second goal in a half-field intra-squad scrimmage.

Cano stands in goal for the team, which leads, 2-0.

“It’s over. It’s over,” shouts Cano, who goes by the nickname Butch. He taunts the opposing team, which has yet to get a ball close to the net.

It was a Cano outlet kick that led to the score, and Cano delights in rubbing it in. He parades. He flaunts. He shares another high five.

Later in the game, his fingers swathed in white trainer’s tape, dark blue sweat pants hitched tightly about the hips, he makes a twisting, diving block of a shot on goal. The taunting returns.

It is vintage Cano, a former professional goalie who coaches both the men and women’s teams at Dominguez Hills. Futbol , he says, is best when play is intense.

“I’ll get into people’s faces,” he said. “That’s the bottom line.”

There are those who have faced off with Cano with little warning of his heady approach. Says former UC Berkeley women’s Coach Bill Merrill, now an assistant at Dominguez: “Goalkeepers in the pros are known to have a screw loose. It’s just their breed.”

Cano, 33, does not hold a college degree, although he is taking classes at Dominguez. He is allowed to coach based on his professional experience. He receives a salary of “about $1,500 a month” during the season. He supplements his income with soccer camps, of which a large portion goes back to Dominguez Hills for the use of its name, facilities and equipment. He is also coach of a girls’ state select team, an elite national traveling squad.

His many roles put strains on his time. He estimates that he puts 20,000 miles each year on his automobile recruiting and coaching for Dominguez Hills alone. None of his mileage is reimbursed.

In a recent week, he spent Friday in Chino with the state select team, all day Saturday coaching a double-header at Dominguez Hills, Saturday night and Sunday morning in Chino, Sunday afternoon at UC Irvine with the Lady Toros, Monday and Tuesday mornings in Chino, afternoons at practice with the Toros men’s and women’s teams, then back to Chino, where he stayed the night in a motel.

On Wednesday he drove to Dominguez Hills in the morning, took the men’s team to Bakersfield for an afternoon match, then drove to UC Santa Barbara for the Lady Toros’ evening match at 7. He found a motel, then returned to his Redondo Beach home the next morning.

“He’s one of those guys who is never home,” said men’s assistant coach John Gerrard. “He’s a coach, always. Always with soccer.”

Cano says of his efforts for Dominguez Hills: “No one would do what I do.”

Officials at the school, which has a stingy record of funding athletic programs, credit Cano with building a mountain with a molehill of money. The women’s team has won more than 45 games in less than five years. In his fourth season with the men’s team, the Toros are battling for the California Collegiate Athletic Assn. title.

“He has brought a lot of notoriety to the university,” said Athletic Director Dan Guerrero. “He is like a lot of soccer players, flamboyant. He is one of the best ambassadors for this university.”

In the macho world of soccer, Cano is mucho macho. As a player, he lived and died with yellow cards; so, he argues, why change now?

“He has a style, an outgoing assertiveness,” said Merrill. “He brings that style to every facet of the game.”

He is a rarity, an American-born professional. American players are often cast as second-class citizens in soccer circles. Cano discovered early in his career that playing the game was the easy part. Surviving its ethnic skirmishes was not.

“An American kid in an ethnic league, you got to be ready,” he said.

“I’m a fiery guy. Maybe too cocky, but I always went out to play. If there was trouble (a fight), I was there.”

That intensity surfaces in the coaching box now.

“If you ever watch Marine in a game, he coaches just as he plays,” said Guerrero.

He maintains intensity in practice. Fifteen minutes before he climbed in goal for the women’s scrimmage, he stopped a passing drill in disgust and ordered his players to drop to the ground on their backs.

“All right, I knew I shouldn’t have chosen this drill for you because you can’t think,” he told the women. “Fifteen (sit ups).”

“How many?” asked a player.

“Twenty now!” he snapped. “You have to think. Think!”

The slow, agonizing death of Marin Cano Sr. five years ago of Alzheimer’s disease almost killed his youngest son, too.

“My dad taught me never to quit on anything,” said Marine Cano. “I would visit him (in the hospital) and see what was happening to him, and I’d say, ‘Gee, Dad, I don’t know if you can live like this.’ I wondered if he should just give up, but he fought that thing until the very end.”

A retired boxer, Marin Cano Sr. battled the disease for more than 10 years before he died. When he died, “it was very difficult on my mom. She still had me to raise,” said his son, a senior in high school at the time.

The family of five children lived near Jefferson Elementary School in Torrance. It was not an easy life for Marine. He was an admitted failure in sports. He would grow up to be 6-feet-1 and weigh 185 pounds, with flowing black, shoulder-length hair, but as a child he wore a butch haircut and was frail because he had asthma and later diabetes.

Soccer changed him. In the fall of 1964, on a walk past Jefferson Elementary with his mother, Theresa, 10-year old Marine saw some friends playing soccer. Local parents were starting a youth soccer program. He asked his mom if he could play too.

“The family was financially in dire straits,” said Hans Stierle, one of the parents who went on to found the American Youth Soccer Organization. “Marine was a little tyke who hung around my house all the time.”

Marine could not afford to buy a pair of soccer shoes, so Stierle’s wife, Christel, gave him a pair. In his first game Cano played in the field and was “a bum,” he said. In his second game he was sent to goalie, where he blocked several shots.

“I was a keeper from that point on,” he said.

“It became quite evident very quickly that he was an outstanding athlete,” said Hans Stierle.

Christel Stierle remembers Cano as “a very nice fellow. Very polite.” On the field he shed that image quickly.

“He was one hell of a goalie,” she said. “So skinny and long-legged, but one hell of a goalie.”

Cano played against a German national team as part of an AYSO all-star team. At 16, while attending Bishop Montgomery High School, he turned professional and played in the Greater Los Angeles Soccer League, a well-established semi-pro league. Later he spent one season in England (“The worst place on this planet”) and then came back to the United States to play for several teams in the defunct American Soccer League and the North American Soccer League.

As a teen-ager in the Greater L.A. League, Cano played against men of all nationalities, sometimes 15 years his senior. It was not easy.

“I got my spurs early,” he said.

Cano was an average player, good for his age, but not great. Enter Max Wozniak, a Polish expatriate who had first coached Cano in the AYSO-German all-star game.

“He had lots of ability, but lots of technique things he needed to work out,” Wozniak said.

Cano, haughty, not yet eligible to vote but old enough to play in a man’s game, thought he knew it all.

“Max broke me down,” Cano said. “He told me I was a nobody. He broke me down and then he built me back up.”

There were times, Cano said, that he wanted to tell Wozniak what to do with a soccer ball. But the work ethic of his father loomed in his mind.

Said Wozniak: “Marine was very disciplined. He worked on himself and he became a very good goalkeeper.”

Cano strode into a Carson restaurant wearing a polo shirt, flimsy athletic trunks and tennis shoes.

“You have nice legs,” said one of three women seated at a table nearby.

“Thank you. Thank you very much,” a blushing Cano replied without missing a beat.

“I’ve always been outgoing. I’ve never been afraid to sit down and talk,” he said. “But I’ve never been in trouble.”

Recently married for the second time, Cano says the stories about professional athletes and their odd habits are not always true.

“But I’m not going to go through life without a few stories to tell,” he said. “It breaks up the boredom.”

Some of the better Cano tales include:

--The time he met a group of parents and their soccer-playing daughters in Denver for dinner dressed up as “Dr. Doom” in cape, tights and black mask. He sprayed whipped cream on the crowd. His intent: He hoped to break up tension at a very competitive girls’ age group tournament. (“I torched ‘em.”)

--The time when he was an assistant men’s coach at UCLA and was stripped naked by members of the team and left to run along Sunset Boulevard on a busy afternoon with only his T-shirt around his waist.

--And the time in England when he was involved in a fight with one of his own teammates after his first practice because the youthful Cano didn’t like the older man’s attitude. (“We’re very good friends now.”)

All this, Cano said, may have earned him a tough-boy attitude.

“At a young age I got in a group of guys. . . . We were never really heavy partiers, but we hung out at the beach a lot. That’s all we wanted to do. I finally said to myself: ‘Is this what you want to do the rest of your life?’ ”

As a coach, Cano remembers his past.

“I’m strict now. We have a curfew on road trips. I’m tough on these kids.”

When he is unhappy with their play, it shows. This season he has suspended three female players for a week each.

“That’s why we win. We sure don’t win on the number of scholarships or because we have fancy uniforms. We win because we have character.”

There are other part-time coaches at Cal State universities. Most have a second job to help pay the bills. Not Cano. Soccer is not only his job, it’s his life.

“As a coach I take soccer home with me, wake up with it and sleep with it,” he said. “There’s no way to find another outlet.”

Among CCAA members, Dominguez Hills ranks last in money spent on its athletic program. Soccer has the smallest operating budget in the Toro athletic department--about $10,000 for both programs, also the lowest in the CCAA. That translates to the equivalent of about one full-ride scholarship per team per year, said Guerrero. Recruiting top-notch athletes, even secondary ones, is difficult with only one scholarship, so Cano has the discretion to divide it among his players. Often Dominguez Hills splits one scholarship 12 different ways during the season.

Said Merrill of the problem Cano faces in maintaining a program under those circumstances: “You can’t make a Porsche out of a Subaru.”

Cano, however, won’t settle for less than a BMW.

“I can moan about it. I can rebel. Some say I should. Who would suffer? My team. I’m out to do a good job.

“Some of these kids couldn’t play anywhere else but here,” he said. “I’m here to win, not to lose.”

Guerrero says he laments the day Cano will move on to a better job, but he says he will understand.

“He has made the commitment to soccer,” he said.