NEWMAN : If His Detractors Are Right, Then Where Did Those Six MISL Titles Come From?

There is a tad of little boy left in Ron Newman. You see it when he jumps up from his chair to demonstrate a play. Or when he flashes a devilish smile while discussing a tactic that might bend Major Indoor Soccer League rules to the limit.

It’s a bit surprising that Newman hasn’t lost his appetite for this game. He has been through more than his share of rough spots as coach of the often wild, sometimes complaining and usually zany Sockers.

Newman has been called everything from a borderline idiot to a borderline genius, sometimes in the same sentence. Players say his English style of soccer is archaic. Coaches say his innovations show disrespect for the game. He has been trashed in the newspapers and is never far from a critic.

Yet Newman has been on the winning end of more indoor soccer games than any coach in history. His record over nine years is 298-153, including a 60-23 playoff mark.

The skeptics have their argument. Check the talent, you’ll hear. Where would he be without Juli Veee? Branko Segota? Kevin Crow, Brian Quinn and Steve Zungul?

It seems people think this group could have racked up as many victories with Fred Flintstone running the show. But even Newman’s harshest critics admit he deserves some credit.

“I’m sure we would have won championships,” says Crow, the defender who once requested a trade because he said he no longer wanted to play for Newman. “But I don’t think we would have won six.”

Monday, the Sockers play Baltimore in Game 1 of the MISL championship series. Newman is four victories away from his seventh title. His team, as usual, pulled through a slow start, a host of injuries and a 3-2 deficit in the semifinals of the playoffs against Dallas.

That’s typical. Little has come easily for Newman.

As a child, he often had to go to bed in an air-raid shelter because German bombers were attacking the naval yard in his hometown of Portsmouth, England.

His first professional contract as a player earned him $7 a week, hardly enough to start an early retirement plan.

And despite the championships, life with the Sockers has been rocky. Perhaps most indicative of that is the way he has learned to measure success. It isn’t in terms of money, victories or championships. Rather, he figures his worth by the number of times he has been ripped in the newspapers.

Somebody once told him: “It’s only when you’ve made it that you’re going to start getting people calling you names in the media.”

By that criteria, Newman could be considered among the greatest coaches of all time. In any city, any sport.

Examples?

First some background. During January and February of 1986, the Sockers made a practice of calling timeouts late in games in which they held comfortable leads. Newman decided these were good situations to practice pulling the goalie in favor of a sixth attacker, his invention.

Most of the league, even some of the Sockers, took exception, calling it poor sportsmanship. Displeasure was voiced in print.

Former St. Louis defender Steve Pecher said: “Some of (the Sockers) were coming up to us after the game and apologizing. They said, ‘Don’t kick us. It’s not our fault. (Newman) was an idiot last year, and he’s an idiot this year.’ ”

To this day, Crow thinks his coach was wrong.

“I still disagree with it,” he said. “He said he was doing it for practice. If you’re the other team, you’re not going to look at it that way.”

Newman defends himself, saying if he was looking to rub salt in a team’s wounds he would “tell everybody to get on one leg and cover an eye.”

Criticism of Newman has been frequent. Many disagree with his ideas, from players who were taught different brands of soccer in their native countries, to referees who never could figure what Newman was going to come up with next, to coaches who were perhaps simply jealous.

Without Newman, this game might have progressed at a nice, steady pace and, quite possibly, never reached its present level of excitement. Call it a poor imitation of traditional soccer if you will, but Newman’s intentions were always to improve the entertainment value of both his team and the game.

His first step in preparing for the switch from outdoor to indoor was to read a hockey book. He didn’t get much out of it.

“I found it just like a very ordinary soccer coaching book,” Newman said. “They did the same sort of things you do with high school boys.”

Early on, Newman toyed with substitution. It didn’t make sense to him to make a great player run up and down the carpet so long that he could hardly walk by game’s end. So he had players coming and going so fast it made heads spin. Of course, that also caused problems.

Once, in a game against Chicago, Newman noticed opposing players coming on the field before their teammates had gone off. He questioned the referee, and the conversation went something like this:

Newman: What bloody rules are we playing?

Referee: As long as they don’t interfere with the game anymore, the other player can come in.

Newman: That seems a bit bloody lax.

Referee: That’s the way hockey does it.

Newman: OK, if we’re following hockey . . .

So the next game, in New York against the Cosmos, Newman decided to give the laws of hockey a go. He asked the referees to clarify the substitution rule once again and was told the same thing, a player could enter the game as long as the player coming off was no longer involved in the play.

With that established, Newman proceeded to have an offensive player run toward the wall every time the Cosmos began a breakaway and send a defensive player flying off the bench at the other end to mark their unsuspecting center forward. It worked like a charm and, in Newman’s words, “The New York fans went mad.”

The refs pulled Newman aside at halftime and told him he was stretching the rule a bit too far. Maybe more accurately, it was another case of Newman stretching his imagination.

During games, Newman stands near the substitution doors. He found out awhile back he could give his players an advantage by opening the door and redirecting the ball.

Asked about that, he breaks into a “guilty-as-charged” smile. “I shouldn’t do that,” he says. “Sometimes I see that ball coming, and I know if I turn that door a little bit it may change the angle. It’s irresistible.”

If Newman’s creative mind is one reason for his success, perhaps a bigger one is his ability to squeeze the best out of a wide variety of players with vastly different backgrounds.

This season, he brought back superstar Yugoslavian Steve Zungul who, at 34, was a question mark. Other teams didn’t want him. Some thought it was a stupid move.

Turns out Zungul is second only to Segota in playoff points (12) and has given the team valuable experience on the attack.

Over the years, Newman has learned bits and pieces from each player’s style and incorporated it into his master game plan.

“I think he’s been very flexible,” Quinn said. “He kind of gives players a free rein to do what they want as long as they produce.”

That hasn’t been easy. Players don’t always agree with Newman’s style, which is largely based on his English background.

Listen to Juli Veee: “He comes from the old school, caveman time. The indoor game is a very new game. The English style of soccer doesn’t fit this game at all.”

But Newman’s coaching does. He has never put a choke hold on the creativity of his players. He knows when to leave well enough alone. To hear Veee tell it, there’s no other way to deal with the Sockers. They’ve always been too crazy to control.

“The American public doesn’t understand the nationality problem,” Veee said. “I couldn’t stand half of (the players). And they didn’t like me, either.”

Judging by some of the negative things said by Socker players in the newspapers, Newman couldn’t be categorized as a popular coach. You don’t find him at the bar on team trips surrounded by players, though maybe he would like that.

“Ron would like to be close to the players,” Quinn said. “He likes everybody to be his friend. Maybe that’s not the nature of the job requirement.”

There’s difficulty in playing two roles, authority figure and friend.

Veee said he hardly spoke two words to Newman off the field. But when Veee was having personal problems, going through a divorce, Newman told him: “Juli, take as much time as you want. Don’t worry about it.”

“He let you work your own things off,” Veee said. “I think he’s one helluva good human being.”

A sensitive one, too. He admits the public criticism isn’t something he takes in stride.

“It hurts,” he said. “I don’t know anybody who likes it. I don’t like my family involved in that type of thing. I don’t think it should be done in the media. I’ve never criticized a player in the media.”

For every critical player who feels Newman’s coaching has had little to do with the Sockers’ success, there are others who say he has had quite a bit to do with it. Waad Hirmez is the first to admit that if anyone should criticize Newman, it should be him. Newman cut him twice.

Instead, Hirmez says: “He will give a player a chance over and over. You have to give credit to the person who’s putting all these players on the field. He has done so much for the game in this country. I just can’t see why anybody would criticize him for anything he does.”

If nothing else, through good and bad, Newman has retained his sense of humor.

There’s one story Newman’s son, Guy (who played for the Sockers from 1980-86) enjoys telling. One day before practice, the players were sitting around waiting for Ron Newman. He arrived and told Steve Daley, a midfielder, to get up and do some sprints. The players watched. About the time Daley was getting tired, somebody asked Newman what he was doing. Newman said he had recently been in for a checkup, and the doctor told him: “You need to exercise ‘daily.’ ”

There are many more stories, including the time Veee was supposed to speak at a luncheon and wasn’t able to make it, so Newman showed up with a life-size cutout of Veee and spoke for him.

The bottom line is that Newman still enjoys coaching. He dismisses the mishaps with a simple: “Those sort of things happen.”

It’s the price for doing what he loves.

“The tolerance this man has,” says Veee, pausing. “He puts his whole life into soccer.”