‘Shutout’ Is Bruin Soccer Goalie’s Middle Name

Being a goalkeeper in any sport is not a pleasant task.

It’s about as much fun as being a mechanical duck in a shooting gallery or a dummy in bayonet practice.

But UCLA’s top soccer goalie, Anton Nistl Jr., plays his position as if he were a monster in a Stephen King novel. The duck comes to life and sinks its iron bill into the rifleman’s throat. The dummy wrests the bayonet from the soldier’s hands and turns it on him.

The Bruins won twice last week, raising their record to 11-0-1. Nistl was in the net for all the team’s matches and has 10 shutouts and a minuscule goals-against average of 0.16. Both marks are the best in the country.

The fifth-year senior from Los Angeles has 35 career shutouts and has already broken the school record of 30 set by Tim Harris, who played professionally with the Los Angeles Lazers and the Minnesota Strikers and is now a UCLA assistant coach. Nistl is also UCLA’s career leader in games won while he was in the net with 49.

Nistl is one of the top candidates for the Adi Dassler Award, given to the country’s outstanding goalkeeper. He has risen to the top partly because of his unusual approach to goal keeping. Unlike most other goalies, he attacks the attackers, torments the tormentors.

UCLA Coach Sigi Schmid said the 6-foot, 1-inch, 185-pound Nistl is not as big as a couple of former Bruin star goalies: Harris and David Vanole, a goalkeeper for the U.S. national team. Nistl, he said, is a couple of inches shorter and 20 to 30 pounds lighter than the other two.

“But Anton is the quickest of our keepers and has the best vertical jump, something like 38 inches. (His jump) definitely helps him; it allows him to play big on cross balls, which is like a centering pass in hockey except that it is a high ball. Another goalie will be thinking, ‘I can catch this,’ but it will be out of his grasp.”

“One of his other assets is that he has very good speed, much better than most goalies. We encourage him to play well off his goal line when we’re attacking, and sometimes he functions almost as a sweeper behind our defense.

“Most goalies don’t venture outside the 18-yard penalty box because when they do, they can’t use their hands to (attempt) a save. Anton is not afraid to use his feet, and his physical speed helps him there as well.”

Nistl seems to have been born to be a goalkeeper. His father, Anton Sr., was a star goalie in Austria and in the United States after he immigrated. In the early 1970s he played with Schmid on the Los Angeles Kickers.

Schmid remembers the elder Nistl as being “very aggressive, very tenacious--much like Anton.”

The younger Nistl plans to stick to goal keeping after he graduates. He said the club team for which he played last summer, the San Diego Nomads, won the championship of the World Soccer League. The WSL, he said, is expected to become a professional outdoor league and that he would like to play for the Nomads as a pro. He would also like to get chance to play indoors as a pro.

He may have been born to be a goalie, but he did not always play that position. He said he began in the California Youth Soccer Assn.-South when he was about 8 and took up goal keeping a little later because “I wanted to learn more about it, and people said that I had a knack for it.

“I was encouraged to stay in there, and I’ve done well with it. But I didn’t start taking it seriously until I was 13 or 14.

He took the sport seriously enough to be named an All-CIF-Southern Section goalie as a senior at St. Francis High School in La Canada, but he did not play as a senior because of an injury.

While in high school he also played with a top club team, the North Huntington Beach Untouchables. Several other UCLA players have come from the Untouchables, including past star Eric Biefeld, who has played for the U.S. national team, and current Bruins Mike Lapper, Sam George and Joe-Max Moore.

Nistl also played football in high school and was an All-Del Rey League punter and free safety.

He was good enough in football to be offered scholarships from such colleges as Oregon State, San Diego State and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.

But he said he received letters from nearly every college in the country that were interested in him as a soccer player. Soccer was the only choice for him, he said, and UCLA the only school.

He chose UCLA, he said, because of Coach Schmid and the winning tradition of his teams. The Bruins were NCAA champions in 1985, reached the national semifinals in 1984 and were also quarterfinalists in 1987.

He got a chance to play with such former Bruin stars as Dale Ervine, a former national team member, and Paul Caligiuri, a member of the national team since 1983.

“If you ever wanted to learn how to win,” Nistl said, “playing with Paul was a big plus.”

Nistl played with the national B team last year on a tour of Korea and was supposed to play with that team in the World University Games in Brazil. But soccer in the games was canceled, Schmid said, because of economic conditions in Brazil.

Nistl would like to play for the United States in the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona. But he is 22, and there is an age limit of 23 for the team, so he will be too old, he said.

He has no regrets about missing the Olympics. “That’s the way it is. You’ve still got to keep on playing. You’ve got to shoot for the best you can.”

He wants people to know that he has worked hard to get where he is and that he has had a lot of help along the way. His biggest helpers at UCLA, he said, have included Coach Harris and Lapper, a sophomore defender.

Harris has “helped and guided me in everything I wanted to accomplish,” he said. Nistl broke Harris’ career shutout record in a 2-0 victory over the University of San Francisco. After the game, he said that Harris “was making jokes about it, but basically he was pretty happy for me. I’m his protege and he trained me, and it just shows that Tim Harris has class and where he’s coming from.”

Nistl had 11 shutouts last year but began that season looking as if he would not get any. UCLA started the season with many inexperienced players on defense, and Nistl wound up surrendering eight goals in his first three games, all losses.

But with Lapper in the lineup on defense, Nistl gave up just 10 goals in the next 19 matches. UCLA finished with a 13-5-4 record and went to the second round of the NCAA regional playoffs.

He has worked hard to get where he is in soccer, and he has also worked hard at his summer job with his father and to get his degree in history from UCLA.

In the summers, he said, he gets up at 5 a.m. to work with Anton Sr., a carpenter who usually puts the finishing touches to interiors of large office buildings. At the end of his work day, Anton Jr. often drives long distances to get to a night soccer game.

“It’s a great summer job,” he said. “It helps support me through school, and I’m fortunate that I still can continue to play. I realize the way it is in the working world, and it’s important for me to graduate.”

Soccer does not draw the big crowds that UCLA football and basketball do, but Nistl said that Sunday home matches draw from 800 to 1,200 people and that some away games are seen by thousands of fans.

“When you do play before a crowd, it is added incentive and the adrenaline flows. But I try to play with intensity in every game, whether or not there is a crowd.”

Intensity is not really a strong enough word to describe his performances. “He is a tremendous competitor, and when the game starts, all he wants to do is win,” Schmid said. “He is intense almost to the point of blindness when it comes to his approach to game. He is angry sometimes.

“When he steps into the goal, most of the time it’s a big plus for him because the other teams don’t want to mess with him. He views a soccer game as a battle, and he’s definitely one of the soldiers you want on your side.”

If you plan to take in a UCLA soccer match some day, you won’t have any trouble spotting Nistl. He’ll be the one moving quickly back and forth around the goal, kicking and batting away attempted goals.

He’ll also have an unearthly glow in his eyes, his head will be swiveling on his neck to spot the enemy--and he’ll be breathing fire.