On the Soccer Map : World Cup: Pele-class goal by former UCLA star Paul Caligiuri brought U.S. team international respect.

In suburban America, it hardly is unusual that Paul Caligiuri spent hour upon hour of his youth playing in his driveway. Most other boys growing up at the same time in Diamond Bar also played in their driveways, shooting basketballs at hoops nailed to the wall above garage doors. But the game that Caligiuri played demanded much more of a sacrifice from his garage door.

Pretending that the door was a goal, he kicked soccer balls at it. He was on target so often that its paint cracked, its hinges broke and the stucco above it crumbled. He also missed occasionally, breaking windows in his house and also the neighbors’ house.

Why couldn’t they have had a normal American child for a neighbor, they must have wondered, instead of one who thought he was from Brazil?

His father told him to play somewhere else, but Caligiuri always returned to the driveway. It usually was difficult to find enough boys in the neighborhood to play soccer. In the driveway, he could practice shooting by himself or with his brother. Right foot, left foot. Left foot, right foot.

No one could have known then that all those hours in the driveway would mean so much not only to Caligiuri, 25, but also to an entire generation of American soccer players and perhaps even to the future of the sport in the United States.

Thirty minutes into last Sunday’s decisive game at Port of Spain, Trinidad, Caligiuri, a defensive midfielder, scored the only goal to give the United States the victory it needed over Trinidad and Tobago to qualify for next summer’s World Cup finals in Italy. That will be the United States’ first appearance in the World Cup finals since 1950.

It was a special goal for a special moment.

Caligiuri took a pass from Tab Ramos at midfield, dribbled a few steps forward and was about to shoot with his right foot from about 30 yards when a defender closed on him. Caligiuri faked the shot, chipped the ball to his left foot and, while the ball was still in the air, booted it toward the goal. Right foot, left foot.

Trinidad and Tobago’s goalkeeper, Michael Maurice, watched helplessly as the ball curved into the top right corner of the net. He could be excused if he was caught off guard. Like virtually everyone else in the world, he no doubt believed that American players lacked the skill required to score on a shot that difficult.

It was a remarkable shot for any player, American or otherwise. In the International Herald Tribune, Rob Hughes of London’s Sunday Times wrote: “Pele would have had a pop at goal from here. Maradona probably would. A handful of Europe’s top professionals might contemplate it.”

Through the miracle of television, it was a shot seen around the world. The headline in one of Italy’s leading sports newspapers the next day read: “An Italian Brings Us the USA.”

Actually, it was Caligiuri’s paternal grandparents who were Italian. His father was born and raised in Racine, Wis., and knew little more about soccer than did his sons, John and Paul, when they discovered the sport in 1971. Paul was 7, 16 months younger than John.

There was not much going on at the time in Diamond Bar, a bedroom community east of Los Angeles that was just beginning to develop. Riding their bicycles one day, John and Paul recognized some of their friends in line in the parking lot of a supermarket and stopped to inquire. Before they left the parking lot, both had joined the local American Youth Soccer Organization.

“One of my most humiliating moments came on my first day of practice, when the coach asked me to dribble the ball,” Caligiuri recalled Saturday during an interview at his West Los Angeles apartment.

“I knew enough to know that soccer was played with feet. So I didn’t understand why he wanted me to dribble. I thought he meant with my hands. Under my breath, I asked the coach, ‘What do you mean?’ I learned it after that day.”

From that point on, Caligiuri’s story is fairly typical for an elite American soccer player, although he was on a faster track than most. In other countries, where soccer is the most popular sport, players learn the game in the way Americans learn baseball, at their grandfathers’ knees. They play it in the streets and vacant lots, imitating their heroes from the professional leagues. The game comes to them instinctively, not from how-to manuals.

In the United States, Caligiuri’s generation is the first to have been introduced en masse to the sport at an organized level as the U.S. Soccer Federation sought to build from the ground up. A few years ago, the USSF estimated that more than 8 million children were playing soccer.

But most do not stay with the sport beyond junior high. The coaches, for the most part, are not well-trained, interest from within the communities is not high, and the future for the better athletes is infinitely brighter in other sports.

From among 8 million players, however, there were bound to be a few with exceptional abilities who would decide to see where the sport could take them. Or where they could take the sport. They formed the nucleus of the current U.S. team, which qualified for the 1988 Summer Olympics and will join 23 other national teams in the 1990 World Cup.

Of those players, Caligiuri is certainly the most accomplished, if not necessarily the best. After playing for three years in the AYSO, he graduated to an all-star team known as the Diamond Bar Kickers that finished second among 474 teams at an international tournament in Oslo, Norway, in 1978. The next year, he played for six months in a youth league in West Germany. He earned four varsity letters in the sport at Walnut High School and was captain of UCLA’s team that won the NCAA championship in 1985.

After the 1986 World Cup in Mexico, there was an exhibition game at the Rose Bowl between the European All-Stars and the Rest of the World. Deciding that it would be nice to invite a token Southern Californian to participate, the organizers chose Caligiuri. He played only the final 20 minutes, but he made the pass that enabled Maradona to assist on a goal and impressed at least one European player, West Germany’s Felix Magath.

Magath was about to retire as a player, but he persuaded his team, HSV of Hamburg, to give Caligiuri a chance. When Caligiuri signed a 1 1/2-year contract later that year, he became the first American ever to join a first division team in West Germany’s prestigious Bundesliga .

He spent his first several months playing for the club’s amateur team, then was released one game into the next season without playing a minute. But he believes that his time there was well-spent because of the exposure it gave him to major league soccer.

“It was an opportunity to play at a higher level, and I grabbed at it,” he said. “This is home for me. I didn’t want to leave California. But I knew what I had to do to become a better player.”

He made enough of an impression in Hamburg that he immediately was offered another 1 1/2-year contract, with SV Meppen, a team in the Bundesliga’s second-division. He played regularly there before returning to the United States in June to re-join the national team. He had played the previous summer with the U.S. Olympic team in South Korea.

“By the time I left Meppen, I felt the most important thing for me was to help the United States qualify for the World Cup,” he said.

He was welcomed back with open arms by the U.S. coach, Bob Gansler, but not by some of the players. They had played three qualifying games without him by the time he joined the team for a game in New Britain, Conn., against Guatemala and they felt they did not need him for the remaining five.

“Any new player coming in is going to cause some animosity,” said U.S. goalkeeper David Vanole of Manhattan Beach, a former teammate of Caligiuri’s at UCLA. “But with Paul, there also was some jealously mixed in because he had played in Germany. It’s the dream of all American players to play in the Bundesliga .”

Other players complained that Caligiuri thought he was better than they were because he had played in the Bundesliga and tried to coach them on the field. But Vanole said that Caligiuri was only trying to give his teammates the benefit of his experience.

“Things seem to go Paul’s way. He’s a confident player,” Vanole said. “But that was perceived as arrogance. People started to talk behind his back and got other players to turn against him. He didn’t handle it well, but it wasn’t his fault. He never knew what was wrong.”

Caligiuri played in only one game before suffering a stress fracture in his foot and being sidelined for seven weeks. When he returned, he was unable to get back into the lineup until the final game last Sunday against Trinidad and Tobago.

Gansler told the team during a training camp at Cocoa Beach, Fla., the week before the game that Caligiuri would start in the midfield because he could counter Trinidad and Tobago’s quickness.

“I was afraid it was going to be a nightmare for Paul,” Vanole said.

But because the team was isolated that week, the players developed a closeness they had not had before. Besides holding a players-only meeting to clear the air, they spent most of their time away from the field together, eating meals, watching television and playing pool.

“It was the first time a lot of the players had spent any time trying to get to know him,” Vanole said. “They realized that he was different from the way they thought he was. They also saw how hard he works.”

When Caligiuri scored the goal, Vanole said that he is sure a few players muttered to themselves, “Why him?” But he said that those players represent a small minority.

“Believe me, I went through my hardships,” Caligiuri said. “It was a problem that I had to deal with. But we made tremendous strides in the week before the game in Trinidad. When we regroup in six weeks, we’re going to regroup as a team. After only one week, I’m already thinking that I’m ready to get back together.”

Even those players who might still resent Caligiuri’s success should recognize the significance of his goal. The national team would have been at least temporarily disbanded if the United States had not won in Trinidad, leaving many of the players without jobs. Instead, each player received about $12,000 in bonuses for qualifying on top of the $25,000 to $30,000 they earned this year in contracts with the USSF. They no doubt will receive raises next year as they prepare for the World Cup.

For the USSF, even more was at stake. Operating in the red for much of this year, it now will receive at least $1.4 million from the International Federation of Association Football (FIFA) for qualifying. USSF officials expect to generate another $8 million or so in sponsorships, television contracts and ticket sales for exhibition games, including one in February at Stanford against the Soviet national team.

Furthermore, the Americans’ participation in the 1990 World Cup might generate interest in the 1994 World Cup, which will be played in the United States. That, in turn, might create not only another generation of soccer players but also the first generation of American soccer fans.

Caligiuri said that he was not thinking about any of that when he scored the goal.

“But I’ve been told about it plenty of times since,” he said. One person who told him was Pele’s manager, Julio Mazzei, who called to invite him to play an exhibition game in Brazil.

Caligiuri, however, has been careful not to take too much credit for his goal.

“I was the goal scorer, but it’s not an individual sport,” he said. “As far as I’m concerned, we’re all heroes.”