Fans Are Still Interested, but What About Players?

A couple of things struck me as I drove to the Sports Arena Friday night for Game 3 of the MISL’s Western Division championship series between the Sockers and Dallas Sidekicks.

The team, it seemed to me, was in excellent health. But the franchise appeared to be ailing.

The team, you see, was right where it wanted to be. It was in the playoffs, as it always is, and it was coming home with the series tied at one apiece. This meant, of course, that there had been a “break-through” victory in Dallas that positioned the hometown heroes to sweep into the finals with victories Friday night, tonight and Tuesday night.

Forget that the Sockers were 25-27 in the regular season and that Dallas was the division champion. This, after all, is the Sockers’ time of year. To them, the regular season is an appetizer, and the playoffs are the entree.

And this particular course of the entree was looking all the more appetizing because Dallas had lost 10 in a row and 15 of 16 in San Diego. What’s more, Dallas’ players were dealing with a history of individual failures, because 15 of the 16 on the roster had previously been knocked out of the playoffs by the Sockers while playing with one team or another.

So, for the Sockers and their fans, this was to be a celebratory occasion, a chance to whoop it up and place a searing brand of reality on these upstart characters from Texas.

The question, as I saw it, was whether the fans would bother to show up for the occasion.

With one exception, attendance has dwindled yearly since hitting the peak of 11,415 per game in 1984. The two first-round home games against St. Louis drew a total of 11,975, which would have been little more than an average crowd back in 1984.

This seeming apathy did not, to me, bode well for the future of a franchise that has already been bailed out of bankruptcy once. You stick a thermometer in this body, and I was afraid it would read something like 78.6 degrees . . . and dropping.

Added to this concern was the fact that the Padres were home, and Bruce Hurst was pitching against the New York Mets and unbeaten Frank Viola. What would happen, I wondered, if they threw a playoff game and no one came?

Projections of a mere 5,000 or 6,000 in attendance proved to be unfounded. It was a nice crowd. Not a great crowd, mind you, but a nice crowd. It was loyal enough and loud enough to approximate the decibel level of a 747, even though it was somewhere between a Cessna and a Lear Jet.

It was, all in all, the right circumstance for the Sockers to go ahead and jump into a two games-to-one lead and get a few more folks fired up for Games 4 and 5.

However, the first half was about as dreary as Saturday morning. They could have played the whole thing with a bowling ball for all they managed to do with the soccer ball. The Sidekicks played as if they were afraid someone would find out they only had one bullet in their guns, and the Sockers accommodated by stooping to that level of ennui.

At halftime, I asked owner Ron Fowler about the health of the franchise, given the small crowds for the first round. He was upbeat.

“The first round,” he said, “historically doesn’t do well. I think, hopefully, we have 8,500 tonight. That’s not bad going against Hurst and Viola. I feel good.”

He should. The attendance, in fact, was 9,009. Not great, as I said, but not bad. And the crowd was doing everything it could to be a factor in the game, from poorly executed (thank heaven) waves to that familiar, lowing Soooock-eeeeers chant.

The only problem was that the Sidekicks took both the Sockers and the crowd out of the game with a sleep-walking attack that ultimately put everyone to sleep. The Sockers played with the intensity of a bowl of yogurt, and the crowd reacted as if it had been drinking warm milk.

The Sockers did score first on a goal by Brian Quinn, except that you sensed A) that was not going to be enough and B) that was all they were going to get. Exhibits A and B were both correct.

Dallas has this player named Tatu who seems so chatty and friendly on the field that you almost expect to see him handing out business cards to the defenders. While the Sockers were reading them, he scored two goals in 57 seconds, and Dallas was on the way to a 4-1 victory.

The Sockers were dead. They looked as if they had been taking Laker lessons, learning the hard way that teams of ‘80s are no longer in style in this new decade.

“That,” said Ron Newman, the coach for the ‘80s and probably the ‘90s, too, if his players will awaken, “was the worst performance for a Socker team here. There’s no way we should play like that. The intensity wasn’t happening.”

Intensity had better start happening, starting with tonight’s game. Already, the Sockers are in position where they have to win the last two games in San Diego and then hope for a split in Dallas to survive to another championship series.

It doesn’t look good.

I came away with the impression that, while the franchise may be healthy, the team is ailing.