Crazy Eight: Sockers Win It All Again : When the Occasion Arises, So Do the Sockers’ Singers

If you were Laurence Olivier, which part would get your attention? Hamlet or Batman?

Wouldn’t Caruso rather sing the Barber of Seville than Tommy?

Michaelangelo chose his ceilings rather carefully.

Rodin didn’t do coffee tables.

Does anyone remember that shawl Betsy Ross knit for her great aunt?

What we’re talking here is rising to occasions. You know, like how Cher dresses for the Academy Awards. Or why Joe Public coughs up the money to rent a limo for an evening.

To the Sockers, the Major Indoor Soccer League playoffs are their private piece de resistance. They should play them in tuxedos. They play the regular season in pajamas. Wake them up for The Main Event. Wake them up when it is time to get interested.

In fact, maybe the Sockers shouldn’t even have to do regular season. This year, they barely did. They had a 25-27 record and figured to be out of the playoffs in less time than it takes to say MISL.

Yet there they were once again Friday night. They were wearing 1990 MISL championship shirts and caps, which were probably manufactured in October. They were spraying more champagne than they were drinking. They were indoor champions.

Again. For the incredible eighth time in nine years.

The 6-4 victory in Game 6 made it four games to two over the Baltimore Blast and gave the Sockers what might have been their unlikeliest of the eight championships.

“They thought maybe we might be a Cinderella,” said Ron Newman, the coach for all of these years, “but we ended up being the Phantom of the Opera. We were lurking in the shadows, and now we’ve taken the mask off.”

If the Sockers indeed were wearing a mask, it had a smiling face. The Blast, victims four times in as many championship showdowns against the Sockers, had the other one once again.

“They play when they have to,” said Kenny Cooper, Baltimore’s coach through all these years of frustration. “That’s the key thing. You ask if a team with a 25-27 record deserves to win? They won it.”

And so the chorus echoed through the Socker locker room, sung to the tune of “Guantanamera.’

“We sing when we win,” they sang. “Oh, we sing when we win.”

It isn’t very original, but they do sing those words to that tune every year. Every year but one, of late.

Erich Geyer, the assistant coach who may be the first person to be both a player and a coach for an MISL championship team, struck up a different chorus.

“We sing in 19 . . . 87,” he started. “We sing in nineteen eighty-seven . . . “

Brian Quinn, the captain and most valuable player for the second time in a championship series, cut him off.

“Erich,” he said, “we didn’t win in ’87.”

That , to the MISL, may be the most memorable year of the last decade. It was like The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant, which was written when that never happened.

But this was the year the Sockers could lose and maybe even should lose.

However, anyone who wrote these guys off forgot that these guys write the script when it gets to indoor soccer post-seasons.

“This is what it’s all about,” said Kevin Crow, like Quinn a six-time veteran of champagne baths. “We didn’t plan on having a 25-27 record in the regular season. We have no excuses. We just didn’t play up to our potential. We knew we could play a lot better and the bottom line is that we did. The bottom line is that the playoffs are all that matters.”

The playoffs. That’s when the loafers come off, and the dancing shoes go on. That’s when Picasso puts away the paint-by-number and gets out his palette. That’s when Ron Newman turns Cinderella into a monster.

“The last 16 games,” Quinn said, “were the best we’ve played all season.”

The best may well have been the last. They had a chance to win it Wednesday in San Diego in front of the home fans, and they played very well. But they did not get it done. And so they were condemned to come to Baltimore. It proved to be an inconvenience, a little like having to wait in line at the border.

The Sockers simply took it to the Blast Friday night. There was no other way to say it. They played well enough to win, 8-4 or 10-4 or 12-0. Suffice it to say that the Blast only made it respectable by playing all of the fourth quarter with a sixth attacker and no goalie. The Sockers spent most of the last few minutes passing the ball around as if in a pre-game warmup.

This team was not the best the Sockers have put on a field, but consider the ages of most of these guys, and a case can be made that this group may eventually be just that.

Already, in fact, anonymous voices in the locker room were saying: “Nine is fine.”

For the moment, though, the present was to be celebrated.

“Fill this cup full of champagne,” said Erich Geyer, “and let’s drink out of it.”

The monsters were thirsty. The full moon must have gotten their attention.