Move Keeps Collins In the Game Longer : MSL: Socker player was ready to retire before his switch to defender.

The thought of retirement rarely pops into the heads of indoor soccer players. Age only adds savvy to a player’s game, the thinking goes.

So why quit?

But at 29 and after six years in the Major Soccer League, Ben Collins found himself asking, “Why not?” as his second season with the Sockers began in October.

Collins worried he would again fall prey to injuries, just as he did the previous two years.

If the pattern repeated a third time, Collins thought, it must be his body telling him “enough.”

“Not many people know this,” Collins said earlier this week, “but at the beginning of the season I decided that if I got another injury like I did last year, I was going to retire.”

Collins since has undergone such a complete about-face that as the Sockers prepare to open the Western Division finals against the St. Louis Storm at 7:35 tonight at the Sports Arena, he is trying to talk another Socker, defender Kevin Crow, out of his plans to quit.

Because Collins found a new position this season, his waning career has been rekindled.

Collins made the switch from midfielder to defender, a position he had wanted since he began playing high school soccer but one he was told he couldn’t handle because he was too small.

The Sockers really had no choice, though. They had only one returning defender, Crow, and training camp became a revolving door through which rookie hopefuls at that position came and went.

When more went than came, Sockers assistant coach Erich Geyer recalled 1987, when he coached the Chicago Sting and when Collins helped the team by filling in on defense.

So Geyer convinced Coach Ron Newman to deploy Collins similarly. The thinking was that Collins, 5-feet-8 and 150 pounds, could help Crow tutor rookie defenders David Banks, Alex Golovnia and Saeed Bakhtiari.

Collins, however, did more than tutor. He blocked 36 shots, a career high and third most on the team. He also scored 20 goals and assisted on 13 others for 33 points, most by a Socker defender.

Perhaps more important was when Collins scored. Three of his goals won games. He also assisted on three other game-winners.

Collins’ greatest attribute is his timing. He appears to have a natural instinct when to become involved in the offensive mix.

“That’s why he’s nicknamed Silk,” Newman said. “His game flows beautifully and he can be very deceptive.

“This was how I expected him to play when he signed. Last year was the surprise.”

The surprise was this: Instead of racking up points, Collins himself was racked up:

* A left quadriceps pull kept him out of 10 games as the 1989-90 season began.

* A right knee strain caused him to miss four more games in February.

* Finally, a stress fracture in his left foot kept Collins from the season’s final eight games plus the first seven games of the playoffs.

But that wsn’t all. The residue of the injuries took the shine off Collins’ skills. So when Newman had to choose who to take to Baltimore for Game 6 of the championship series and who to leave home, Collins’ name was the first to be scratched off the reservation list.

As it turned out, the Sockers won Game 6, 6-4, and claimed their eighth title in nine years. The celebration erupted in Baltimore. Collins sat home in San Diego.

“I think it really hurt him when he wasn’t a part of the championship,” Newman said. “I felt bad for him--I’d like to take everybody when we have a chance to clinch.”

Indeed, the pain of sharing the joy of a championship with his teammates is the only injury that still lingers.

“I didn’t feel I contributed to the championship last year,” Collins said. “But this year I’ve been playing all season and if we win it again, I will feel a part of it.”

Said Newman, “I think (missing out last year) it has made Ben very determined to be a part of this team. But of course, he has been more than a part, he has been a key to our success. And if we win another championship, a lot of it will depend on whether Ben can continue to play like he has been.”

But Collins credits to his teammates, mostly Crow.

“Kevin is a three-time defender of the year and he has really helped us,” Collins said. “He always uses his head and seems to know what other players are going to do and I’m still learning from him. That’s why I hope he plays another year. I’m trying to talk him out of retiring.”

Collins began his professional career in 1978 with Mighty Barrole, one of two first-division teams in Liberia. He was 16.

“Those were some of my best years,” Collins said. “Since 1978, my mother wanted me to come to America, but I always told her I wanted to stay and play. I wouldn’t have come over here if there wasn’t a coup in (April) 1980.”

There were others who wanted Collins to leave Mighty Barrole, a team made up of players from the interior of Liberia. Collins’ family is from the coastal town of Monrovia where the Invincible Eleven, Liberia’s other team, plays.

Collins’ father, Ben T. Collins, played for the Invincible Eleven.

“Myself and my husband, and everyone in the whole family wanted Ben to play for I.E.,” Collins’ mother, Esther Dundas, said from her home in New York. “But before he went to Mighty Barrole, he went to I.E., and I.E. said he was too young.”

But that wasn’t the last Collins and his family heard from the Invincible Eleven.

“After Ben started doing so well for Mighty Barrole,” Dundas said, “Someone from I.E. came to me and asked me to tell Ben to play for them. I told him I could not do that because when Ben wanted to play for I.E. you said he was too young and not good enough.”

Collins remembers the tug-of-war.

“The Invincible Eleven wanted me, but Mighty Barrole had become like a family. We went to movies together and we got together once in a while and had fun.”

Besides, Collins found success with his first team.

“I wasn’t even a big name in high school,” Collins said. “But when I played for Mighty Barrole, I started playing so well. I was only 16, but the other players took care of me and protected me on the field and that gave me so much confidence.”

Collins was never a big scorer, but, as he did this season, he scored some timely goals.

“I scored a lot of important goals,” Collins said. “If the game was tied 1-1, I would make it 2-1.”

It was a surprise to Collins’ mother that he succeeded in the game that, as a kid, he was always getting into trouble over.

“My punishment,” Collins remembered, “always was that I couldn’t go out and play soccer. I learned to behave myself real quick.”

His mom tells another story.

“He was kind of stubborn,” Dundas said. “When he had to do work around the house, he would always go out and play soccer instead. Instead of doing his homework, he would play soccer. I would tell him he had to come home from Sunday school and change his clothes before playing soccer, but he would go straight to the fields and play in his church clothes. I have four kids, two boys and two girls, and when I went to pick them up after Sunday school there was no Ben.

“So I would tell him, ‘I am going to teach you a lesson: You come straight home from school and no soccer.’ ”

The chosen form of punishment came back in the form of guilt for Collins’ mother one summer day in 1971.

It was Aug. 24, Flag Day, “the day we honor our country,” Esther Dundas said. “They had a soccer game between Ben’s school and another school, and Ben did very well.

“After the game, Ben’s teachers came up to me and said they saw a future in football for Ben. They said he was a good football player and that he had good potential and that I should encourage him every way I could.

“I thought to myself, ‘What have I been doing?’ I’ll never forget that day.”