Early Socker Gloom Never Means Doom

Opening Night is always the same for the Sockers. There are so many tuxedos the Sports Arena looks like the penguin exhibit at Sea World. Clowns wander the concourse. Balloons flutter in the parking lot.

And, as always, another banner goes up into the rafters.

All by themselves, the Sockers are doing their best to decorate the place. This one was No. 9. That’s one way of defining dynasty.

Excuse me if you have heard this before, but don’t look for Opening Night ’92 to include another of these banner-waving gigs. All good things must someday come to an end. In the Sockers’ case, it looks like the good old days were the yesterdays.

This aggregation simply can’t repeat.

Can it?

Indeed, how many times has it looked like the Sockers don’t have all the right stuff to get it done?

Over and over and over again.

It just seems different this time. But maybe it seemed different the time before and the time before and the time before.

All summer and into the fall we have heard nothing but doom and gloom. It was nasty, what with the newer, slimmer salary cap making it more and more difficult to keep a championship club together. And, as usual, there was concern over whether the Major Soccer League would survive.

Early the week before the season started, the Sockers did not even have a complete roster. It looked as if they were going to have to call Central Casting to fill the uniforms. Tryout camps must have looked like “A Chorus Line” in shorts. You figured they had to be looking for players in soup kitchens.

Did it look bleak, or what?

Excuse me again, but I think they were putting us on. Someone in the Socker organization must have been taking Lou Holtz lessons. It is not quite as dismal as it seemed.

Kevin Crow has been through a few of these off-seasons. Nothing surprises Crow. He does not get too far up or too far down. He could yawn through a tornado.

“We might have gotten a little bit later start,” Crow said, “but we’ve had quite a bit of turnover year in and year out.”

This year’s turnover was such that the season opened Thursday at Dallas with two players participating in their first indoor game and another player who had never in his life practiced with the Sockers. The final score was somewhat predictable. Dallas won, 7-2.

“The score didn’t reflect the game,” insisted Ron Newman, the coach through all these years. “I thought we’d look a lot worse than we did.”

Newman was standing outside a locker room that I expected to resemble a nursery school. I wondered who had the diaper concession.

Brian Quinn was gone, right?

Paul Wright too?

And hadn’t Kevin Crow retired?

Take away those guys, as well as Waad Hirmez, Branko Segota and Rod Castro, and not much would be left.

Lo and behold, I walk into the locker room and Kevin Crow is in his usual corner locker and Brian Quinn is sprawled on a training table and Paul Wright is slipping into his uniform.

What was this all about?

Let’s see. Let’s do a little roll call here.

Victor Nogueira, here. Paul Dougherty, here. Ben Collins, here. David Banks, here. Jacques Ladouceur, here. Wes Wade, here.

That’s a reasonably solid nucleus of returning players, especially with Messrs. Quinn, Crow and Wright in uniform as well.

What’s more, the Sockers also have Tim Wittman, only the Baltimore Blast’s all-time leading career scorer, and Thompson Usiyan, only the St. Louis Storm’s all-time leading career scorer.

All the whimpering and whining just may have been a bit premature.

The Magic is Back? That’s the 1991-92 motto? Why? Where did it go?

Nowhere.

These might not be all the same players who won banner No. 9, but it’s the same team. This team does manage to get things done. It has done it with many casts of many characters.

A few of them were honored before the game Saturday night. The most familiar fellas were Juli Veee and Jean Willrich, but every one of them was a part of winning championships and knitting banners for the rafters.

The 1991-92 Sockers will not come racing out of the starting blocks. They never have. They thrive on suspense. They seek uncertainty.

Quinn and Wright have not practiced with their new (and old) teammates. Wittman and Usiyan must be blended into the mix. People such as Terry Woodberry, John Kerr, Zico Doe and Alex Khapsalis will get better as the season progresses.

It’s all there for this team, even though it might not seem like it for a while.

Don’t do something stupid like suggest there will be no raising of a 10th championship banner come this time next fall. There’s just no end to good old days for the Sockers.