Kick-Starting Their Careers : For Olajuwon, Ewing and Others, Athletics Began With Soccer

Hakeem Olajuwon, one of the world’s premier basketball centers, was relaxing in a hotel room shortly before the NBA playoffs began last month when a call interrupted his meditation.

“I just want to talk about the World Cup and soccer,” the caller said.

“I think it is wonderful, it’s exciting,” came the enthusiastic reply.

“We will surprise a lot of people.”

We is Nigeria, Olajuwon’s homeland, and like most of the nearly 100 million inhabitants, the Houston Rocket star is excited about his country’s prospects during the World Cup finals, which will begin June 17 in the United States.

Olajuwon, 32, might have had more pressing concerns on the eve of the NBA playoffs, but he simply could not keep from talking about the World Cup.

That’s because the 6-foot-11 Olajuwon is one of several stars who got his first athletic experience in soccer. The NFL is full of soccer-style kickers, and perhaps none are more prominent than the Zendejas family of Southern California. Tony and his brother Martin were joined on the football field by cousins Max, Luis and Joaquin.

But athletes from other disciplines have benefited from their soccer backgrounds as well.

Olajuwon, for one, began playing organized soccer at the Muslim Teachers College in Lagos when he was 14. He started as a fullback, but when he grew into a 6-foot-9 frame was converted to goaltender.

“They always tried to shoot at ground level,” he recalled. “They didn’t think I could bend.”

Olajuwon said he learned to stretch to make the save.

“I was tested so many times,” he said.

He did not realize it at the time, but already he was developing skills that would make him a dominant NBA player.

“All my fakes in basketball are from soccer,” he said. “It’s body movement, footwork. That was my foundation to be agile for my height.”

Olajuwon has suffered through Nigeria’s spotty World Cup play. This will be the country’s first appearance in the Cup finals, although Nigeria won the African championship in 1980, finished second three times after that and won again in April.

One of the most bitter defeats was inflicted by Tunisia at Lagos in 1977, when a tie would have guaranteed Nigeria a berth in the 1978 World Cup. Olajuwon witnessed the 1-0 loss.

“It was a big disappointment,” he said. “Everyone was in a state of shock.”

If he has any regrets, it is that he cannot discuss the game with many basketball players. Olajuwon said Brian Williams of the Denver Nuggets is the only NBA player who talks soccer with him.

But if the Rockets reach the NBA finals against the New York Knicks, Olajuwon might broach the subject with his New York counterpart, Patrick Ewing.

Until Ewing moved from Kingston, Jamaica, to Cambridge, Mass., when he was 13, he was a soccer player.

“I wanted to be the next Pele,” he once told director Spike Lee in an Interview magazine profile.

Ewing played forward. But because he was tall for his age, Lee asked if they had tried to turn him into a goaltender.

“I didn’t want to be the goalie,” Ewing said. “I wanted to be the forward. I wanted to use my athletic ability. I wanted to run and jump--man, you know, do all that.”

But Ewing left his soccer dreams in the Caribbean, where he had been unfamiliar with basketball. Shortly after moving to New England, he wandered onto a playground and was asked to join a basketball game.

“I said I didn’t know how to play,” Ewing recounted. “They said it didn’t make a difference, they just needed an extra body.”

For Randy Smith, who played guard for the old Buffalo Braves, playing soccer and basketball came naturally. He excelled in both as a child on Long Island.

In the early 1970s, the decision was easy. Soccer in North America was in its embryo stage, and although the NBA was struggling, it was a far safer career route.

Smith, an All-American in soccer and basketball at Buffalo State, rejected an offer from a Toronto soccer team and joined the NBA. It was a wise choice. He scored 16,262 points in a successful 12-year career.

But he struggled with the idea of giving up soccer altogether. He joined the Tampa Bay Rowdies of the North American Soccer League in 1974 during a contract dispute with the Braves. But shortly before the first exhibition soccer game, Buffalo offered him a lucrative contract, stipulating that he quit playing soccer.

“I regret that I didn’t hold out a little longer,” Smith said. “I regret I wasn’t part of (professional) soccer in some capacity.”

Sports car driver Juan Manuel Fangio II, who lives in Miami, laughed recently when asked if he had been much of a soccer player while growing up in Argentina.

“I was a little too rough,” Fangio recalled. “I was really going hard, into fighting.”

So, his compatriots made him a defender. The ones with finesse and a future played forward. Still, Fangio embodies the passion of Argentines for soccer.

“It’s something you can’t explain to Americans,” he said.

His calling, though, was the path taken first by his uncle, Formula One star Juan Manuel Fangio. Racing, Juan II said, took up so much time he never developed in soccer.

Adrian Fernandez of Mexico, who is driving as a rookie at Indianapolis for the Galles team of La Jolla, had a similar upbringing.

In his case, though, the genes might have been pulling both ways. One of his uncles, Angel Fernandez, was one of Mexico’s prominent soccer commentators. Other uncles were race drivers.

Adrian was good enough to play for a club, Mundet, for two years but was torn by his love for racing. He finally gave up organized soccer to race full time. But he still plays Sunday afternoon games with his father’s auto shop employees when he’s at home.

Fernandez continues to follow the Mexican national team and is friends with some of the players. He is hoping to support their effort this summer but is pulled between his work and his love of soccer.

“I have to keep my concentration high because of my racing,” he said, adding he might not attend any games.

That does not seem to be a problem for Olajuwon, who has never won an NBA title.

“I’m looking forward to (the World Cup),” he said. “Nigeria never got out of the African championships. . . . It’s overdue.

“And I’ll watch as much as I can.”