WORLD CUP '94 / 20 DAYS AND COUNTING : Not Quite All Greek to Him : Panagoulias Coaches That Nation's Team, but He Also Was a Key to Rise of U.S. Soccer

By RANDY HARVEY

May 28, 1994 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

GARDEN CITY, N.Y. —

“Are you kidding?”

Like an orchestra conductor with a baton, Alkis Panagoulias is waving his cigar to direct the conversation as he holds court in a hotel lobby for reporters, friends and anyone else who happens by.

Mostly, it is a solo performance as the fast-talking, big-smiling coach of Greece’s soccer team tells stories, shares his world view and occasionally answers questions in language that, for a family newspaper, should be described as colorful and left at that.

“Are you kidding?” he repeats, responding to a question about whether he is feeling heat from the Greek public and media because of the team’s undistinguished record in exhibitions leading to the World Cup, which starts June 17. Included is a recent 5-0 loss to England.

“Football is actively involved in all phases of Greek life, from the prime minister down to the last citizen,” he says. “You can’t get away with a defeat. It’s not like your country. . . .”

Pause.

“My country,” he says.

Pause.

“Our country.”

Despite occasional linguistic entanglements, Panagoulias does not have an identity crisis. Far from it. He proudly proclaims himself “the only American coach in the World Cup.” True. Even the U.S. coach is a Serb who lived in Mexico for 22 years before moving to Laguna Niguel three years ago.

Panagoulias, who will turn 60 Monday, ventured from his native Greece to the United States in 1962 for his education, became a dual citizen and has made his home here for 25 years.

He is barely known in the United States, although he coached the U.S. team in 1983-85. Even his neighbors in Vienna, Va., where he has lived for 12 years, did not know he was an internationally renowned soccer coach until recently, when television crews began appearing at his door and his picture ran in a local newspaper.

Conversely, he is known too well in Greece. After the Greeks qualified for the World Cup for the first time, he was called a modern-day Ulysses. Now that the team is struggling, having scored in only one of its last five games, he is called something entirely different.

“We beat Russia to get to the World Cup, the first team to qualify from Europe and the second team in the world,” he says. “We lose the first exhibition game and I’m a son of a--what?--gun. It was a national catastrophe. If Greece loses, every Greek loses.”

The two cultures, as well as the two teams dearest to his heart, clash today at the Yale Bowl in New Haven, Conn., where Greece meets the United States in an exhibition.

“Are you kidding?” he says when asked if the game is special to him.

“Ten years later, I feel part of this (U.S.) team. I’ll see certain players I handpicked for myself when they were 16, 17. I saw Paul Caligiuri when he was a sophomore at UCLA. Tab Ramos was a 16-year-old in New Jersey when I said I wanted him. They said, ‘But he’s a small boy.’ I said, ‘I don’t care, I want him.’ . . . Brian Bliss from Connecticut, Hugo Perez from California.”

Like a protective parent, he is defensive when the U.S. team is criticized.

“I sent two assistants to watch Saudi Arabia and the USA,” he says of Wednesday’s scoreless game at Piscataway, N.J. “They were not impressed, though I don’t know why. They found a lot of weaknesses in the American defense, and they didn’t see any creativity in the attack. But I beg to differ. I know better than those guys.”

Believing that the U.S. players on this team are more advanced than the ones he coached, he would have liked another chance with them. Although his U.S. team played respectably in the 1984 Olympic Games, it failed to qualify for the 1986 World Cup. His contract was not renewed.

“There was some speculation that I would coach this (U.S.) team, but no one from the federation ever asked me,” he says. “They tried me, and they failed. Why should they turn to me again?”

That was one of his few soccer failures in his adopted country, which he fell in love with as a boy in Thessaloniki, Greece, after watching Errol Flynn movies. When he enrolled in college at Middletown, N.Y., in 1962, he quickly discovered that he was the school’s only genuine soccer player.

“The first day, I bent over to tie my shoelaces so that I could see how the other players kicked the ball,” he says. “I said, ‘If I’m not the king, I’ll be the prince.’ Twenty-four hours later, my picture was on the front page of the newspaper.”

He finished college in Upsala, N.Y., moved to New York to play for a semipro team, married a Greek-American woman and they had two children. But he never really settled down, returning to Greece on several occasions to coach in the professional league before he was asked to take over the national team in 1971.

During his 10-year stint, Greece qualified for the European Championships for the first time. Unable to duplicate that success after Panagoulias left, the Greeks asked him to return in 1992.

It has been, for the most part, a happy remarriage. Leaders of the conservative New Democratic Party convinced him he was so popular that he should run for Parliament, and although he was among the victims of a landslide victory by candidates from the socialist PASOK Party, he says that he would have won if the election had come after Greece qualified for the World Cup.

PASOK is attempting to oust the conservative leadership of the soccer federation, resulting in a threat by the sport’s international governing body to kick Greece out of the World Cup. But with his cigar in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other, Panagoulias appears to have no cares as he enjoys the comforts of a fine hotel near the team’s temporary training camp at Adelphi University.

In every way other than miles, it is a long way from the accommodations somewhere off the New Jersey Turnpike provided for him and his young Americans by the U.S. Soccer Federation before a 1985 World Cup qualifying game against Trinidad and Tobago.

“I remember that we were at a hotel--not a hotel, but a motel --that I’m still ashamed about,” he says, recalling that the establishment was used primarily by truck drivers for their amorous escapades.

“Those were the days when everybody in the world was beating us, even Bangladesh. I went with my young college boys to Malaysia, and of course, we lost. The king asked me to have coffee with him, and he said, ‘What is going on with the U.S. team?’ I told him to pick up the phone and call President Reagan. He just laughed.”

Panagoulias believes that the USSF has improved since then but says there is still much more to be done.

“Paul Caligiuri still remembers me telling the team that some day U.S. players are going to be the protagonists, a Greek word,” he says. “There are not one but 25 or 30 Peles here somewhere. It’s up to us to find these players.”

Whether Panagoulias will be part of that effort remains to be seen.

“Are you going to give me a job next year?” he yells at a Greek official who passes by.

Then returning his attention to his audience, he says: “First, I have to see if I want to stay in Greece. I’m a little bit tired and I miss my family.”

Since returning to coach the national team, he has spent no more than two months at a time with his wife, Vanna, and has seen his children, Debbi and John, only once every six months. They have remained in Virginia, where Vanna sells real estate, Debbi, 26, manages a record store and John, 22, is a student.

Even after arriving with his team in New York last Monday, he did not see them until a family birthday party here Friday for himself, Vanna and Debbi, all of whom were born in May.

Asked their ages, he was temporarily confused about his daughter’s.

“I’m trying to give her back a year because she’s still unwed,” he says, laughing.

One of the Greeks nearby asks if Panagoulias is saving for her dowry.

“Are you kidding?” he says. “When somebody asks for a dowry, I’ll say, ‘No way, I’m an American.’ ”

World Cup

Coach Profile

* Name: Alketas (Alkis) Panagoulias.

* Birth Date: May 30, 1934.

* Birthplace: Thessaloniki, Greece.

* Nationality: Greek and American.

* Became National Coach: June 1992.

* Record: 6-4-4.