Cox Played Big Role in Scoring Cup : Bureaucracy: The O.C. congressman helped steer soccer officials through Washington’s regulatory maze in 1986. He pulled strings by mentioning Ronald Reagan.

Oh, so no w you’re a World Cup Soccer fan. Now that the commemorative coins are minted and the T-shirts are printed and the hawkers are selling the flags and the American team is warming up in Mission Viejo and the first game starts today and all you have to do is get a ticket to the final in Pasadena.

All of a sudden, your speech is peppered with words like “mid-fielder” and “header” and “corner kick.”

But where were you in 1986 when the United States government nearly mucked the whole thing up?

The truth be known, most Americans don’t get soccer. They never have. This is the most popular sport in the world, and most of the games, if they are broadcast at all, are not even broadcast in English. And so it came to pass that World Cup Soccer, played for the first time in the United States, might not be here at all if not for the likes of Christopher Cox--USC soccer player turned White House legal counsel turned Republican congressman from Newport Beach.

It was Cox who helped steer World Cup officials through Washington’s bureaucratic rapids when the United States was first proposed as a venue eight years ago, securing an executive order from then-President Ronald Reagan that directed the cooperation of all federal agencies and cinched World Cup USA 1994. He has since watched over everything--from the commemorative coin to the site of the American team’s practice field.

“He was a key. Everybody in the damned government had their fingers in this,” said Eddie Mahe, who ran the U.S. Soccer Federation’s 1986 campaign to bring the event to the United States. “Without him, I don’t know that it would have survived.”

To understand the process behind this event, one must understand the United States’ tepid relationship with a sport beloved by the rest of the world:

British fans have been known to get so worked up over soccer that they trample each other to death. But a recent Harris Poll suggests that only 20% of the Americans are even aware that the World Cup will be played here, and fewer than half of those intend to watch it.

World Cup soccer draws a global audience of 2 billion--that’s 2 1/2 times the number of people who tune into the Super Bowl. But when professional soccer was briefly played in Anaheim several years ago, officials tried to draw a crowd by asking the Beach Boys to perform; the Beach Boys left before the first kick.

It isn’t as though America hasn’t tried to love soccer. Once, Henry Kissinger went to Stockholm to persuade FIFA, the international soccer body, to send the World Cup here. FIFA said the United States was a pain in the neck and gave the games to Mexico.

It turns out FIFA officials are more accustomed to dealing with leaders who sign a piece of paper and say “let the games begin.” They do not take kindly to an unappreciative public and a President who has to get permission from every agency of government just so a few countries can kick a ball around a field.

So one can only imagine a soccer lover’s panic in 1986 when the United States was in the running to host the 1994 World Cup and the bureaucratic monster reared its ugly head. The Department of Treasury wanted to know about taxes on income earned by foreign soccer players in the United States. Agriculture wanted to know about the foreign food some athletes planned to import (soccer players are evidently quite finicky eaters). Labor was muttering something about a 40-hour work week.

Howard Baker, then Reagan’s chief of staff, sensed trouble. He needed an attorney who could not only navigate the Washington bureaucracy, but relate to a sport that required the use of the head.

There stood Chris Cox, who had played four years of soccer at St. Thomas Academy in St. Paul, Minn., when most of the other kids in his high school class went out for football. A fellow who played varsity soccer at USC, knowing that any other varsity sport at such a prestigious university would have been out of his reach. (“Soccer was accessible to mere mortals,” he would later recount.) So what if Cox did switch to hockey at Harvard grad school? This guy knew soccer. Baker gave him the job.

“World Cup USA was in a panic,” Cox remembered. “They needed waivers from virtually every agency of the federal government. The President didn’t have the authority to waive the laws.”

In record time, Cox prepared an executive order directing the agencies to fall in line. Reagan signed it.

“Chris personally kept the heat on,” Mahe remembered reverently. “He kept a club to the head of every agency. The order was signed on a Saturday, three hours before the bid was to get on a plane for Zurich.

“Without Chris, we wouldn’t have had anyone inside the White House,” Mahe said. “He just kept saying ‘President Reagan wants this. Go do it.’ ”

At the time, great sighs of relief were breathed by American soccer fans, a much-deprived lot left to worship a game that, in the words of one foreign journalist, “America can’t bring itself to love.” But there was no national jump for joy, not like when Los Angeles locked up the ’84 Olympics.

“Nineteen-ninety-four seemed like a long time off, so it was not a very impressive story to tell at the time,” Cox said modestly.

He spent the ensuing years helping introduce a bill allowing the commemorative World Cup coins to be minted, lobbied to have the American team practice in Mission Viejo and helped the Rose Bowl win out as final venue over someplace in Florida.

Just the other day, the U.S. team presented him with the first jersey to be signed by all 22 members; he sent it out for framing.

Now he can sit back in soccer nirvana, enjoying a game he has loved most of his life, even if he hasn’t played it in 20 years. Maybe America will catch his soccer fever.

Maybe not.

When it’s over, all 22 of the home team’s players will leave the country to play with foreign soccer clubs, because soccer at their level does not exist in this country.

“Sometimes,” the congressman said, “it’s just easier to watch football.”