WORLD CUP USA ’94 / THE FIRST ROUND : Never Asleep at the Wheel : Tireless Rothenberg Charts the Future of U.S. Soccer

Two-thirty in the morning. The responsibility nudges Alan Rothenberg awake, tugs him out of bed and across a hardwood floor, drops him into a leather chair at a cluttered desk.

He reaches for the phone. He dials his secretary at the office. Her voice mail answers. He dictates.

For the next 90 minutes he makes decisions for others who are sleeping, who will hear about them six hours later and have no idea they were issued by a man in his nightclothes.

Sometimes the responsibility leads him other places. One recent night his wife, Georgina, investigated an ominous squeaking and discovered her husband riding his stationary bike. The digital clock read 3:27 a.m.

“I’m lying in bed and a million things go through my mind,” Rothenberg says.

Each one capable of staining the world’s largest sporting event and the Los Angeles entertainment lawyer who has dared to run it.

This is the responsibility that will not let Rothenberg rest, this World Cup soccer tournament he is trying to sell to a country that doesn’t know soccer from kickball.

By July 18, as chief executive officer of World Cup USA 94, Inc., Rothenberg will have supervised 52 soccer games at nine U.S. sites.

He will attempt to do it calmly, despite international passion that can turn tailgate parties into riots.

He will attempt to do it confidently, despite many in the soccer Establishment who privately hope he trips.

Underneath the monogrammed shirts and silk suits, Rothenberg, 55, looks like a boxer. His voice is like sandpaper, his eyes still and cold. His thick hands move with his words.

“You can’t unnerve him,” former law partner Ronald Silverman said. “You can’t scare him.”

But this, Rothenberg concedes, is different.

If he succeeds, he will be able to look in a mirror and see the reincarnation of Peter Ueberroth, who was making a runaway success of the ’84 Olympics while Rothenberg was serving as the Los Angeles Games’ commissioner of soccer.

Gone forever will be those back-room days as president of the Clippers, owner of the Los Angeles Aztecs pro soccer team, lawyer for Jack Kent Cooke.

But if he fails, soccer as a spectator sport in this country fails with him. Gone forever.

“You get so intense on the inside,” Rothenberg said. “But you have to stay calm on the outside. You can never let them see you panic.”

Some of his fears have become successes:

--Ninety-five percent of World Cup tickets have been sold, although there were distribution problems. Rothenberg says they were minimal.

--More than $250 million has been collected in fees from major corporations.

--By the time the final is played July 17 at the Rose Bowl before an estimated worldwide TV audience of 2 billion, Rothenberg said, the World Cup is expected to have netted $20 million for the advancement of soccer in this country.

Ten years ago, the checking account of the U.S. Soccer Federation had a balance of $900.

Other fears, though, have manifested themselves into enough enemies to fill a 120-yard field.

In his attempt to establish a legacy for both soccer and himself, Rothenberg has offended many of those he is trying to serve.

Charging him with everything from conflicts of interest to schoolyard bullying, many in soccer’s Establishment have decided his price for success is too high.

“The man has the morals of a bandit,” soccer entrepreneur Michael Hogue said.

Rothenberg hears the charges and laughs.

“Joining the U.S. Soccer Federation was like joining the PTA,” he said.

Many of those who have worked closely with Rothenberg, even some who resigned to escape his combative reign as USSF President and World Cup boss, also scoff at his opponents’ credibility.

The failings of the accusers, some say, represent the reason soccer needed Rothenberg in the first place.

“Some people are going to say bad things about Alan Rothenberg,” said Charles Kenny, a former World Cup executive. “Others are going to say good things. But you can’t have an event of his magnitude without a man like him.”

Then there is agent Leigh Steinberg, who, even though he represents the U.S. team in sometimes tense negotiations with the USSF, says he has walked away from Rothenberg with one overwhelming feeling.

“He is the best thing to ever happen to U.S. soccer,” Steinberg said. “I understand what is being said about him, but you have to look at what has happened to soccer in this country before he was in charge . . . then what has happened since.”

*

Eleven at night, a lower middle-class section of Detroit, a pharmacy known as Eddie’s Drugs, 1954.

Eddie Rothenberg is the father. Alan is the 15-year-old son who spends a lot of time selling gum and sweeping floors.

While walking out the back after closing, Alan sees a gun. In seconds, he and two others are back inside, on their knees, three gunmen standing above them counting money and swinging pistols.

“Kneeling there with my eyes closed, I heard a thunk and a groan, a thunk and a groan,” Rothenberg recalled. “I was third in line. I’m thinking, ‘God, what’s going to happen?’ ”

He had sort of the same feeling in 1990, when he was elected president of the USSF and given one mission: make the World Cup work.

It had been awarded to the United States in 1988 but there were no marketing partners, no interest, and a good chance that soccer’s world governing body, FIFA, would move it to another country.

Rothenberg, despite having played in only two soccer games in his life, did not wait to be the next one knocked in the head.

Before soccer’s car-wash and bake-sale crowd could blink, he had fired everyone from World Cup CEOs to secretaries, changed everything from marketing plans to salary structures, and basically appointed himself soccer king.

“Some of these people had to realize, there is a big difference between lining the field for a youth-league game and running a potentially billion-dollar business,” Rothenberg said with a laugh.

And those gunmen 40 years ago? Rothenberg laughs about them, too.

They left a scar on the back of his head with the butt of a gun. But several weeks later he spotted their pictures in a newspaper--he said he had been so frightened he would never forget those faces--and they were soon in jail.

Rothenberg learned then that there was nothing wrong with a little fear. As long as you know how to use it.

Said Ron Newman, coach of the San Diego Sockers professional team: “Everybody says this guy is using soccer to promote his own interests. . . . I say, ‘Hey, we’re also using him . ‘ This guy has his whole career on the line. He cannot afford to fail.”

But some have decided it’s not a fair trade.

They say he is working not for soccer’s fortunes, for which he had little concern four years ago, but for his own fortunes.

“Some of the things he has done are . . . morally wrong,” said Louis Palivos, president of the Illinois State Soccer Federation and a candidate in the coming USSF presidential elections.

Among the things that have many upset:

--The six-figure salaries and about $15 million in bonuses and severance pay that top executives of nonprofit World Cup USA 94, Inc., are receiving.

This includes an anticipated $3-million bonus for Rothenberg for his “volunteer” efforts. Rothenberg has already taken out a $300,000 loan against that bonus, according to World Cup Board members.

--Rothenberg not only is taking over World Cup USA 94, but also a proposed new major soccer league, even though he was elected president of only one organization, the USSF.

--An attempt by Rothenberg to bill World Cup for his hours in the name of his law firm.

Rothenberg says that his firm of Latham & Watkins was never paid for his time spent on World Cup business, but sources have told The Times that on one occasion he tried to bill World Cup for time spent on television negotiations and was rebuffed.

--Rothenberg’s standard practice of flying first class and staying in suites.

“This is still a charity . . . and I just don’t think anyone should fly first class in a charity,” said Richard Groff, USSF treasurer who is also running against Rothenberg in the August elections.

*

Two in the afternoon. Rummaging through that day’s mail, oil salesman Allen Gilmore has discovered a surprise check for $4,300 from the M&M;/Mars company.

Gilmore, the president of the state soccer federation in Wyoming, earlier had received a check of $5,000 from Adidas.

There was a time, he said, that “people in the U.S. Soccer Federation didn’t even know Wyoming existed.”

Today, because of sponsorship deals nurtured by Rothenberg, Gilmore is able to offer college scholarships to his state’s junior soccer players for the first time.

“Alan has turned everything around,” Gilmore said. “If he wants to run everything involved with soccer in this country--and keep bringing in money--I’d be tickled to death.”

Not every Rothenberg story, though, has such a happy ending. Ask Hogue, a Torrance businessman who produces soccer games and is the agent for U.S. player Hugo Perez.

Unhappy with the state of soccer here, Hogue and brother Skip raised $49,000 and spent nine months organizing a campaign to elect an unknown outsider as USSF president in 1990.

The outsider was Rothenberg, whom Hogue and others claim promised to make him the U.S. team’s general manager.

Later, after Hogue had helped build the training facility in Mission Viejo, he says he was promised an opportunity to run it.

Today, Hogue is weighing a lawsuit against Rothenberg, who he says reneged on both promises.

“Alan Rothenberg’s word means nothing,” Hogue said. “His regard for the truth is a joke.”

Rothenberg said he never promised Hogue anything.

“I can deal with a lot of images . . . but (Hogue) just never worked out,” Rothenberg said.

As varied as Casper, Wyo., and Torrance, the paradoxes of Rothenberg’s last four years cling to him like annoying lint.

Behind his back, some of the World Cup’s 400 paid employees call him “Rothenweiler.”

But this is the same man who once hired a helicopter to transport him from a World Cup function to a nephew’s bar mitzvah because he didn’t want to disappoint the youngster.

This is the same man whose wife gets teary-eyed when she talks about a 34-year marriage that has survived the pressures of Hollywood.

Then there is the Rothenberg who, upon firing Charles Cale as World Cup CEO at the end of 1991, failed to offer Cale’s secretary another position, contrary to most standard business practices.

Sophia Alvarado, one of the first two World Cup employees in Los Angeles, needed six months after her severance pay ran out to find a full-time job to help support her two children.

“Chuck was fired and they gave me no options,” she said. “Alan never even spoke to me.”

Said Rothenberg: “I don’t beat up people because I enjoy beating up people . . . but if I have to leave some strewn bodies in order to win, within the rules, that’s the way you have to do it.”

*

Eight at night, an Orlando hotel, the USSF general meeting in August of 1990.

While Rothenberg sits at a dinner on the night before his election as USSF president, his campaign workers are up to dirty tricks.

In a story corroborated by several others, Los Angeles businessman Paul Hinkley said workers used tweezers to remove clippings of a damaging newspaper story about Rothenberg that had been slipped under hundreds of hotel doors.

Hinkley, who said he also spied on the opposition for Rothenberg, is another who claims World Cup organizers failed to find him a full-time job, as promised.

Rothenberg, who denies any knowledge of dirty tricks, admittedly wouldn’t have even run for office except for the influence offered by FIFA, soccer’s powerful governing body.

“I never would have gone for that office if its wasn’t for the World Cup,” Rothenberg said.

With attitudes like these, he was immediately mistrusted by many of the 3.5 million mostly working-class soccer volunteers he represented.

They are the sort of people he grew up with, but left.

Rothenberg spent his first 21 years near downtown Detroit, in a modest three-bedroom home that housed seven people, including a grandmother.

His mother, Bebe, pushed him to expand his mind beyond the family-owned pharmacy. His father quietly pulled at him to remain close to his roots.

After graduating from the University of Michigan law school with top honors, he listened to his mother and headed for California.

When he and Georgina drove off, his father turned his head so his son wouldn’t see him cry.

“Detroit seemed a little confining,” Rothenberg said. “If you were from the right family, or from the right background, you would get certain breaks. If you’re not, you don’t--and we weren’t.

“I was a nobody in Detroit.”

The soccer community says he runs the World Cup as if he has forgotten those roots.

They point to the time that, while pushing the proposed Major League Soccer, Rothenberg flew to Oregon to meet with the renowned Nike CEO, Phillip Knight. Nike sources say Rothenberg did not have an appointment and that Knight was scheduled to be in Europe then.

When a receptionist refused to admit him, Rothenberg said that as the leader of the World Cup, he was not leaving until Knight recognized his presence.

Knight, who coincidentally had canceled his trip and was in his office, finally met with him.

Staffers also twitter about a memo from Rothenberg urging everyone to help him rise on the Sporting News’ annual list of the 100 most powerful people in sports.

In 1991 he was ranked 86th. Last year, he was unranked.

“I didn’t care if that (publication) thinks I’m a jerk, this was not about me, but about my position,” Rothenberg said. “I was pushing our people to get Sporting News to recognize the World Cup’s impact in this country.”

Said former partner Silverman, “Other tough guys can deliver their tough messages with a little more subtlety.”

This includes his approach to salaries. Although Rothenberg turned down an offer from his board of directors to pay him $300,000 a year, the salary of his top assistant has rankled many.

Scott LeTellier, the No. 2 person at World Cup, is making $210,000 in salary this year with a bonus package that includes a $40,000 allowance for country-club dues and a $1,225 monthly car allowance.

In addition, LeTellier will be paid for nine months after the completion of the World Cup, and will also be paid moving expenses to any of the 48 contiguous states for up to 18 months after the event. Included in that moving package are 12 round-trip tickets anywhere on the U.S. mainland, with a promise of payment for first-class upgrade coupons.

“I think the USSF is a charity, and as a charity, our priority must be developing the program,” said Groff, the USSF treasurer. “Too often, we are developing perks.”

Rothenberg, whose current estimates of a $20-million profit are 20% less than his quoted estimates in published reports last year, defends the salaries and perks.

“We are working with a $400-million budget, and we are only paying market value--less in some cases--for some of the people we have to have,” he said.

Through it all, Rothenberg continues to work 20-hour days while defending his reputation as a man who gets things done.

He has a back condition that sometimes causes him such pain that he lies down in airports. Yet he was recently strong enough to open the doors of the White House, where he became the first U.S. soccer official in recent memory to have a personal meeting with the President.

“I do care what people think about me, care about the community, care about what is left behind,” he said. “But ultimately, I’ve got a job to do.”

And ultimately, that job is soccer. Rothenberg laughs when recalling his two encounters on the field, both with employees during the 1984 Olympics.

In the first game, he said, he stood outside the penalty area in front of his own team’s goal and played the thug.

“I told them I would stand out there and knock people down, and that’s what I did,” he said.

In the second game, he moved up to forward, ran in front of a crossing pass, and had no idea what to do with it.

Unnerved? Scared?

“I didn’t know what to do with the ball, and it was coming right at me, and . . . “

Rothenberg stuck out his belly. The ball hit it and bounced into the net.

His employees fell to the ground in laughter. By the time they had risen, Rothenberg had already walked off the field, caring nothing about how he looked and everything about how he had scored.