Fame Isn’t Pouring Over U.S. Cup Team

After a 44-year wait, you’d think there would be a toast, a party, something.

Instead, most folks at the hotel where the U.S. soccer team is staying for the World Cup had no idea who the guys in the crisp new U.S.A. hats were, let alone what they had done.

Just in case somebody corner-kicked you Wednesday night and you missed it: The U.S. squad notched the biggest victory in American soccer in nearly half a century, beating Colombia, 2-1. You’ve heard of the Miracle on Ice in the 1980 Olympics, and the Miracle Mets of 1969? Well, this was the Miracle on Grass. But you could hardly tell that Thursday--The Day After.

For all the excitement at the Dana Point Resort, there might as well have been a convention of coroners in town.

Vince Lima, a banquet waiter, said: “Well, no, there really hasn’t been too much activity. . . . Maybe nobody knows they’re here.”

Maybe, but Stephan Kachani, valet parking attendant, said he’s not sure people could recognize a World Cup soccer player even if they knew the team was there. After all, they’re not like professional basketball players or football players, he said. “They’re all so . . . so . . . tiny,” he said.

And so it was that on the day after perhaps the greatest day in U.S. soccer history, team member Ernie Stewart, he of the game-clinching goal, did his laundry and teammate Paul Caligiuri slept in. Even former Dallas Cowboys coach Jimmy Johnson, in town for a speech to sports editors from around the country, got a bigger police escort than the entire U.S. soccer squad.

As if there needed to be any more evidence that soccer, the rest of the world’s favorite sport, has yet to catch on in this country. It’s a good bet that the U.S. soccer team was bigger news just about anywhere else in the world, aside from the throng of reporters who got to interview the players Thursday afternoon at the Dana Point Resort.

Inside the hotel:

Joe Schroeder of San Diego, who was there for a credit union meeting, when he heard the U.S. soccer team was in the next room, said: “Are they really?”

Did he know what any of them looked like?

“Not really,” he said. “They don’t really stand out. They’re not 6-foot-9 or anything.”

Outside:

Laurel Schmidt of Rancho Santa Margarita, who was at a park just down the knoll from the hotel, said: “You’d think they’d be mobbed.”

You’d think. But then again . . .

Schmidt said she thought it was bigger news that Johnson, the ex-football coach, was at the hotel. He was on hand for the annual Associated Press sports editors meeting there.

“He came in a helicopter and had probably five or six police cars as an escort,” she said.

“Soccer has just never been as popular a sport here,” she said, almost apologizing. “But it’ll get there.”

Actually, there is hope.

After seeing one of the U.S. players perform an acrobatic “bicycle kick” Wednesday, Schroeder’s children immediately went out to give it a whirl.

“They saw that kick three different times on replay and they immediately went out back and started trying it,” he said, adding, “and these are kids who sleep with their baseball mitts.”

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