Enjoying the Good Old Days of Soccer While They Last

While visiting Chicago’s Wrigley Field last year on the most tranquil Friday afternoon any dreamer could conjure up, I was awash in a sense of the past. As a sports venue open for business since 1914, Wrigley automatically lends itself to nostalgia. But especially because it’s a baseball park with all the lore that attends the national pastime, a day at Wrigley almost forces you to think of the game when it was simpler and quieter.

Getting off the el and walking over to the park that May afternoon, I imagined people beating that same path 40, 50, 60 years ago. I imagined men in straw hats and women in long dresses and schoolboys with short haircuts--all converging for a day at the park. For all I know, the players probably hopped the train and walked in the front door of the ballpark, too, mingling easily with the regular people because most ballplayers were regular people.

For a sports romantic like myself, it would seem to have been a rather splendid era.

It was an era when only the game mattered to fans and when our brows never became fevered over such annoyances as salary caps or lockouts or arbitration hearings. Big players made good salaries in their day, but most ballplayers took off-season jobs to supplement their incomes. So, you’d find them on farms or in foundries or pharmacies, or working the counter at hardware stores or restaurants.

They were athletes as people, living not apart from the crowd but in it.

Perhaps we have some of that in our midst now and don’t recognize it. Perhaps we should enjoy it while we can.

I’m talking about the United States soccer team in World Cup competition. I chronicled my ignorance of soccer in Friday’s column, but, the nuances of the game aside, I may be missing a more significant moment in American sports history.

We may be watching a sport about to burst into the national consciousness.

If so. . . .

These may be the days people reflect on in the next century when recalling that a star soccer player made less than the minimum salary for a major league baseball player.

These may be the days they recall when soccer wasn’t polluted with strikes, profiteering and price gouging.

These may be the last days before soccer players, like today’s baseball players, openly say about the game their predecessors loved: “Never forget, it’s a business.”

History tells us that the bridge between the good old days of our major sports and what we have now is television.

TV contracts with the leagues have turned athletes into millionaires. Players joined owners in becoming businessmen.

Sports idealists like me probably over-romanticized players of yesteryear, and I suppose we could do it with today’s soccer players. It’s not like our national team is groveling.

The team’s general manager, Bill Nuttall, said players make anywhere from $40,000 to $90,000 in salary, plus insurance against injuries. But when compared to baseball’s minimum salary that is now over $100,000, soccer players are the day laborers of sport.

“The question is, why is there not big money in soccer right now, and the answer is TV,” Nuttall said. “It all boils down to TV.”

But just like power, money corrupts. And TV corrupts absolutely.

I asked Nuttall if the players bemoan their secondary pay status. “It concerns them, but the reality is we have no TV,” he said again.

I asked if he thought fans might appreciate his players more because they aren’t making big bucks.

“I don’t know if the public is privy to behind-the-scenes as to whether the players are happy or unhappy,” he said. “I don’t know if the public is grasping that part of the dynamic. I think they like the fact that they’re young kids being paid a decent salary but that they are nowhere near the superstar numbers other sports are paying. People can relate to that. Right now in baseball, if you get a hit once every four times, you’re a million-dollar player. I think the guy sitting in his living room having a beer and making $10 an hour gets a little miffed at that.”

Nuttall predicted that soccer will grow in fan appeal and that the revenue trail to the players will follow. “I think everyone who’s in athletics would like to maximize their income during the small window of opportunity they have,” he said.

Baseball, basketball and football players said that same thing once upon a time in America, and they made it happen over the last 20 years.

Perhaps the World Cup will make it happen for soccer players, too.

If it does, this note of caution to all soccer fans:

Just remember, these were the good old days.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday.