U.S. Team Gains Support as It Goes Along

They knew the pollster’s dreary findings and the long odds against them knocking off heavily favored Colombia. But the American soccer team also knew it needed a spark, something akin to sending a bottle rocket screeching across the sky, something that would force folks across the country not just to pay half-hearted attention to them, but smile and marvel--maybe even get a little dewy-eyed at what they had done. What they desperately needed, in midfielder John Harkes’s words, was “a result that shocked the world.”

And they pulled it off Wednesday on a beautiful California day at the Rose Bowl with a stunning 2-1 victory that, in part, persuaded Colombian Coach Francisco Manturana to announce he would resign. Now, the fervent hope among the players and U.S. soccer officials is that this tournament run might do for American soccer what the pioneering “Miracle on Ice” victory over the Soviet Union at the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, N.Y., did for U.S. ice hockey -- or, failing that, at least mirror what skier Tommy Moe’s stunning victory in the Lillehammer Olympic downhill race last February did to snowball interest in the U.S. Winter Olympic team.

All three instances are the kind of sports victories that Americans -- delusionally or not -- like to think of as quintessentially American. The U.S. soccer players, to a man, said they all believed they could defeat Colombia even before the game began. That took a ton of bravado. The Americans also knew they commanded scant respect not just at home, but also abroad.

Some people had looked at the roster and derided it as a “passport” or “green-card team” -- a motley mix of naturalized U.S. citizens, college stars and overseas-based pros. Some questioned if the squad would have qualified for the Cup if it hadn’t gotten the host’s bye into the 24-team field. That motivated the U.S. team too.

Now the American team -- which went from January to April without a win in international tune-up play -- finds itself in a wholly unexpected tie for first place in its four-team World Cup group. Sunday’s first-round finale against Romania at the Rose Bowl figures to be the most-watched soccer game in U.S. history. Depending on the score, a win could send the U.S. team to Washington, D.C., for its second-round game.

But unlike the other first-place teams in each group, “We don’t have a (world-class star) Hagi or a Valderramma,” says U.S. assistant coach Sigi Schmid of the Romanian and Colombian stand-outs. “We know that our success comes from unity and from helping each other out.”

It’s a hard way to play. But then the team is full of men used to hard knocks.

Neither flamboyant defender Alexi Lalas and midfielder Cobi Jones, one of the first subs off the bench, received college scholarships; they made their college teams by showing up and trying out. Another starting U.S. defender, Cle Kooiman, received no response from 1990 World Cup coach Bob Gansler when he sent Gansler videotapes of his Mexican League games. “I thought I should’ve got at least a one-game look,” said Kooiman, who kicked a 59-yard field goal as a high school football player but turned down scholarship offers from USC and others because, “My heart was in soccer.”

Midfielder Hugo Perez’s family sneaked into the United States from El Salvador when he was a child; Fernando Clavijo, his wife and two children moved to the United States as illegal aliens in the mid-1980s. He bussed tables and cleaned factory floors around New York City to make ends meet until his indoor soccer career took off. In 1987, he obtained his U.S. citizenship.

Striker Roy Wegerle was born in South Africa and left home at age 17 after a successful letter-writing campaign to U.S. colleges gleaned one -- the University of South Florida -- that would take him. Had Wegerle stayed, the country’s apartheid policies would’ve frozen him out of international sport. As it was, he nearly missed this World Cup because he underwent three arthroscopic knee surgeries on Jan. 18, March 30 and April 15 of this year. Almost concurrently, starting sweeper Marcelo Balboa raced back from a disastrous anterior cruciate knee ligament tear in 7 1/2 months -- far faster than the usual 9- to 12-month recovery period.

Balboa, playing with abandon Wednesday against Colombia, almost scored on a bicycle kick shot that missed the net so narrowly Meola was seen crossing himself in amazement at the other end of the field. (To execute a bicycle kick, the most difficult goal-scoring maneuver, the player falls backward, scissor-kicks the ball and lands on his upper back.)

“If Marcelo had scored on that play it would’ve been the greatest goal in the World Cup history, in my opinion,” Meola said. “A play like that takes incredible timing, skill. Everything. And he was so close. Man!”

As it turned out, two goals against Colombia were enough. Afterward many of the U.S. players admitted having to choke back tears as they celebrated on the field. So many of them-Harkes, Ernie Stewart, Tab Ramos, Eric Wynalda, Wegerle and Kooiman-were the first Americans to excel in their respective overseas leagues. Another, Thomas Dooley, was born in Germany to a German mother and a U.S. serviceman who abandoned them. Though reared there, Dooley says he also craved coming to the United States, trying to find his father. When the U.S. team called in 1992, he packed up his family and left Germany’s prestigious Bundesliga to make the 16-month training buildup with the team.

Dooley has often said when he arrived, “ “Cheesburger, please’ were the only English words I knew.”

Somehow they got by. Somehow they got to this point, all of them assembled by cagey coach Bora Milutinovic, who may be the most charmed man in international soccer today.

In the last three World Cups, the Serbian-born Milutinovic has taken an unheralded Mexican team to the World Cup quarterfinal rounds in 1986 (Mexico’s best-ever result), an even less-respected Costa Rican team to the second round of the 1990 World Cup. Milutinovic’s coaching background against Latin teams -- and a hunch to start 37-year-old Clavijo -- proved a decisive advantage against Colombia. The American team had an answer for every maneuver the Colombians tried.

Before World Cup play began on June 17, nearly 75 percent of Americans polled didn’t know it was coming to the United States. That number has nearly flip-flopped now -- 60 percent of people in most recent poll have noticed the quadrennial world championship is here for the first time. If the American team keeps going like this, the number figures to leap again. But don’t tell them it’s a miracle.

“I don’t believe that,” Lalas says.

“A miracle -- aw, I don’t know,” defender Paul Caligiuri says. “I’ve heard that we seem fearless a few times now, and I think that’s a good assessment. The fashion we played (Wednesday) and the result really inspired us. There’s this great World Cup atmosphere once we get on the field, and once you see a great slide tackle to knock the ball away or a great save by Tony, you just want to step up too. No one on this team wants to let the other guys down. Bora is pioneering this thing, giving us his experience. And he just keeps reiterating the importance of going out there and enjoying the game -- just enjoying it.”

It’s only been two games. But what’s not to enjoy?