WORLD CUP SOCCER ’94 / THE FIRST ROUND : Spotlight : THE JURY IS IN FROM THE FRONTIER

Under the headline: “Uncle Sam on Course to win his Stars and Stripes!” this was written:

In bars across the land, jokes about Maradona being confused with Madonna have been given up, exhausted and passe.

Maradona is no stranger now. A relic to the rest of the world, in America he’s instant big-time, and he is adoring every moment, mugging for the cameras, tumbling in mock anguish, joyfully resurrecting the last of his diminished but still compelling talent.

The faces of Roberto Baggio and Romario and Rai and the wild boyo Jack Charlton--being likened to Bobby Knight, a fanatical chair-throwing basketball coach who believes, like the late (Liverpool coach) Bill Shankley, that winning is more important than life and death--flash across the television screens.

It has happened. For how long, how profitably, we cannot yet know, but soccer, as portrayed by exotic foreigners and the good ole American boys of the U.S.A. team, has finally broken through this last frontier.

(Soccer) was, we can see clearly now, seeking not so much new business as new life and new blood and . . . it is not too soon to give an interim report.

The verdict: sensational.