WORLD CUP USA ’94 / MEMORIES : GRAHAME L. JONES : U.S. Has Missed Its Best Shot to Ensure MLS Success

I remember the date clearly. It was Aug. 5, 1973.

That’s when I covered my first soccer match for The Times, or indeed for anyone.

Poland was playing Mexico at the Coliseum. I wanted to see the game, so I volunteered to cover it.

In those days, no one at the newspaper was interested in soccer, so I got to go. It was a friendly. The Poles and Mexicans both had qualified for the 1974 World Cup in West Germany and needed some international competition before the tournament.

Tony Morejon was promoting the match. Morejon, from Spain, spent more than half a century keeping the Greater Los Angeles Soccer League in business. He worked long hours and put up with all sorts of absurd problems. Why? Because he loved soccer. It was that simple.

They won’t have heard of him at FIFA, any more than they would have heard of other soccer friends from those early days, Chuck Bowerman from Malta, for example, or John Best, a former referee, from Ireland.

But they, and many more like them, are the backbone of the sport in the United States.

Which is why, when thinking of memories from World Cup ‘94, their names came to mind.

They were not involved in the tournament. All they did was lay the groundwork for its success by spending countless hours at the grass-roots level, planting the seeds for soccer to thrive in this country.

What a pity if it were all to go to waste.

World Cup ’94 is history. In the next day or two, the FIFA hierarchy will be gone. The foreign press and fans will be gone.

And the greatest opportunity soccer has had to succeed permanently in this country will be gone.

And we will be left with what?

Promises of a professional league? Does FIFA seriously believe Major League Soccer will be up and running by April? Does it think this World Cup, successful and profitable as it was, will be the catalyst that launches the sport into the big leagues?

Give me a break.

The final whistle had no sooner sounded at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena on Sunday than things began to fall apart.

From now on, look for infighting and excuses, amateurism and ineptitude, to take center stage as the U.S. Soccer Federation tries yet again to self-destruct. Ego and greed are the name of the game from now on.

Is that an unnecessarily negative attitude? Not when it’s based on more than 20 years of covering the USSF and seeing it drop the ball time and time again.

Those running the sport in this country, and that means from Alan Rothenberg on down, had a tremendous opportunity here, perhaps the last opportunity to establish soccer as a viable professional sport in the United States.

But I think the chance has passed them by.

Today, the day after World Cup ’94 ended, the professional league should have kicked into gear. The franchises should have been in place. The team names should have been known. The clubs should have been signing World Cup players and coaches, capitalizing on the interest generated in the sport by the World Cup.

Instead, U.S. soccer today walks off the edge of the cliff. Coverage in non-Spanish language newspapers and on non-Spanish language television will plummet in volume, if not disappear.

It need not be that way. Soccer is not ending merely because World Cup ’94 has ended. The players and teams are simply moving to different fields in different lands.

This fall, qualifying for the 1996 European Championship in England gets fully under way. Forty-nine national teams are involved, including 13 of this World Cup’s participants. Next year, the Copa America, or South American Championship, is played in Uruguay, featuring another 12 nations.

Next year also brings the second FIFA Women’s World Championship in Sweden, with the United States as defending champion, as well as the Under-20 World Championship in Nigeria.

In 1996, the Atlanta Olympic Games will feature men’s and women’s soccer tournaments in five cities.

The same year also sees the start of qualifying for the 1998 World Cup in France. Add in all the annual national and continental club competitions, the African and Asian championships and innumerable friendlies and its easy to see that there is life after 1994.

But will the United States be part of it?

This World Cup did incalculable good in introducing fans to soccer and giving them a genuine interest in the game. That includes many of my colleagues at The Times who earlier shuddered at the idea of covering soccer.

That, perhaps, is my fondest memory of World Cup ’94.

But wouldn’t it have been far better to have had a proper professional league right now, rather than some nebulous promise?

No one will go to half-empty stadiums to see second- and third-rate American players and a few over-the-hill foreigners in the MLS. That has failed before.

But there is one formula that might work.

Let AC Milan have a farm team in New York, using promising American players and up-and-coming stars AC Milan is interested in keeping. Have the team wear the same uniforms as the parent club.

Do the same thing in Chicago with Bayern Munich. The same thing in Los Angeles with Chivas of Guadalajara, and in Seattle with Liverpool in Miami with Sao Paulo. And so on. Make it a truly international league, reflecting the country as a whole.

World Cup ’94 has proved that the United States is not a melting pot but rather a multicolored quilt. Soccer can and should be a thread that ties the pieces together.

It’s not an impossible dream. It simply needs the right people to pursue it.

A few more Tony Morejons, Chuck Bowermans and John Bests, for example.