World Class

We have heard all the reasons Why Soccer Can’t Make It In The United States, pounded into our heads since we were knee-high to a shinguard, and they are lies, every one of them.

There’s not enough scoring for the average American sports fan. Ask the average American sports fan if he thought Dominik Hasek shutting out Russia, 1-nil, in the men’s Olympic hockey gold-medal game was boring. Talk to a true baseball aficionado and he’ll tell you that the 1-0 pitchers’ duel is the creme brulee of the connoisseur’s experience.

You can’t use your hands, so Americans can’t relate. Figure skaters only use their feet too, and the television ratings in Des Moines and Dubuque are through the roof.

We didn’t invent it, therefore it must be un-American. We didn’t invent golf, either, and have you tried getting a decent tee time on a weekend recently?

Too many foreigners in short pants. Hasn’t seemed to hurt tennis too much.

If these were the only hurdles confronting soccer in its bid for acceptance in mainstream America, the Galaxy would be drawing 50,000 for Wednesday night games against Tampa Bay and Cobi Jones would be no less famous than Kobe Bryant.

No, the biggest obstacle impeding soccer in this country, in 1998, is the World Cup.

Because we are non-factors in the biggest soccer tournament on the planet, again, just like every World Cup played before this one, the World Cup is a non-factor in the Nielsen-and-sports-talk-radio ratings.

Because we have never come close to winning the World Cup, won’t again this year and might not contend until Kasey Keller III is starting in goal for the United States, the average American sports fan looks at soccer much the same way he looks at biathlon, ski jumping, fencing and judo--a foreign curiosity to be endured once every four years.

How to change this perception inside the households of Joe and Jane Six-Pack?

Easy answer: Win the World Cup.

It worked for women’s basketball and women’s hockey--two once-obscure sports that were fitted for national television contracts and the cover of cereal boxes as soon as they won Olympic gold for the good old U.S. of A.

Not so easy: How to win the World Cup.

Steve Sampson, dreaming the dream of every American soccer coach, believes the United States can win the greatest prize in soccer “within 12 to 16 years,” which gives us until 2014 to find the Ronaldo of Rowland Heights or the Klinsmann of Covina.

Alan Rothenberg, president of U.S. Soccer, brazenly has moved the target date up to 2010, resorting to that quintessential all-American approach to problem solving: Throw enough money at it--$50 million, in this case--and the problem will go away.

Rothenberg wants to spend that $50 million in player development, launching a U.S. soccer academy, a nationwide scouting system, a foreign training residency program and a youth program that will allow players as young as 12 to train with national coaches.

The master blueprint has the United States reaching the World Cup quarterfinals in 2002, the semifinals in 2006 and winning the whole thing in 2010.

Pie in the sky?

Keller, the United States’ world-class goalkeeper, thinks so, recently telling the ESPN SportsZone web site that “It’s too ambitious to say that we’ll win the World Cup by 2010. There are too many great footballing countries and too many great players who have never won a World Cup for us to think we could do that.”

Unless, perchance, an asteroid strikes the earth between now and then, jarring off track the planet’s routine rotation around the sun, and the best athletes in the country suddenly decide that, yes, strange as it sounds, soccer is the career for them.

Imagine for a moment if soccer, as it is in Italy and Brazil and England and Argentina, was the national pastime in the United States--the intended destination for every kid on every playground and every sandlot for the last 50 years.

Michael Jordan, starting striker for Team USA.

John Stockton and Nick Van Exel, playmaking midfielders.

Michael Johnson and Jerry Rice running the wings.

Ken Griffey Jr. at sweeper.

Junior Seau at central defender, knocking diminutive Spaniards and Romanians off the ball and onto the seats of their Umbro shorts.

Hakeem Olajuwon, a goalkeeper as a boy growing up in Nigeria, swatting away crosses and snagging high shots headed for the upper right corner of the net.

“We would be world champions, without a doubt,” Sampson says. “The United States produces the best athletes in the world with the perfect mentality--the belief that we can be the best in anything.

“Because of that, once we got our best athletes into soccer, we would win the world championship. Just think if Ken Griffey or some of our Olympians had grown up playing soccer as their No. 1 sport.”

Octavio Zambrano, coach of Major League Soccer’s Los Angeles Galaxy, initially laughs at the thought. The NBA all-stars--starting in midfield for the United States against Germany in the first round of the World Cup?

“I have mixed feelings about that,” Zambrano says. “This game is not about size or the ability to jump or the ability to run fast. This game is about a lot of different components. You can’t extrapolate that if Michael Jordan played soccer, he’d automatically be awesome.

“His dexterity and his coordination would have to be transferred to soccer skills. Can he match up, with the size he has, with a young Mauricio Cienfuegos? He might be able to run the open field, but can he hit the 1-2 ball in tight space? Can he dribble somebody ‘on a dime,’ as we say in soccer? Can he hit the long ball?”

Zambrano pauses, mulling the scenario.

“I am trying to get in my head the picture of the Mailman, Karl Malone--who I like a lot--running down the flank and trying to cross a ball and having Michael Jordan running into the middle of the field ready to head that ball into the net,” Zambrano muses.

He laughs again.

“I have to say, I would pay to see that team.

“In fact, I would love to coach that team. The possibilities are endless.”

The question was put to several members of the U.S. national soccer team: What if the best athletes in the United States played soccer?

“They already do!” midfielder Cobi Jones quipped.

“We’d have the cream of the crop,” defender Alexi Lalas says. “I’d like to think that we have the best athletes already, but it’s obvious: If your top athletes have only one sport to aspire to when they’re growing up, like it is in many South American and European countries, that’s much better than if you have five sports to choose from, like in the United States.

“I also think soccer requires different qualities, both physically and intellectually, than other sports. We produce the best athletes in the world, but does that mean they’d be great soccer players?

“Some sports are difficult to approximate with soccer. Take a linebacker in football. What a linebacker does is not what I do.

“Soccer players are much more like hockey players, or some small basketball players. There are a lot of athletes who are similar to soccer players--wide receivers, long-distance runners.”

Sigi Schmid, coach of the UCLA men’s soccer team and U.S. under-20 men’s national team, says a quick raid of NBA backcourts would be a good start in the crusade to narrow the competition gap between the United States and Germany, France and Holland.

“Point guards and off-guards,” Schmid says. “If you’re 6-6, it’s harder to play soccer because it’s tougher to dribble the ball when you’re that tall. But all point guards would make good soccer players. Tyus Edney, Nick Van Exel, Isiah Thomas--they’ve got the fluidity you see in great soccer players. . . .

“To me, soccer and basketball are very comparable. Obviously, one is played with the hands and one is played with the feet. But the basic principles are the same--how you break down a zone defense, how you play man-to-man defense, movement without the ball, cutting to the basket.

“It’s the same principles. Conceptually and tactically, there’s some carryover. But I think soccer is more difficult, because it’s played with the feet and a player has more options to consider.

“In soccer, a player has basically 12 options. He can shoot, dribble or pass the ball to one of 10 teammates. In basketball, a player has six options--shoot, dribble or pass to one of four teammates. Soccer has more options, which makes it mentally more difficult to play.”

Schmid, however, doubts that U.S. soccer will ever see the day when it can lure a Penny Hardaway away from the NBA or a Deion Sanders away from the NFL.

“It comes down to the money an athlete can make in the sport,” Schmid says. “For a Ken Griffey or a Michael Jordan to say, ‘I choose soccer,’ it’s got to be financially beneficial for them to make that choice. . . .

“Our top soccer players, like Cobi Jones, make decent money. But it’s not Shaquille O’Neal money.”

Not even close. Shaquille O’Neal, if properly motivated, could open up his billfold and buy every team in MLS--along with a couple of expansion franchises in Orlando and Baton Rouge.

“I don’t think we can get the Ken Griffeys and the Michael Jordans,” Schmid says flatly. “But we can get the guy coming out of high school who would have gotten a basketball scholarship to Oregon State or Washington State or UC Santa Barbara. Or the kid good enough to get a football scholarship to Fresno State or San Diego State. Guys who are good, solid college athletes.”

Guys who can make due, in other words, on the sportswriter salaries currently being offered to MLS recruits.

Before U.S. soccer can compete with baseball and football for prime American athletes, MLS needs to pump up player salaries to the $1-million to $2-million range. And for that to happen, Schmid says, “it would take the United States winning the World Cup first.”

Hmmm.

So let us get this straight: In order for U.S. soccer to enlist the elite athletes needed to win a World Cup, it first must be able to offer players $2-million contracts. But in order for U.S. soccer to be able to offer $2-million contracts, it first must win the World Cup.

This, sports fans, is known as a Catch-22.

(Which sounds like the U.S. game plan for Germany in Paris on Monday: “OK, Kasey, if they take 22 shots against us, and they will, you better catch 22.”)

U.S. striker Eric Wynalda wonders if all this talk of the United States winning the World Cup in 2010 or 2014--or 2050--is nothing more than wasted breath.

“People like to say this team is going to be successful in the year 2000-something,” Wynalda says. “Then you ask an average American and he’ll say, ‘Hey, soccer. That’s really getting more popular, right?’ ”

Wynalda shakes his head.

“In that regard, I don’t think we deserve to win a World Cup,” he says. “Because people here wouldn’t appreciate it. And that’s sad.

“The only real difference between us and the rest of the teams in the World Cup is that everyone else believes they can win it.

“Italy says, ‘We can win!’

“Germany says, ‘We can win!’

“Brazil says, ‘We have to win! If not, it will be a national disaster!’

“But in the United States, it’s, ‘Go get ‘em. Nice try if you lose.’ ”

Maybe it would be worth placing a phone call to Michael Jordan, just in case, once his Chicago Bull career is over any day now.

“I’ll give Michael Jordan a year of lessons,” Cobi Jones volunteers. “We’ll see if he can pick it up.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Going on Record

The United States this year is making its sixth World Cup appearance. In the 15 previous competitions, the best U.S. showing was in 1930, when it finished fourth. Uruguay beat Argentina (the team that ousted the U.S.) in the title game. How the U.S. record stacks up:

TOP RECORDS IN WORLD CUP

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No. Country Record Points 1. Brazil 49-13-1 111 2. Germany* 42-16-15 100 3. Italy 35-14-12 84 4. Argentina 26-9-17 61 5. England 18-12-11 48 6. Spain 15-9-13 39 7. Uruguay 15-8-14 38 8. Sweden 14-9-15 37 9. Russia** 15-6-10 36 10. France 15-5-14 35 23. United States 4-1-9 10

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* West Germany before 1994 tournament.

** Includes Soviet Union.