Arena, Bradley Careers Intertwined Like Ivy
One is aloof, almost haughty. The other is intense, almost feisty.
One peers down from a height, his head held high, his fish-cold eyes unblinking, his manner disdainful, dismissive. The other looks you straight in the eye and dares you to argue with him.
Bruce Arena and Bob Bradley are strikingly different and yet eerily similar.
Unquestionably the two most successful American coaches in Major League Soccer, they are, in a very real sense, the future of the sport in this country. It will be up to them, and coaches like them, to take soccer to a higher, more competitive, level in the U.S.
The respect comes easily, but why is it so difficult to like them?
Perhaps it’s the New York in Arena that makes him come across as someone who views the rest of us as mere mortals. He was born in Brooklyn 47 years ago with, some have said, a sizable chip on his shoulder.
Perhaps it’s the New Jersey in Bradley that makes him seem to always be trying to prove that he is as good or better than the rest. Call it the Jersey syndrome. He was born in Montclair, N.J., 40 years ago.
Or perhaps it’s the Ivy League in both of them that rubs more laid-back souls the wrong way. Arena went to Cornell, Bradley to Princeton.
And now here they are, on the eve of MLS Cup ‘98, the league’s third championship game, ready to square off against each other on Sunday at the Rose Bowl.
Arena coaches Washington D.C. United, a team that under his guidance has won two league championships, one U.S. Open Cup and, in a first for any American team, one CONCACAF Champions Cup.
Bradley coaches the Chicago Fire, a franchise that didn’t exist a year ago. In the team’s first season, he has led it to the title game, sweeping the favored Galaxy out of the playoffs along the way.
There will be nothing to hide between them; they are more than familiar with each other’s strengths and weaknesses and have coached together for several years.
Arena spent 18 years as coach of Virginia, winning five NCAA titles and compiling a 295-55-31 record. His winning percentage of .807, D.C. United folk are quick to point out, is better than even John Wooden’s .801 mark at UCLA.
For two of those years, Bradley was Arena’s assistant with the Cavaliers, then moved on to coach Princeton for 12 years, going 92-80-15. In 1993, Bradley was named NCAA coach of the year after taking the Tigers to the final four, where, inevitably, they lost to Arena’s Virginia in the semifinals.
College was not the only place where the two coaches’ paths crossed.
When Arena was named U.S. Olympic coach for the 1996 Atlanta Games, he selected Bradley as his assistant. And when he was named coach of D.C. United, he again turned to Bradley as his second-in-command.
So, having been on the Washington bench when D.C. United won the MLS title in 1996 with a 3-2 overtime victory over the Galaxy and again in 1997 when it retained its title by defeating the Colorado Rapids, 2-1, in the final, Bradley, like Arena, has two league championships to his credit.
But winning one on his own would mean much more. Already, he has followed Arena down too many paths.
The D.C. United coach has compiled regular-season records of 16-16, 21-11 and 24-8 and was named MLS coach of the year in 1997.
The expansion Fire was 20-12 this season under Bradley, who on Tuesday was named MLS coach of the year for 1998.
As Peter Wilt, Chicago’s general manager, tells the story, Arena laughed at the idea of the Fire being a success in its first year. But then Wilt staged a coup by luring Bradley away from Washington.
“I wanted an American coach, or at least a coach who understood American players and the MLS style of acquiring players,” Wilt said.
One of the key things Bradley had learned from Arena was how to assemble a winning team. Arena and Kevin Payne, Washington’s general manager, are acknowledged as the best front office in the league when it comes to putting the jigsaw puzzle pieces together. Wilt and Bradley followed suit this season.
“It’s tough to piece a team together when other teams have a two-year head start,” former Galaxy and current Fire midfielder Chris Armas told the Chicago Sun-Times. “Bob picked good players and good people. We have guys who came from every walk of life, with different mentalities and personalities, yet he developed a sense of family.”
That was evident in the bedlam of the Soldier Field locker room after the Fire had clinched a place in the final by beating the Galaxy. But as the players hugged and cheered and cavorted, Bradley remained focused.
“I’ve said it many times,” he said, “D.C. has set the standard for the first three years of this league. Without taking anything away from the Galaxy, I still believe that when it comes to big games, Washington is the best team in this league. They have experience and they know how to win.”
Like Arena, Bradley becomes quite animated when the subject is victory or defeat. Neither one likes losing.
“Their [D.C. United’s] incentive is that they want to win,” he said. “That’s what great players and great teams are all about. They’ll be thinking that they’ve got two rings and they want a third.
“On our end, all we can say is that it doesn’t matter if you’re a first-year team or not, you’re lucky as a player when you’re in a final. And at the end of your career you hope that you’ve had a chance to be in some finals and you hope that you’ve had a chance to win some championships.
“I’ve said that a lot this year. We didn’t start talking about that on Day 1 because it didn’t make sense, but as time went on we felt that we were a team that could compete for a championship.”
Both coaches are so focused on the game at hand that neither is willing to look beyond Sunday’s game.
Arena is curt almost to the point of rudeness when he is asked, for the umpteenth time, whether he will be the next U.S. national team coach.
Bradley, rumored as a likely assistant and/or future Olympic team coach, also dismisses such talk as premature.
But given their track records, given their history of cooperation and competitiveness, given their prickly, won’t-bow-down-to-anyone nature, can U.S. Soccer find a pair of coaches better suited to the task of taking on the world?
It’s unlikely.
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MLS Cup
D.C. United vs. Chicago
When: 12:30 p.m. Sunday
Where: Rose Bowl
TV: Channel 7
