Balboa Is Ready to Show His Old Self

If it hadn’t been for that Hemingway fellow, a good title for this story would have been “The Old Man and the Sea.”

Not that this piece aspires to any literary pretensions. Not by any means. It’s simply that in the case of Marcelo Balboa, “old” and “sea” seem to be the common themes today.

After all, Balboa turns 32 next month, which in soccer terms puts him closer to the fossils than the future. He will argue otherwise, of course.

And he is returning from the hinterlands of Colorado--OK, so Denver isn’t the back of beyond, but its coastline is somewhat distant--to the shores of the Pacific and his former San Diego State haunts.

The occasion is today’s Major League Soccer All-Star game, set for 12:30 p.m. at Qualcomm Stadium. The Cerritos-born Balboa, a defender for the Colorado Rapids, will be starting for the Western Conference.

His mind, however, might be more on Mexico than Mission Valley.

On Sunday, he and the rest of the U.S. national team leave for Guadalajara to compete in the eight-nation FIFA Confederations Cup. Awaiting them in the first round are New Zealand, Brazil and Germany.

It’s a tough challenge and one that Balboa wasn’t at all sure he’d be taking up again. Not after the misery that was World Cup ’98.

That was when Steve Sampson, then the U.S. coach, gave the veteran of the 1990 and 1994 World Cups a total of nine minutes playing time, in the third and final game, when the Americans’ tournament had long since plummeted earthward, trailing fire and smoke.

“The whole situation just came to a point where I really thought about not playing for the national team again,” Balboa said. “It took the fun out of it for me.

“I’m not the type of player who will kiss up to anybody to be on the field. I’ll show you what I’ve got in practice, I’ll show you what I’ve got in a game. If that’s not good enough, then I’ll be more than happy to sit on the bench for you.

“But I’m not going to be buddy-buddy with anybody. That’s just not my style. I would prefer to sit on the bench than kiss up to anybody. That’s basically what happened in ’98.”

As things turned out, Sampson was ousted, Bruce Arena took over as national team coach and the disgruntled veterans on the ’98 team were put out to pasture.

Until this week.

That’s when Arena recalled Balboa to the U.S. team for the first time in more than a year and gave him 45 minutes of playing time Tuesday night in the 2-1 victory over England’s Derby County at Mile High Stadium.

The next day, Arena named Balboa, who has played 127 games for the U.S. since 1988, to his 20-player roster for the Confederations Cup. He also recalled John Harkes, the U.S. captain who was kicked off the team by Sampson two months before the ’98 World Cup.

“I think he [Balboa] has had a good year [in MLS] and we do have a shortage of central defenders,” Arena said. “He’s a player who has a lot of experience at the international level. He’s the most-capped [men’s] player in the history of U.S. soccer.

“There was a point in time when he was going to be called, and doing it when he was home [in Denver] would hopefully make the transition back into the team a little easier. These next couple of weeks will give me the opportunity to get to know him a little bit better as a player.”

Balboa’s age, Arena said, is not a factor.

“He’s 31,” he said. “I don’t think that’s old. At 33 or 34, you worry about it a little bit, but he’s not an old man by any means.

“I don’t know yet [what Balboa will bring to the back line]. He’s very good in the air and he’s a pretty good passer. It remains to be seen how good of a defender he actually is.”

For Balboa, even a few days under Arena’s coaching have been an eye-opener.

“It’s a different level,” he said. “The respect that Bruce shows players, it’s just a new experience. It’s fun.”

He also likes the team’s offensive attitude.

“It’s an aggressive style of soccer,” he said. “You attack, you press and you put pressure on them [opponents]. It’s exciting to watch the U.S. play. Tuesday was the first time I was involved with it, and it’s exciting. You take some chances.”

Balboa said the France ’98 debacle might actually have helped his game.

“After the World Cup, I was able to take off almost two months, just get away from the game and kind of get my head back together,” he said.

And without being pulled away for national team games, he was able to concentrate fully on the Rapids, who are in first place in the Western Conference and have reached the quarterfinals of the U.S. Open Cup.

And that age thing?

“I guess people consider me old because I’ve been here [on the national team] since ‘88,” he said. “I think I can still play the game. I guess I have to go out and prove it every day in MLS, and that’s what I’ve been doing.

“There are a lot of players who are 30, 31, 32 who are on this team, but for some reason the only one they ever say is old is me. And I have no idea why.”