By David Wangerin
Temple University Press
249 pages
“In the quarter century since its demise, the NASL [North American Soccer League] has been subjected to no end of post mortems. Almost all list several causes of death, and many of these the strategic plan had warned against: hasty expansion, the rush for network television, a failure to develop native talent, the wrong kind of marketing. But other ailments were less easily remedied. Foremost among them was the naïve assumption that the millions of children who had discovered the fun of playing soccer wanted to watch others play it – or that their parents would even let them. ‘My father used to take me to Yankee Stadium,’ [NASL star] Kyle Rote Jr. recalled. ‘He’d say, “Watch Mickey Mantle do this,” or “Watch Tony Kubek make the double play. See how he gets out of the way of the sliding runner.” ' The father is comfortable in teaching his children. In soccer, it’s just the other way around. It would be a fair comment to say that kids know more about the game than parents do. That can be tough to handle from the ego standpoint.”
