Generation Zero - The MISL: A View From a Soccer Traditionalist - Part 2/2
Generation Zero - The MISL: A View From a Soccer Traditionalist - Part 2/2
An excerpt from Chapter 8 of Hal Phillips' book about the rise of the US National Team in the 1990s
Click HERE to read Part 1.
We again pass the typewriter over to Hal Phillips, author of Generation Zero: Founding Fathers, Hidden Histories & the Making of Soccer in America, for the 2nd and final installment from Chapter 8 of his book. If you like this excerpt, go buy the book here! And if you’d like to learn more about Hal Phillips, click here!
The Express went away, but professional indoor soccer never did. While the original MISL folded in 1992, later iterations — including the still-extant Major Arena Soccer League — can still be found on the boob tube, live from assorted secondary American cities. During the mid-1980s, when it wasn’t clear whether professional soccer would ever fly in this country, MISL remained a vital part of the professional, competitive mix. The league offered players not just a bit of cash but fitness and training, even if its brand of fitness and training did not do much for outdoor preparedness. That disconnect is why Duke striker Tommy Kain jilted the Express, and why Mike Windischmann avoided indoor like the plague. It’s why, when MISL’s mighty Cleveland Force drafted him straight out of college in 1986, Brian Bliss didn’t exactly jump for joy.
“For us guys who had only played outdoor, we deemed indoor soccer a bastardization of the game,” Bliss explains, still visibly bristling at the indignity of it all. “But that was our only option to get paid and make a living in the game. So I did sign with the Force. [Fellow USMNTers John] Stollmeyer and Des Armstrong were there, too, and some of the other guys were spread around the league.”
Steve Trittschuh graduated from college with Bliss and also went straight into MISL — because what other practical options did he have? “Brian and I are the same age,” Trittschuh says flatly. “We had to make decisions.”
MISL wasn’t the only entity fueling America’s indoor-soccer heyday. Multiple pro leagues operated during the mid- and late-1980s, featuring a range of geographic reach, money and quality of play. Directly below, nearly beside MISL on the U.S. indoor soccer pyramid sat the American Indoor Soccer Association, where Jim Gabarra first caught on as a professional with the Louisville Thunder. In 1986-87, the AISA expanded beyond its original Midwestern footprint into Pennsylvania, Georgia and Florida. When the Tampa Bay Rowdies first launched an indoor team, it did so as part of the growing AISA.
I was aware of this league because David Slade, a college teammate of mine, played for the AISA’s Hershey, Pennsylvania, franchise. “Slado” was a memorable character, a sort of surfer dude whose blond shag haircut and laid-back persona belied his intelligence and his roots in Guilford, Connecticut — hometown of the inimitable Kevin Maher.
Slado was probably the best player Wesleyan University put forward the last two years I was there: technically excellent, not super fast but big, strong and fearless — the kind of attacking midfielder whose confidence and vision on the ball got better when the standard of opponent got better. I remember running into him in 1989 or thereabouts at some Wesleyan alumni function. He regaled me with stories of his itinerant futbol life in the AISA and his team, the Hershey Impact — surely one of the most unfortunate franchise monikers in American sports history, especially at the height of the AIDS crisis.
I’m not the guy to write it, but the story of MISL, the AISA and U.S. indoor soccer in general deserves a whole separate book — maybe a Triple-A cross between Ball Four, Jim Bouton’s irreverent baseball classic, and Loose Balls, Terry Pluto’s stellar, somewhat squalid history of the upstart American Basketball Association. Slado’s Impact, for example, came into being thanks to the immortal Larry Samples, a 45-year-old veterinarian from nearby Hummelstown.
Samples lined up 20 local investors to make the franchise a reality. The club proved viable for just three seasons, never filling more than half of the 7,200 seats inside Hersheypark Arena (site of Wilt Chamberlain’s 100-point game — March 2, 1962, Philadelphia Warriors vs. N.Y. Knicks). In 1991, the AISA rebranded — the National Professional Soccer League would operate through 2001 — and the Impact folded. Much of the roster, according to Slado, simply moved 15 miles west to play for the newly cobbled-together Harrisburg Heat.
We romanticize the ABA, and the AISA, and the NASL, and the old World Football League because they failed, of course. For some reason, all these years down the road, their initially grandiose, ultimately hapless dreams add nebulous elements of romance and charm to American soccer’s modern Creation epic.
But there was something else going on at this time, something more pertinent to our story: In a professional soccer landscape so devoid of outdoor successes, there was the inkling, post-NASL, that indoor soccer had the potential to scale, in America specifically. Some believed that perhaps this was how the game would finally find a broader U.S. audience, not just live and in person, but on the golden goose of startup requisites: television.
This view made some actual sense. A league season contested during the winter months, indoors, meant MISL need not compete directly with baseball or American football. Goals were more plentiful indoors. No draws, either. The game’s hockey-influenced format worked better on television, which was just another way of saying, “The indoor game can be seamlessly jiggered to accommodate commercials, while the outdoor game cannot.”
A goodly portion of this would-be conventional wisdom proved nothing more than speculative marketing perspectives and outright propaganda served up by MISL itself, by league broadcasters, by assorted futbol haters and media contrarians, not to mention soccer impresarios made truly desperate by the grim state of the professional outdoor game in the mid-Eighties.
Under their breath, however, in vaguely conspiratorial tones, even staunch backers of traditional outdoor soccer whispered an even more somber point of view: Perhaps American sporting consumers would never respond to soccer. In any form. Ever. No one knew for sure whether that heretical belief was accurate. Not in 1986 or ’87. But this much seemed obvious: The longer the professional outdoor game remained on hiatus, the more MISL grew in stature. By default.
“At the time,” Trittschuh explains, “having grown up in St. Louis, playing for the Steamers was the thing to do. They’d pull in 15,000 to 20,000 a game sometimes, and I was like, ‘This is what it is — if you’re going to play soccer professionally in this country.’ It was really the only thing available at the time.”
USMNT striker Bruce Murray never played professional indoor soccer, but he recognizes MISL’s prominent, mid-decade role and influence: “MISL came in and rescued things a bit, rescued a lot of careers. Some of those teams were really successful. MISL was actually an incredible option for players and fans. It was big business at that time — in certain cities. Ask Jerry Reinsdorf, the Bulls owner. He said as much during that recent Jordan documentary [The Last Dance]. In the mid-Eighties, the Chicago Sting were outdrawing the Bulls by a mile.”
Three years and counting from the collapse of NASL, as an impossibly young USMNT showed its first signs of life, the overarching prospects for American professional soccer had never been quite so bleak. The new national standard-bearer, the Major Indoor Soccer League, did prove successful in several markets. It was also four short years from folding its own tent. A new outdoor circuit, The A League, had been scheduled to launch in 1988, but why would that low-budget venture succeed where NASL had failed?
The hard truth was, there existed during the troubled mid-Eighties no identifiable path forward for professional soccer in the United States, indoor or outdoor. The urban/ethnic club infrastructure endured. It would always endure. But never would it even aspire to a form of professionalism useful to players, to the Federation, to broadcasters and their corporate partners. As a result, despite the country’s first Olympic qualification since 1972, it was impossible to envision how any of these broader professional inadequacies could be overcome.
If we had a time machine that traveled us back to the fall of 1987, and we informed a gathering of staunch American soccer fans that the U.S. would not only qualify for Italia ’90 but host the 1994 World Cup as well, they’d look at us stone-faced — then ask what we’d been smoking. If we further informed them that Major League Soccer would celebrate its 25th anniversary in 2021, by which time 31 states would have legalized or decriminalized marijuana, they’d surely dismiss us as cranks.
Coming Next Week: More MISL action!
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