The P.U.N.I.S.H.ers: Part 2 of 3
In Wichita, a Young Wings Fan Becomes an Archivist of the Indoor Game
Four young men. Brian Holland. Mike Romalis. Alan Balthrop. Rich Paschette. Each is drawn to the indoor game. In and of itself, this is unremarkable. Many people are drawn to a sport. But these four men do more than cheer. Something compels them to start documenting this game.
It is 1984 and Mike Romalis has now been attending games for two full seasons. At age eight, the Wichita Wings are the center of his young life. One evening, as usual, he sits watching the local news broadcast, hoping to see some Wings news. This being Wichita, Kansas, where the Wings are the biggest game in town, the odds are very good.
A story pops up on the TV. It shows highlights from the Wings’ first season. Specifically, it shows a Wings home game. It is the first time Romalis has seen footage of that first year.
“I was stunned. I was shocked. The footage looked so primitive compared to how glitzy the Wings appeared to me by then, in 1984. It was color footage of them in their horrendously ugly uniforms with the orange and the ridiculous yellow sleeves with the half stripe. It just made such an impression on me,” Romalis said.
From that point forward, he obsesses about the Wings’ history. Yes, he now understands that footage from five years in the past is hardly “history.” But to a 5-year-old boy, it is antiquity. It is a newly discovered mythological era. He becomes very interested in the former players and the old uniforms, both for the Wings and the league in general.
“I remember, in Missile Magazine, in the 1984-85 season, they advertised you could send away for the league media guide. I remember in the ad it had the different features of the media guide. One of them said, ‘History of the MISL.’ And I circled that. I still have the program. It became this lifelong hobby,” Romalis said.
But in the 1980s, collecting anything could be an excruciating hobby. There was no internet. Instead, there were backs of magazines and rumors of sources. Not much else.
“I do remember if there ever was a picture or item from the 1978 to 1982 era, not just of the Wings but of the rest of the league, I would pore over it. I would PORE over it,” Romalis said.
Once his family acquired a VCR, he began taping games so he could go back and watch them later. At the time, blank VHS tapes were a pricy item. But something compelled him to keep documenting this team. In the latter half of the 1990s, eBay became a thing. It allowed Romalis to start buying old game programs. The internet opened a door to a new source.
“I don’t think it was ‘Googling’ at the time, maybe ‘Yahooing.’ I think I just typed in ‘MISL game videos.’ I found this source in Portland, Oregon named Downing Bethune. He had this ridiculous collection of game tapes. I made contact with him and started trading the games I had, making copies on VHS tapes. I began buying quite a few from him. That was a real boon that helped satisfy this lifelong hunger,” Romalis said.
The MISL folded in 1992, and though the Wings continued on through the 1990s, the NPSL was a lesser league. Indoor soccer no longer held the public’s imagination like it did for a brief time in the 1980s. By 2001, the Wings closed up shop.
Yet, a now grown-up Romalis could be found in the bowels of the Wichita State University library, digging through the microfilm library of newspaper articles. He would spend hours putting the reels on the clunky old magnifying readers and tearing through the team’s history, year by year. By 2010, the library acquired a scanner that allowed him to acquire individual articles from the reels. But this wasn’t just to satisfy his collecting obsession. He began to toy with the idea of documenting this history in some way.
Later that year, Romalis had lunch with Roy Turner, the legendary former head coach and president of the Wichita Wings. He told Turner of his plans to start a website devoted to the Wings.
“[I was] letting him know he wasn’t forgotten,” Romalis said.
Soon after, wichitawingshistory.com debuted. The site, now long dead, attempted to assemble a living history of the soccer team. Some of those scans from the Wichita Eagle-Beacon newspaper ended up on the site. The players had their own individual pages with old photos and biographies. Romalis corresponded with both players and staff to determine what they had been up to in recent years. Some even had updated pictures.
The very popular Angels dance team featured prominently on one page. Various game programs and other memorabilia appeared on other pages. It was a mecca for all things Wings.
“I think it was an initial attempt to get the Wings back in the public consciousness. My feeling was that by the end of the decade of the 2000s, as big as the Wings were in the 1980s, it was amazing nobody was talking about it anymore,” Romalis said.
When billionaire business owner Wink Hartman brought the team back in 2011, Romalis opened his email to discover a message from a local television station wanting to interview him about it.
Five years later, Romalis and I co-authored Make This Town Big: The Story of Roy Turner and the Wichita Wings, a project that was born of Romalis’ single-minded obsession with the Wings. And he finally got to use some of that game footage when our documentary film, God Save the Wings, premiered in 2020.
For Romalis and the other PUNISHers, the MISL provided a product that spoke to the American public, soccer fan or not.
“They created this big entertainment package. It was more than the game, it was the whole experience. It’s important to keep the MISL alive for historical reasons. A lot of what we experience now in sports was birthed there in the late ‘70s and ‘80s,” Romalis said.
For younger soccer fans who didn’t experience the heady days of the MISL, Romalis and his brethren provide a reminder of how all that is happening today in Major League Soccer didn’t appear out of thin air.
“The American sports landscape is littered with leagues from different cities and different sports, but the MISL was unique in its way. It was the first indoor soccer league of any kind in the world that attracted the talent that it did. Maybe it was a holding pattern until outdoor soccer became a bigger thing. But I think that as time goes on, it’s important to keep that memory alive because it kept soccer in the public consciousness in this country for a lot of years,” Romalis said.
(TO BE CONTINUED NEXT WEEK)
Coming Next Week: Part 3/3 of The P.U.N.I.S.H.ers…