The P.U.N.I.S.H.ers: Part 3 of 3
Brian Holland, Rich Paschette, and Alan Balthrop Keep the MISL Spirit Alive
If you missed the first two parts, click here: Part 1 and Part 2
In Kansas City, Brian Holland lost interest in the Comets for a time. Romalis went through a similar period in the early 1990s, when his attention shifted to the Wichita Thunder hockey team. But in 2006, Barry Wallace died of cancer at the age of 47. The former Queens Park Ranger had played for several MISL teams, but spent most of his time with the Wichita Wings and then the Comets before settling in the Kansas City area after his retirement.
“I was sad to hear he had passed on. It rekindled the memories of that period, which I hadn’t thought of for a while,” Holland said.
His own happy memories inspired him to share photos and history about the Comets. Another Facebook page he followed debuted a “This Day in History” page, convincing him that his favorite MISL team deserved the same. Thus, the “Hot Winter Nights” Facebook page was born.
“Before the stuff became available on the internet, I spent many, many hours at the KC library going over microfilm from the ‘80s. I spent hours going through the games and filled out the score sheets for the games I didn’t go to; and the road games,” Holland said
Every day of the year, Holland posts about that day’s historical Comets happenings. Eventually, he expanded the posts to include the NPSL’s KC Attack and the Kansas City Spurs of the old NASL.
“I have a file for each day,” Holland said.
Originally, he thought he’d only do it for one year. But he keeps it going, always looking for new information and updates to share for the new year. In the summer, he would often struggle to find events in the winter-centric sport of indoor soccer. But he can always find a transaction or something tangential to the Comets to post.
Holland is a certified PUNISHer representing the Comets. Someone’s gotta do it.
For Rich Paschette, a minimum-wage gopher job with the New York Arrows didn’t directly translate into something bigger and more important. But it did whet his appetite for doing his part to promote the game of indoor soccer.
For a time, he wrote for a national soccer supporter’s newsletter. In 1990, he decided to create his own: The Great Indoors. Born in the pre-internet MISL era, his monthly newsletter provided a lifeline to indoor fans desperate for news about the state of the sport around the country. When the MISL died in 1992, The Great Indoors continued to provide coverage on the World Indoor Soccer League (WISL), Continental Indoor Soccer League (CISL), and the long-running NPSL. Paschette ran the publication for 15 years.
“It didn’t have a hell of a lot of subscribers; maybe 200-300. I don’t think I lost any money. You write it from the heart,” Paschette said.
But Paschette’s biggest contribution to preserving the history of the MISL is something most rare: a book about the league. Hot Winter Nights (Brian Holland liked the title so much he asked Rich if he could use it for his Facebook page!) is a shadow of a ghost hidden in the darkness. It is impossible to find. Personally, I know of one copy. Not surprisingly, it’s owned by fellow PUNISHer Mike Romalis. I have seen it and touched it, but don’t possess my own.
Perhaps this is fitting. A book about a forgotten league has been forgotten. But inside its pages are statistics that might not be found anywhere else. The MISL-era occurred entirely before the internet became widely available. Many of the statistics have been lost to the sands of time. They exist here and there, scattered in lost regions of the internet, in newspaper archives, and microfilm in libraries around the country. But Paschette’s book contains much of it.
“Half of the book is schedules and results. A quarter of it was stories about the games. The other quarter was reflections and interviews,” Paschette said.
If you find it, hidden on eBay amid several identically named titles in the romantic fiction genre, let me know. For my money, a book about the MISL is more romantic than any story featuring a shirtless guy and a lonely, but beautiful single mother with a heart of gold.
In the year 2000, the Dallas Sidekicks, now existing in a lesser league, launched their first website. The “History” link said: “Coming Soon.” A year later, upon the relaunch of the website, the “History” link said, “Coming Soon.”
“At which point, I said, ‘To Hell with this, I’ll do it myself.’ I went down to the public library and spent any number of quarters on microfilm printing. I started going through the Dallas Morning News, the late Dallas Times Herald, and the Ft. Worth Star Telegram, pulling every box score I could find and building a website of the team’s history. I relied on a visual program called Dreamweaver to help me build the website,” Alan Balthrop said.
The Sidekicks took no offense to Balthrop taking on this task. In fact, soon after, the “History” link on their official page pointed to Balthrop’s own Sidekick’s history website. They even asked him to help edit the team media guide. Finally, they invited him to become the team’s unpaid broadcast statistician.
“That’s when I really started being the historian, rather than just a fan,” Balthrop said.
In 2004, the Sidekicks ceased operations. But Balthrop didn’t stop his work. A few years later, when Reunion Arena was scheduled to be torn down, Balthrop flew into action. He worried that an important piece of Sidekicks history might be sitting in storage at the arena: the championship banners.
“I got permission from the Mavericks to go and look in the storage locker where I knew they’d be. Sure enough, these giant championship banners were still sitting there five years [after the team folded]. To my great surprise, so was every statistic, every box of media guides, every videotape, and the official scrapbooks from the first four years of the franchise. Nobody bothered to clean out the office,” Balthrop said.
He rented a truck and carted it all off to a rented storage space. Then, Balthrop began to methodically sort through 20 years of data.
“I wanted to document the history of the team. I wanted indoor soccer to be treated as important as the NFL or NBA was. The only way I could do that in my small way was to keep as many of the records as I could,” Balthrop said.
A common thread appears.
“I honestly thought, ‘Oh my God, we’ll be forgotten. If I don’t do this, nobody will,’” said Alan Balthrop.
Rich Paschette keeps information flowing through The Great Indoors. Mike Romalis fears the history of the Wichita Wings will die, so he starts a website. The death of a former player jolts Brian Holland enough that he embarks on a journey to document a day-by-day history of the Kansas City Comets.
But why do they feel the need to do this? What do they gain from becoming the annalists of an old sports league?
“It’s a great way to meet girls in a bar,” Paschette jokes.
Balthrop has the best explanation.
“I think it is because you fall in love with the sport and you recognize that not only is it something precious to you, it is NOT precious to the media at large. Baseball is not a sport; it’s a religion. There are thousands of baseball historians. There are hundreds of basketball historians. The entire history of professional hockey exists somewhere, and is being guarded by lots of Canadians. But there are only a handful of indoor soccer people. It makes us want to make certain this is never forgotten,” Balthrop explains.
And thanks to the PUNISHers, it won’t be. At least not while they still breathe.
Stay tuned to more exciting MISL history, coming next week.
I have a copy of Hot Winter Nights. It is invaluable for a video project I am working on.