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World Cup Nostalgia: Ultimately, it was televised

World Cup Nostalgia: Ultimately, it was televised

by Hal Phillips 0 Comments

The inimitable Archie Gemmel, on the rampage against Holland in 1978.

Like the Olympic Games, the World Cup comes round but once every four years. Unlike the modern Olympiad, the World Cup has only recently attracted the exhaustive attention of television programmers, a fact driven home to me by my friend and colleague, Dieter Schmidt, in his debut column at halphillips.net. There was indeed no international soccer on U.S. television in the early 1970s (before Dee got a bit too stoned and spent the next 32 years frozen in a northern Manitoba trash heap). Indeed, the World Cup final — the most watched sporting event the world over — was not televised live in America until 1982, and each game of the tournament was not available on TV until ESPN undertook the task for the 1994 games, staged here in the U.S.

The United States’ thrilling last-minute victory over Algeria on Wednesday was testament to the overwhelming power of the shared televised sports experience. My fellow podcaster Tom Wadlington and I watched at DiMillo’s Bayside, a nice little sports bar in Portland, Maine. It’s not every day that two strangers leap into my arms while screaming with unbridled joy, as happened when Donovan buried the winner. It’s the latest in a series of World Cup TV Memories that I will take with me always.

I have fairly visual, broadcast-enabled memories of each World Cup starting with 1974, some more vivid and complete than others. Catching a World Cup match pre-1994, even a final, took some real doing, some planning. Here’s the first in a two-part rundown of how I managed it.

1974: West Germany

I don’t know who the chick is, but that’s Hubie, at right, just as he looked in the 1970s.

I grew up playing for the Wellesley United Soccer Club in suburban Boston, and club wide for many years our uniforms were, for reasons unknown to me, a fairly exact copy of the German national kit at that time: white socks, black shorts, white shirt with black piping. So, we had a kinship with the Franz Beckenbauer, Paul Breitner, Gerd Muller teams of that period. One of my very first coaches, in fact, Mr. Krause, was a German national whose son, Dirk, would fling himself about the goalmouth during practice making saves and yelling “Sepp!”, in honor of the Mannschaft’s imperious, talented keeper, Sepp Maier. Even so, while I knew the Germans had won the 1974 World Cup, I didn’t see the final until 1977, when I attended the Puma All-Star Soccer Camp — run by another Teutonic type, one Hubert Vogelsinger, an Austrian national who, rumor had it, had been banned from his native soccer community (and emigrated to San Diego) after head-butting a referee during a match in Vienna. In any case, Hubie showed films every night after running us ragged all day long. He was understandably Germanophilic and it was there, in the Taft School cafeteria, in Watertown, Conn., seated beside my Wellesley roommate Mike Mooradian, that I finally saw the 1974 final, in its entirety: Holland with its kick-ass Orange uniforms; both teams with their amazingly long hair and mustaches; Holland’s 15 consecutive passes to start the game, culminating in a penalty and converted spot kick by Johann Cruyff to put the Dutch ahead 1-0 — before the Germans had even touched the ball (!); Breitner’s PK to tie the game; Bertie Vogts dogging a sub-par Cruyff the rest of the game; and the Germans’ ultimate 2-1 triumph, with Franz raising the trophy overhead two-handed. There was a great deal of slow-motion included in the game film, an effective motif for the game action but also for visceral reaction shots of these impossibly hirsute Germans, who very much looked the part of marauding Visigoths. Even three years late, it was impossibly exotic and heroic.

1978: Argentina

Just a year later, I returned to Hubie’s camp and, if I’m not mistaken, we saw the ’74 final again one night. But we also saw a highlight reel of the just-completed World Cup in Argentina. This made less of a lasting impression, maybe because we only saw snippets from the tournament. I remember Mario Kempes on a mazy run and scoring a goal in extra time. Was it the second goal in the 3-1 Argentina victory, or the third? Who knows? … I recall a hail of goals from Argentina in a 6-0 drubbing of Peru. Only much later did I learn that this was a match Peru and its Argentina-born keeper were accused of throwing, to put the host country in the final at Brazil’s expense (back then, teams qualified for the final directly from group play; confounding)… And then there is Archie Gemmel, the Scot who scored one of the great goals in British football history vs. the Dutch in some group game. Scotland won the game but didn’t advance out of the group, while Holland went to the final. Still, Gemmel’s goal was so sublime, it’s the highlight from 1978 I remember best — maybe because it remains so talked about and, thanks to the Internet, ubiquitous. Check it out on youtube. You won’t be sorry.

1982: Spain

This was a big deal, seeing the game live. I watched it with my high school girlfriend, Renée, at her parents’ house. There were breaks for advertisements, but I don’t recall that being controversial at the time. Not to me. I was American. I couldn’t yet conceive of a sporting event that didn’t accommodate such interruptions.

1986: Mexico

I watched this game at my house in Wellesley, and I have to admit that I don’t recall anything about the game or the event that was particularly memorable. Just graduated from college and spending the requisite jobless downtime at my parent’s place, no doubt I was stoned at the time.

1990: Italy

A few years ago, my friend Dave called and asked me a cryptic question.

“Remember that time I came over to your house in Watertown and we watched that World Cup game?”

Um, yeah…

“Well, what day was that?”

What do you mean, ‘what day’? It was June 1990; I don’t know the exact day…

“Oh. Okay…”

Dave, why do you want to know this?

“Well, we ordered cheeseburger subs from that place, and I’ve just realized that was the last time I ate meat.”

Well, thanks to the Internet, now it can be told. Dave last ate meat on June 25, 1990, the same day Romania eliminated Ireland on penalty kicks in the Round of 16. I remember quite a bit from that day, and that tournament. Not every group game was televised, on ESPN, but every knockout game was. For a soccer nut who was getting only the semi-finals and finals up to that point, this was Nirvana. At the time, I was 26 and working as city editor at a daily newspaper, which meant I didn’t go to work until 5 p.m. As Italy was 6 hours ahead I could get up and watch World Cup matches all day long before heading to the newsroom. Fabulous.

One more delicious note from 1990: “That place” was The International, a fabulous pizza and sub shop that delivered — and delivered to my address with great frequency. That same day that Dave at his parting cheeseburger sub, I was in the shower and he was in the kitchen doing something when the delivery guy, Ahmed, walked in without ringing the doorbell, as was his custom. I was a regular customer; we had an understanding. With Dave looking on, Ahmed proceeds to set the food on coffee table, sit himself down in front of the television set and take a hit off the bong that was a fixture on said coffee table in that apartment. Dave, who knew nothing of our understanding, was understandably taken aback and hid in the kitchen until I emerged from the bathroom. I’ve always loved that memory, and was only too happy to add the cheeseburger sub aspect.

A Tale of Two Soccer Melting Pots

by Hal Phillips 0 Comments

 

By Dee Schmidt

One of the things you need to know about me is that while I’m counter-cultural and an American through and through (you can be both, my brothers and sisters), my paternal ancestry is seriously Teutonic. Dig: My dad was Austrian and because the heyday of Austrian football came in the 1930s — bet you didn’t know Das Team finished 4th at the 1934 World Cup, and runners-up at the ’36 Olympics — his loyalties and interest (and mine, by extension) naturally shift to the Germans, who, even critics will allow, are totally outta sight when trophies are at stake. The finest tournament performers in the history of world football, I reckon.

The other thing you need to know about me, if you don’t already, is that my soccer experience was interrupted in 1973 by the 32 years I spent in a weed- and ice-induced state of suspended animation (see details here: The Story of Dee).

So it’s with great interest that I follow both the American and German teams at the World Cup now underway in South Africa — not just because I have national rooting interests, but because the make-up of these teams today is nothing as I or any other self-respecting football-freak would have expected them to be in the early 1970s.

I watched the Germans roast and pluck the Australians on Sunday, 4-0, and the result wasn’t nearly so mind-blowing as the German roster: Two Polish-born goal scorers (Miroslav Klose and Lukas Podolski), backed by a withdrawn striker of clear Turkish origin (Mesut Özil) and a defensive midfielder named Sami Khedira, who was born in Stuttgart to a father from Tunisia. The two strikers who came on? Why, naturally it was a fellow named Mario Gomez (father: a Spaniard) and Cacau, who did what Brazilo-Germans are supposed to do: score on his first-ever World Cup touch.

In my day, Die Mannschaft was the whitest, most purely German thing in the country. I’m not about to use the word “Aryan” to describe it, but the national team was a clear reflection of a very white, quite homogenous country. This has changed, and viva la difference, to quote a famous Alsatian (!).

Team USA also features a diverse juxtaposition of flavors, colors and textures. But I have to say, 36 years ago it was an accepted fact that, eventually, the country’s Latin flavor would come to dominate the game here in America. I’m from San Diego (Encinitas, to be exact; my colleague and blood brother Hal Phillips likes to call me “Encinitas Man”, after some movie about a once-frozen cave man) and we could see it happening even in the early 1970s.

So, I’ve gotta ask, what happened?
I look at this team, and though I marvel at its overall skill and athleticism (I really do; the progress we’ve made as a soccer nation makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck), I’m frankly perplexed by how few Latin players are in the team and how Northern European the American style of play remains.

In my day, American soccer was very direct, very straight-ahead, very aerial. And this could be credibly explained by the fact that most of the foreigners coaching American kids back then were British or German. But it would appear that not much has changed. The American style remains Northern European. One look at either of the Mexico-USA World Cup qualifiers shows how much the Mexicans want to hold the ball, and how quickly the Americans want to get rid of it, up the field, in the air.

More pointedly, where are the Mexican-Americans? If the bleats of politicians in Arizona are to be given any credence, should the U.S. roster not be peppered with Latino kids who grew up playing in California, Arizona and Texas?

Carlos Bocanegra from Upland, California, just north of L.A.? Check.

Herculez Gomez? No doubt.

Jose Francisco Torres? Yeah, I think so.

Ricardo Clark? Nope. His dad’s from Trinidad.

Benny Feilhaber? Another Brazilo-German.

Jozy Altidore? Of Haitian descent.

Clint Dempsey? He’s from Nagadoches, Texas, but he ain’t Latin and neither is his style of play.

I’m not saying the USMT isn’t a melting pot. It is.

And I’m not saying that there should be some sort of Latin quota.

It merely strikes me as odd that with so many Mexican-Americans in America, our national team program has not tapped this rich vein of talent more markedly. We used to say that when it does, American soccer will develop a unique hybrid style that is not just its very own, but very difficult to beat. But if it hasn’t happened by now, one wonders when and whether it will.

The Golf Tee & Dentistry: Now it can be told
The Aero-Tee: shaped like a giant, inverted, tri-cuspid fang.

The Golf Tee & Dentistry: Now it can be told

by Hal Phillips 0 Comments

Some golfers look at things the way they are and ask “Why?” Dr. Venanzio Cardarelli dreams of things that never were and asks, “Could you open a little wider please?”

Cardarelli, a practicing dentist who holds some 20 different U.S. patents, is the D.M.D. behind the Aero-Tee, a three-pronged, polycarbonate, cuspid-shaped ball platform that he hopes will revolutionize the golf tee genre. It’s a pretty neat little gizmo and a real step forward, if all the independent testing is on the level (see results at www.aero-tee.com). The product’s tri-fluted, helical support structure is designed to reduce resistance by all but eliminating surface-area contact with the golf ball. According to Cardarelli, 55, this scheme also increases the amount of air accelerating all around the ball — including beneath it.

While the new Aero-Tee departs quite radically from traditional golf tee architecture, its designer does not. In fact Cardarelli continues a long, distinguished and quite curious tradition of dentist-assisted golf tee design innovation. To wit, the wooden golf tee was invented by a Boston dentist, Dr. George Franklin Grant, in 1899, and the tee design most commonly utilized today was patented in 1924, by Dr. William Lowell — a New Jersey-based dentist.

Forget for a moment that Cardarelli’s Aero-Tee, if viewed upside down, bears vague resemblance to a mighty tri-cuspid fang, roots and all.

What is it about the practice of dental arts that spurs an interest, much less sustained structural innovation, in golf tees?

The Aero-Tee: shaped like a giant, inverted, tri-cuspid fang.

“Maybe Grant and Lowell were talking to me from the grave,” laughs Cardarelli, who lives in Plymouth, Mass., and practices four days a week in nearby Braintree. “Honestly, I didn’t even know these guys existed until after I came up with the Aero-Tee. I was just addressing the shortcomings of conventional tees in my basement and came up with this model. Why dentists and golf tees? That’s a tough question. I was just trying to fill a need.”

No pun intended?

“That’s right!”

Cardarelli’s enthusiasm for the Aero-Tee is evident the moment he launches into his rapid-fire, heart-felt spiels on the quest for acceptable tee stability and, of course, polycarbonates strong enough to avoid undue breakage. Yet prior to our conversation, he appears not to have considered why dentists have historically formed the leading edge of golf tee technology. “It’s a very interesting question,” muses the good doctor, slowing down to ponder the matter. “Maybe we look at things with a finer-tooth comb than most people. We do deal with very small increments of measurement all day long, fractions of millimeters. We need to visualize and restore at these levels of fineness and quality — golf tees are created on this sort of scale.”

The morning after we spoke on the phone, Dr. Cardarelli, whose friends call him Vinnie, sent me an email. Evidently our conversation had stuck in his craw. “I am still thinking about your question, about the relationship of dentists and golf tees. Maybe the answer will come from the grave,” he wrote, before adding something he’d neglected to mention the day before: the vice president of Aero-Tee is Dr. Joseph Santelli, a close friend and fellow dentist (D.D.S., actually).

Cardarelli is optimistic about the Aero-Tee’s business prospects, though his product has been on the market a relatively short time [it debuted in early 2004] and there is significant competition. PrideSports of Burnham, Maine, produces some 85 percent of the world’s wooden tees, and golfers aren’t exactly massing in the streets and turning over cars to protest a retrograde state of the art. Most golfers believe low-tech wooden tees, despite their “resistance”, do a creditable job — and most golf courses give them away in pro shops.

That said, Pride has ventured into the high-tech, alternative tee market with its PTS Off-Set model whose design recalls a waitress holding a tray over her head. One of its three prongs is shorter than the others. According to the web literature, “for best results, aim short prong at target”.

The Tomahawx model claimed to reduce resistance by…

A product once marketed under the name Tomahawx went the resistance-free route by concentrating on the other end of the tee — the pointed end that goes sub terra. This knife-shaped point allowed the tee to pivot forward, thus reducing resistance upon driver impact.

… tipping over upon impact — without breaking.

Then there’s the Brush-T (www.brusht.com), another alternative tee product whose flat, bristle-brush platform also claims to reduce resistance and accelerate air flow beneath the golf ball. Sort of ironic that after all those years in the basement — after all those years cajoling his patients — Dr. Cardarelli never saw the golf application of brushes. “I’ve told my wife: I’m shocked that I didn’t come up with that as an alternate design,” he says somewhat ruefully. “I guess what’s really amazing is the person who invented it wasn’t a dentist.”

Indeed, the Brush-T was conceived by Jason Crouse, a South African industrial product engineer. In other words, not a dentist. However, the president of Brush-T North America, Paul Krok, while not a dentist, just happens to be president of another company, Oralgiene USA, Inc., which distributes electric toothbrushes for children. Perhaps for this reason, Cardarelli is gracious in discussing his competitor.

Or perhaps he’s just wary of being pegged as the only dentist on earth against brushing.

Three-wheeling the Vietnamese Highlands

Three-wheeling the Vietnamese Highlands

by Hal Phillips 0 Comments

We had only been a day in Phan Thiet and, frankly, I’d have rather stayed another two. The links at Ocean Dunes Golf Club, part of the seaside Novotel Phan Thiet Resort, were superb (good enough to warrant another go-round, or two) and only a fool would have begged off one fully flaked-out day on the hotel’s long, quiet stretch of beach.

But the itinerary can be a stern taskmaster, so I kept my peace and prepared for our scheduled departure. Then, on the way to breakfast, I saw them — those motorcycles and their attendant sidecars, all neatly lined up in front of the hotel — and my ambivalence melted away. No one in his or her right mind could resist the sheer romance of 200 kilometers, by sidecar, from this tropical perch on the South China Sea to the mountain retreat of Dalat. I was glad to see that my driver, Gilles Poggi, sported a kroma, that distinctive, all-purpose Cambodian scarf. I wanted one, too. I was also hoping we could line up behind our respective machines and, at the sound of a gun, begin the journey rally style.

The reality proves more staid. The sun now peeking over the hotel façade, we slather on the sunscreen, affix our sunglasses, helmets and hats, and wait for the last of our group to return from the bathroom. Hardly the stuff of Paris to Dakar, though our three-wheelers do turn over, en masse, with a very satisfying rumble, and we pull out in precise formation, one after another, like starlettes from a 1930s-era musical follies into the pool.

Poggi, a Corsican who wears his kroma with all the Gallic élan one might expect, is a hotelier whose next project is poised to open just south of here in Ho Tram. These sidecars and their motorized escorts are his personal obsession, and he leads these trips — along with his friends in Team Camel, their touring club — as a one-of-a-kind amenity for guests and acquaintances seeking 360-degree tours of the south Vietnamese countryside.

“We started adventuring with sidecars more than 10 years ago, in Hanoi,” Poggi shouts as we travel up the coast, his voice perfectly audible above the 4-stroke din. “I had two friends who had hooked up with these sidecars. One of them invited me to go to Sapa, and I’ve been riding ever since.”

Poggi slows down and stops his narrative for the moment, to avoid a cavernous pothole. We’ve turned away from the water now, the roads becoming more narrow and dodgy with every passing kilometer. My sidecar, of course, is suspended between three points of a triangle: the two wheels of the motorcycle, to my left, and a third wheel to my right. When Poggi dodges a pothole, my carriage often passes directly over the blemish. The passenger sees it coming and instinctively braces for a jolt that never comes. This is a fine metaphor for sidecar travel: All in all, the experience is far more comfortable than one might expect.

“Later, when we moved to Phan Thiet, I decide to get one for myself,” Poggi continues. “I met a policeman who was selling one, and when I asked him how much, he quoted me a price — by kilo! So I bought one, for maybe $200 US. Later, I realized we should have another one, so we could go out as a group. I bought a second, and the policeman told me, ‘I’ll do you a favor. You buy the second and I’ll give you a third for free.’ Today, we have 11.”

The ride of choice for Team Camel is the 650cc Ural M-72, a Russian replica of the vaunted BMW R71, a German-army staple during World War II and the very bike Steve McQueen made famous jumping barbed-wire fencing in “The Great Escape”. Urals became ubiquitous in Vietnam only after 1975, and they remain practical, Poggi says, because the Russians did a good job simplifying the design, parts are readily available, and Vietnamese mechanics know their way around them. They’ve been fixing them for 30 years after all.

In our party there are two quite spiffy, official-lookijng sidecars while the others are decorated more flamboyantly, according to the whims of individual club members. Remi Faubel, Poggi’s friend and a quite celebrated chef here in VN, drives a Ural of canary yellow featuring the snarling countenance of a large cat-like creature. Poggi and I ride a black model named for “The Ramones”. It’s an odd-but-pleasing juxtaposition, wending my way through a Vietnamese tableau with a Corsican guide, seated in a Russian-made BMW knock-off named for the proto-grungers who gave us “Sheena is a Punk Rocker”.

Having passed through a narrow shelf of level ground set aside for rice paddies, we soon set off into the highlands. We have taken the back roads where villages are fewer and further between. The Urals are working hard now, taking on steep inclines and those potholes too large to straddle. The higher we go into the mountains, the less tropical the landscape becomes. But never is it anything less than lush: 10 shades of deep green set against still darker greens.

On a tree-less plateau set high above a reservoir of sparkling blue-green, we stop for lunch which, thanks to Faubel, qualifies as perhaps the most elegant picnic ever devised by man. Holding a glass of sauvignon blanc, Poggi defends his precious Urals from the half-serious charge that they are, well, rather ungainly in appearance. “The sidecar is not a very noble piece of transportation, it’s true. No matter how we package it. But there is nobility in riding a sidecar, there is nobility in experiencing the highlands in this way, there is nobility in enjoying a lunch of foie gras and perhaps a glass of white wine.”

There’s no arguing this.

After lunch we climb ever higher into the highlands on narrow roads of the switchback variety, each one flanked by precipitous drop-offs lurking just beyond the guardrails — when there are guardrails. It’s something of a shock to see that Vietnam can be so legitimately mountainous. Two hours from Dalat we zig-zag our way up through a broad mountain pass and Poggi points to a hillside dotted with cultivated vegetation: “Café,” he shouts, lifting an imaginary demitasse to his lips. It was the first of many plantations we would pass in the next half-hour. Vietnam is now the world’s second largest producer of coffee beans, behind Brazil, thanks to elevations and hillsides like these.

As we draw closer to our destination, the roads get better and the population less sparse. For several hours, we had passed only through dusty, remote villages where locals met our odd caravan first with surprise, then with smiles and waves. In these more populous areas, our standing as curiosities is more modest. Dalat is a resort Mecca that attracts all kinds, foreign and domestic. A light rain begins to fall. We draw less and less attention as pedestrians veil themselves and we find our place amid the wider flow of traffic.

Though we’d been climbing steadily since mid-morning, the final stretch of road is the steepest yet. Halfway up this series of switchbacks, the vegetation turns again; there are pine trees at roadside now and the air sports a startling crispness, an absence of moisture I hadn’t experienced since my plane touched down in Ho Chi Minh City the week before.

The French influence in Vietnam is hard to miss, even 50 years and three wars removed, but because the French founded Dalat (as opposed to merely occupying it), this mile-high city has retained more of its Gallic character than just about any place in Vietnam. With its alpine qualities, planned neighborhoods and ubiquitous French architecture, Dalat could be mistaken for Lausanne, or Grenoble. Our ultimate destination, the Sofitel Dalat Palace hotel — surrounded by topiary gardens and verdant lawns sloping down to sparkling Xuan Huong Lake — does nothing to mitigate this sensation. Opened in 1922 and restored to the last period detail, the Palace and its fine-dining venue, Le Rabelais, evoke a level of colonial grandeur and indolence the equal of anything in Southeast Asia.

And yes, that is a golf course I spy on the hillside across the lake. Not just any course, apparently, but the one laid out in 1932 for Bao Dai, the last emperor of Vietnam. I think I’m going to like it here.

Bedecked in shorts and flip-flops, I surely looked a fright as I hoist my dust-covered frame from the Sheena Express. Had I alighted in this state from a mere automobile, I might have felt out of place. As it was, I ascend the Palace’s ornate, white marble steps in the perfect historical idiom, regretting only that I had failed to pack a tuxedo.