Kick Off

About anything he took pleasure in--a morning of surprise sunshine, a line-drive double off the wall at Yankee Stadium, a dime found in the gutter-- my grandfather always said the same thing: "How do you like that?" He said it slowly, with only the hint of a grin and a slight harrumph, and it always meant that he loved something and wanted me to love it, too.It's what he always said of New York. He lived in Flatbush, and I used to visit him there each summer. I'd fly in from Minneapolis, where I lived, TWA wings or a red-and-white striped Delta button pinned to my shirt and a yellow vinyl valise swinging behind me. On the ride in from the airport in his silver Oldsmobile, he'd proudly point out the shining World Trade towers and the remnants of the 1964 World's Fair. "How do you like that?" he'd say. For the two decades I knew him, this was my grandfather's mantra, his profession of pleasure in New York's wonders and delights. My grandfather took particular pride in the Yankees teams of those years. They were successful, reaching the World Series four times from 1976 to 1981 (and winning it in 1977 and 1978), and full of character--who wouldn't love (or hate) Reggie Jackson, Catfish Hunter, Thurman Munson, Sparky Lyle, Goose Gossage, and Willie Randolph? But I could only feign interest; much as I followed baseball, soccer was becoming my game. Those were the years of the North American Soccer League (nasl), and there was a team in my hometown: the Minnesota Kicks. They lasted only from 1976 until 1981, but, in those six seasons, the Kicks finished first in their division four times and second the other two, and they drew crowds of more than 30,000 fans to the old Metropolitan Stadium just outside Minneapolis (which was later razed to become the site of the Mall of America). I was one of them. The Kicks were absurdly appealing to an eight-year-old. They wore bright orange and light blue jerseys, their emblem was a freckle-faced boy with an orange Afro, and the team featured unfamiliar faces and accents: There was Alan Willey, an undistinguished English striker with Middlesbrough but a prolific goal-scorer in the nasl; Tino Lettieri, a squat Italian goalkeeper who kept a stuffed toy parrot in the netting behind him during games; and, best of all, Ace Ntsoelengoe, a lanky black South African midfielder. Ace was the Magic Johnson of the nasl, a gifted playmaker with a killer shot and a wide smile. He scored 87 goals in just 244 games--an extraordinary number for a midfielder-- and tallied another 82 assists. I may have been his biggest fan. Were he from any other country, Ace would have been an international star-- but because South Africa was banned from participating in international games as a sanction against apartheid, he never had the chance. Minneapolis in the 1970s, however cosmopolitan, felt removed from the rest of the world to me, and I confess I had no clue why a black South African would be playing so far from home. But the Kicks nevertheless kindled in me a curiosity about foreign countries and lives. Before long, I was watching the weekly European soccer match broadcast on UHF, as much for the sight of grainy Germans and Italians with bad haircuts and short-shorts kicking the nearly invisible ball as for the strange ads for obscure products (Pirelli? Die Zeit?). I loved it all, the way others loved short-wave radio: Hello, world! My grandfather took my sporting treason in stride. One summer, he said, "There's a soccer team here in the city, you know. A good one. The Cosmos. Best in the league." He was right. Backed by Steve Ross and Warner Communications, the Cosmos were the richest and glitziest team imaginable. They had signed the captain of West Germany's 1974 World Cup winning squad, Franz Beckenbauer; the Italian striker Giorgio Chinaglia; and, most famously, the great Pele himself-- and were soon drawing enormous crowds to Giants Stadium. Matching the Yankees trophy for trophy, they won the nasl championship in 1977 and 1978--and in 1980 and 1982, too. As Gavin Newsham recounts in Once in a Lifetime: The Incredible Story of the New York Cosmos, Warner got Mick Jagger, Barbra Streisand, and other stars to show up at the games, and he enlisted Henry Kissinger's help in bringing Pele to the team. But I never changed my allegiance, and I cheered when Ace and the Kicks whipped the Cosmos 9-2 in a 1978 playoff game. Eventually, the Cosmos flamed out as brightly as they'd come in. Pele retired, the money dried up as Warner's other investments (Atari in particular) went sour, and new promotions failed to entice new fans. Meanwhile, TV ratings for nasl games plummeted, and many of its clubs went broke. The league finally folded in 1985. Today's American professional league, Major League Soccer (MLS), has had less flash but more lasting success. Its twelve teams are solvent, and attendance is robust--at more than 15,000 per game throughout the league. Soccer's popularity continues to rise; one can find a wider selection of cleats for soccer than for baseball at some sporting-goods stores. The MLS has also limited the number of international players each team can include on its roster, thereby giving American players the chance to compete and improve--and American fans the chance to cheer on homegrown talent. I'm all for that. But I miss those '70s summer days, watching players from England, Italy, and South Africa right there on the field in Minneapolis and wondering what the countries they'd left behind were like. (Eventually, I moved to London and began to find out.) Most of all, I miss Ace Ntsoelengoe. After returning to South Africa in the '80s, he became coach of a leading youth team, was inducted into the U.S. National Soccer Hall of Fame in 2003, and helped South Africa win the right to host the 2010 World Cup. But he died last month, at just 50 years old, the victim of an apparent heart attack in Johannesburg. I'm pretty sure my grandfather never saw him play. But I know exactly what he'd have said if he had.

By Matt Weiland; Matt Weiland is deputy editor of Granta and co-editor, with Sean Wilsey, of The Thinking Fan's Guide to the World Cup.