Backpass: Story Time
The 1994 World Cup. A punch in the face. And a manager with a wandering eye for well-endowed bar maids. It's Soccer Rabbi story time.
Things have happened this week. Rapids 2 put the senior team on and they handled RSL2, 3-1. MLS signed a big contract with Apple Plus for the next 10 years to broadcast their games. This is good for the league because they’ll be earning 2.5 times what they used to get in tv income. This is good for Colorado Rapids fans that live in New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, Idaho, Wyoming, Nebraska, and Kansas because the new deal eliminates all blackouts - no more Altitude TV, which was available only with a fairly expensive DirecTV package.
But none of that is really compelling enough material to make a 1,000 article. Most soccer writers are taking this time to focus on the USMNT or on the TV package, but not me. I thought I tell some stories.
Two Heaping Scoopfuls of Mainz
Back in 2016, Mainz 05, a Bundesliga team that is forever fending off the drop into the 2nd division in Germany, took a pre-season trip to Colorado. What a great idea! They could open up a new fan base, train at altitude, spread the gospel of global soccer, and give their players a little sightseeing. More European teams should visit Colorado, I think. Mainz came to Colorado Springs and played a match against the Switchbacks. Our Rapids loaned some players down just to make it a fair fight, but it didn’t help much. I think it ended 7-0 for the Mainzers.
The game was fine. Afterwards, the players lined up at tables on the pitch and signed all the merch the fans could throw at them. I still have a scarf signed by the whole team.
That’s not the story. The story is: at halftime I went onto the concourse to buy nachos and a beer, and as I was walking around, I passed by a pop up beer stand operated by Tilted Kilt. Tilted Kilt is, apparently, an off-brand Hooters knockoff - think McDonalds and McDowells. It is entirely possible that this is a well known company and I am simply demonstrating my elite cloistered ignorance of chain bars that draw customers in for their watered down drinks and cookie-cutter customer experience by showcasing attractive women in alluring outfits. Nevertheless I admit - I get the appeal.
Anyhow. There at the Tilted Kilt stand was none other than Mainz manager Martin Schmidt, at halftime of a match he was in the middle of managing.1 This I found surprising. Schmidt’s appointment to Mainz was a huge opportunity for him. Preceding him at Mainz in the not-so-distant-past was the gegenpress genius himself, Jürgen Klopp (now at Liverpool) and Thomas Tuchel, former boss of Borussia Dortmund, PSG, and Chelsea. For the right manager making the right moves, Mainz could be a springboard to great things. And yeah, maybe it was just an exhibition match. But still, I was a bit surprised that the manager would skip the halftime tactics talk to go see if he could sneak a pint.
Schmidt stood there, chatting up two very attractive women - a medium height brunette, and a 6 foot 2 inch Black woman who was, shall we say, exceedingly shapely and very amply endowed.
I got my nachos and returned to my seat. A few minutes later, before the second half kicked off, Schmidt had returned to the touchline. And I watched him have a very excited conversation with an assistant coach in which he pantomimed a very tall person, followed by him demonstrating with his hands either the purchase of two large cassava melons which he carried upon his upper torso, or the previously mentioned impressive breast size of our friend, the Tilted Kilt concessions employee.
Listen, who am I to judge? But I did have questions about how focused and serious Mainz’ manager could be on developing a world class football club if he was distracted at half time by an impressive set of boobs. I became a Mainz fan that day, but not a Schmidt fan. Mainz went on to a bottom-table-but-not-relegation season for 2016-2017. Schmidt was fired. He did the next year at Wolfsburg - they finished bottom of the table. He was fired a few weeks before the end, and Wolfsburg staved off relegation with a playoff win. In 2018-19, he managed Augsburg … to the bottom of the table, and was fired in March. Mainz have struggled but stayed in the top flight since 2016. Their new sporting director… is Martin Schmidt.
Marty. Bubbeleh. My career advice is this: focus more on progressive passing and creating effective drills to hold a late lead. Focus less on comely lasses of impressive physical dimensions.
‘I’m Roger Milla’
The next soccer story I have to tell you isn’t nearly as prurient. Also, it’s the oldest soccer story I have.2
It’s June, 1994, and I had just graduated high school. My mom had taken Lamaze classes - this was the 1976 version of what today we simply call ‘childbirth classes’- with a bunch of other ladies. After they all had kids, they started a mom’s group which effectively stayed together forever. My mom still sees some of them socially now, 45 years later.
For our collective high school graduation celebrations, all the families went away to a beach resort in Oxnard - just up the coast near Malibu. Sun, sand, tennis, omelets. There are two enduring memories I have from that trip. The first is that at some point, all the kids were huddled around a tv for several hours, watching OJ Simpson and Al Cowlings in a white Ford Bronco in the world’s lamest police chase. I went to the pool, I came back, they were watching OJ. I went for a bike ride, I came back – still, watching OJ.
The second memory was one morning, I came down to breakfast, and as I passed through the lobby, a huge group of very fit African fellows was walking through. I noticed a flag on a duffel bag and approached one of them and said ‘Excuse me, but is it possible that you are the national team of Cameroon?’ The man smiled and said, ‘Yes.’
They told me they were training near by and this was their hotel. Which was an amazing, incredible coincidence, because 1) I had tickets to see Cameroon take on Sweden at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena just a few days later, and 2) I happened to have purchased a program to the World Cup the week before. I ran back to my room as fast as I could, grabbed the program and caught the players, in the lobby, getting ready to take the bus off to training.
I approached the first man I saw - an older man, who I thought might be a coach. I stopped and asked if, perhaps, he could point me to Roger Milla, the star of the team, who at the age of 38 scored four goals for Cameroon at the 1990 World Cup in Italy. The man looked at me and grinned.
‘I’m Roger Milla.’ And as I told him I’d be cheering for him from the stands, he politely signed my program.
Soccer Justice
Those of you that know me - through my being a rabbi, or through my writing or my podcasting - know that I am a non-violent person. In general, the moral path is almost always one in which problems are solved with words and not fists, and I attempt to glorify the right-thinking, non-violent approach. In general.
However, there are exceptions.
Way back in 2010, when I was a teacher at a Jewish high school in San Francisco, I was a fervent supporter of all of our sports teams, including the soccer team. I went to an Episcopal school growing up, and Bishop Garver came to everything - boys cross country, girls volleyball, the chess club, you name it, and thus I have always sought to emulate that when I was a day school rabbi. So in 2010 I went out to all the home games for our boys soccer team.
It was a rough year. The team had maybe one or two good players, but they either struggled a little and lost 2-0, or struggled a lot and lost 10-0. The season was a suffer-fest. By the end of the season, they were all frustrated and ready for it all to end. However, they did have one last game, against a school down the peninsula. That school was also winless. After the game, I got a full report from some of the players, and the coach.
The game was scrappy, and physical, and hard fought. What both teams lacked in technical ability, they made up for in aggressiveness. Lotta pushing and shoving, and cheap shot-ing. And a lot of trash talking. One player, one of our bigger and more athletic guys, was giving and getting it all game from some guy, and the ref was just letting it go. By the second half, it was all elbow jabs and shin kicking. My high school scored late, and then endured the pressure to hang on to a 1-0 win. As the game was concluding, our two guys were getting into again with some pushing and shoving. The opposing player said to our player “They should have put you all in the ovens,” an obvious and utterly disgusting reference to the Holocaust.
The kid from my high school punched him in the face. Which, you probably would imagine, earned him a red card.
After the match, our coach informed the opposing coach, the referee, the peninsula high school, and the league about the hate speech incident. The school ultimately suspended the player, asked him to write a written apology, and take some sort of cultural sensitivity training. In addition, he was suspended for the first three games of the following season.
For throwing a punch, our player was suspended from the playoffs and for the first game of the upcoming season by the league.
Reader, our team didn’t make the playoffs, and the kid was a graduating senior.
Violence is never the best solution. But occasionally, we as a society recognize that if you’re going to be racist or antisemitic and you get punched in the face, well, you really had it coming.
Granted, it was already like 5-0 at this point. But still.
Unless you count the story of how I played little tikes soccer for literally one day, but the coach made me cry and I quit. I was only 4, so please don’t hold that against me.
