Rock 'n' Roll Soccer by Ian Plenderleith

Author:Ian Plenderleith
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466884007
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

North of Paradise Valley

From a writer’s point of view, naming the NASL’s team in Las Vegas the Quicksilvers seems almost too good to be true. The unpredictable, mercurial league that had tried its hand at steady growth now found itself eager to grab every opportunity to expand while the going was hot. In the early 1970s, the NASL was like a steady married man who’d settled down with a frumpy but reliable girl following a turbulent youth filled with heady heartbreak. Then, all of a sudden, the steady married man went on a trip to, let’s say, Vegas, and was reminded of how exciting things used to be. The married man forgot about all the accumulated stability he had worked so hard to build back in his home town, and found himself gambling inadvisable sums in a casino, while drinking reckless amounts of alcohol. There were strippers sitting on his lap, and all kinds of temptations and distractions that came with the strippers. Sure, it was just a brief fling, and all details would stay within Vegas, but once Mr. Steady had renewed his taste for the high life, would the lapse into decadence become a pattern that would usher in eventual divorce and ruination?

Like Hawaii, the Las Vegas Quicksilvers didn’t have a bad team—the by-now-standard mixture of Brits, Germans, Yugoslavs and statutory North Americans. They also had Eusebio, in his final season in the top flight, one year after winning the NASL title with Toronto, although his fragile knees rendered him even less mobile than the year before. To try and get the new franchises off to a running start, early games against the Cosmos were scheduled. As we have seen, Hawaii’s second home game was to host New York, but Las Vegas were granted the opener. It was Pelé and Eusebio’s final face-off, and Vegas goalkeeper Alan Mayer recalls it well.

Mayer had been the team’s goalkeeper at its previous home in San Diego, having moved there with the whole franchise from Baltimore, and was becoming used to the fits and starts of a career in the League. He found out the team was moving to Vegas while he was on tour with the US national team in South America, after calling home to speak to his wife. “She said, ‘Oh my gosh, the team was just sold to Las Vegas and we have to move out there, and we have to move right away.’ I was on a six-week sojourn with the national team, and she had to pack everything up and move us to a new apartment, so when I came back I went to Las Vegas. The other players on the US team were just like, ‘Well, that’s the way it is,’ but you could tell it got them thinking about what their team was doing. I’m sure they were thinking, I hope my club’s solid. No one came up and said they were sorry to hear I was going to Vegas, because it was starting to become part of the game.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.