Saturday mornings in the fall, I like to take the No. 1 train up to 218th Street and, believe it or not, find the best sports buy in all of New York. There, for $3, I can sit in the aluminum bleachers at Baker Field and watch the Columbia University men’s soccer team in action.
I think there are few better places to watch any game, anywhere in the United States. From the few rows of bleachers that are the only seats, one can gaze out over the lovely old Inwood section of Manhattan; the cliffs above the Harlem River, the high, blue Henry Hudson Bridge and the spectacular fall foliage along the Palisades.
Under its longtime coach, Dieter Ficken, Columbia was a power in soccer in the late 1970’s and 1980’s. The Lions came within a hairsbreadth of winning the National Collegiate Athletic Association Division I championship in 1983 and although the program has declined slightly since then, Columbia still plays some of the best college soccer in the country.
This has remained a well-kept secret. There are rarely more than a few dozen people in the stands at any given game. I have been going to Baker Field for some 23 years now, and over that time many of the faces have remained the same.
We form a small, dedicated cadre, we soccer fans, and throughout the stands one can catch little, esoteric snatches of conversation about local club teams and high school squads, and how such other regional contenders as St. Francis or Adelphi or Long Island University are doing this year.
These are the joys of small-time sport, repeated ad infinitum throughout the United States. College soccer is played at a pleasurable, human level and almost anyone can win. Over the years such unlikely powerhouses as Hartwick, Howard, Philadelphia Textile, Santa Clara and Wisconsin-Green Bay have regularly competed for and even captured the Division I championship.
These little triumphs of college soccer — avid competition, knowledgable yet orderly crowds, cheap seats — make it all the clearer how unnecessary big-time pro soccer is to the American sporting scene. Last Sunday, the Major League Soccer season came to an end with another dull thud, as D.C. United beat the Los Angeles Galaxy, 2-0, in the league’s championship game.
This Super Bowl of soccer passed almost unnoticed on the sporting scene. This happened, in part, because of the bizarre decision by M.L.S. to stretch its season out to an agonizing eight months, running the opening rounds of its postseason head-to-head against the major league baseball playoffs and World Series and to hold the championship game well into the football season.
Still, the fact remains that after four years of existence, M.L.S. is all but moribund, its attendance stagnant, its television ratings minuscule, its buzz inaudible.
This will undoubtedly bring about more collective handwringing from fellow soccer fans.
No doubt, many of them will again excoriate Americans for our hopeless attachment to fast-moving action and scoring. M.L.S.’s centralized league ownership has already announced such significant reforms as realigned divisions, an end to tie-breaking shootouts, and making the on-field referee the official timekeeper (More ties! Inaccurate game clocks!).
And it is not M.L.S.’s fault that the sport is suffering from a 20-year, worldwide plague of dull, low-scoring soccer. It didn’t help any that the 1994 World Cup, which, with the United States as host, was supposed to do so much to galvanize pro soccer in this country, ended in a scoreless tie — or that no losing team has scored in a cup final since 1986.
But M.L.S. has also contributed heavily to its own problems, chiefly through a striking lack of effective promotion and marketing. New York/ New Jersey MetroStars, for instance, may be the single worst name in pro sports, anywhere, ever. Ticket prices are ridiculously high for a fledgling league.
And just whose idea was it to run television ads that consisted of players talking about their most memorable goals, while the camera spans a completely empty stadium?
Perhaps the real problem lies with the very concept of a single, centralized league ownership (see Soviet Union).
The larger truth, however, is that not everything can be marketed into existence, even in America.
How long now have we been hearing about soccer’s imminent arrival as the country’s next major professional sport?
We have already been through all this with the North American Soccer League. Beginning in 1967, the N.A.S.L. imported dozens of the best players in the world, and it drew occasional throngs of more than 70,000. It was defunct within 20 years.
Even as more and more Americans play soccer than ever before, a pro league has yet to take off. It probably never will, and so what?
Perhaps what we should be asking ourselves is why we need another big-time, men’s professional sports league in this country. The new century may see the fruition of the Women’s National Basketball Association or even a women’s pro soccer league, but these are enterprises that will draw on a new, previously untapped constituency of fans and players.
Men’s sports are already oversaturated with leagues, teams and millionaire athletes, luxury boxes, ruthless owners and tickets that now average close to $50 in basketball and hockey.
I’m a dedicated Yankees fan, and find few things as exciting as World Series time in the Bronx. Yet I can do without the endless lines and extortionate prices; the officious security guards and drunken suburban teenagers spewing beer and obscenities.
There should be a place for something less than that in sports, and it will be a good thing if soccer turns out to occupy that place.
This downsized concept will be a disappointment, I know, for the growing number of American men trying to make a living playing competitive soccer here on an international level.
Yet there are worse things than having to spend a few seasons in Rome or Madrid. Perhaps in this country, at least, soccer can remain something that we sometimes play, sometimes watch, and always enjoy without it becoming a national cult.
In an age of overpriced, overhyped sports, there is much pleasure to be had from games that are still played on a human level.
Photo: The M.L.S. championship game was last Sunday. How many noticed D.C. United’s victory? (Agence France-Presse)