There can be few clubs in soccer history that would consider two successive championship titles and a semifinal appearance in three seasons as a failure. But then there has never been a club like the Cosmos. Professor Julio Mazzei’s and Ray Klivecka’s failure to make it three titles in succession would, predictably, cost them their jobs.
Depending on your view, Hennes Weisweiler was either the perfect or the most inappropriate replacement. He had made his name as the manager behind the remarkable transformation of German club Borussia Moenchengladbach from second-division nonentities into European giants. As the coach at one of Europe’s biggest clubs, Barcelona, he had acquired a reputation for being authoritarian and intransigent. But although he came highly recommended by Franz Beckenbauer, his appointment still came as a surprise. At fifty-nine, Weisweiler was in the twilight of his career and also spoke imperfect English (the same could have been said of any number of the Cosmos staff, players included). Throughout our history we always had at least one translator or another that had to translate the coach’s directions into one of a few other languages,’ says Werner Roth.
Within weeks of his appointment, however, in May 1980, Weisweiler had the team performing better than they had in some time. The West German Hubert Birkenmeier, for example, now found himself as the starting goalkeeper and was repaying his coach with some outstanding displays in goal. New players like the young Paraguayan midfielder Julio César Romero and the American Angelo DiBernardo had slotted seamlessly onto the team and Vladislav Bogicevic had even been transformed, miraculously some said, from mercurial talent (i.e. lazy) to the one of the most industrious players on the Cosmos squad.
With the team apparently rejuvenated, the Cosmos recorded eight straight victories in the aftermath of Weisweiler taking charge. During the run, Giorgio Chinaglia also became the league’s all-time leading scorer with his 102nd goal during the away game at the California Surf. The only disappointment for Chinaglia and the Cosmos was that just 8,660 people were there to witness the occasion. Clearly, the idea that a Vancouver or a Tampa could topple the Cosmos had done little to increase the crowds at games outside the soccer strongholds. They were even struggling in Philadelphia, once the home to a thriving franchise. For their game against the Chicago Sting, they managed to pull an official crowd of just 2,478, although journalists at the game estimated the real total was actually around 1,000. ‘Kind of depressing,’ was the ex-Cosmos keeper Bob Rigby’s response, now playing for the Fury.
The Cosmos also picked up its first trophy under Weisweiler when it won the inaugural Trans-Atlantic Challenge Cup. It was a new four-team tournament that also included the Vancouver Whitecaps from the NASL, Italy’s Roma and England’s Manchester City (which now featured Dennis Tueart in their lineup). Thanks to two wins, a draw and six Chinaglia goals, the Cosmos took the title.
Visible success was what Steve Ross craved and whenever he scanned the sports pages to find the Mets bagging the headlines with their record-breaking $21 million franchise sale or the Yankees signing up Dave Winfield on a ten-year, $23 million deal, it irked him that the Cosmos wasn’t there mixing it with them. The occasional trophy not only went some way to justifying his and Warner’s investment in the club, but it marked the team—his team—out as winners. There was nothing Steve Ross loved more than a winner.
Ross’s mind, however, would soon be occupied by more pressing problems. After experiencing chest pains for some time he suffered a serious heart attack in June 1980. From his hospital bed, Ross ordered that his condition be kept secret, maintaining that it would be bad for the company if the truth came out. Whenever anyone asked after him, Amanda Burden would just say he was suffering from backache. At fifty-two, though, Ross was faced with a stark choice. He could quit smoking and pass on the ice cream and fudge sauce, his doctors told him, or he could start making his funeral arrangements. Soon after, the Parliaments were kicked in the trash.
His health was by no means Ross’s only concern. On a personal level, his marriage to Burden was faltering. According to Connie Bruck in Master of the Game, Burden would often confide in friends that she found it difficult to be married to a man whose cultural tastes and whose interests away from the world of Warner were so limited. A case in point was the Cosmos trip to China in 1977, when on the lengthy flight she sat by and watched Ross and Jay Emmett play backgammon for hour after hour without even acknowledging her presence.
There were also problems with his son, Mark. Now nineteen, he, more than his sister Toni, had found his father’s divorce and remarriage traumatic and began to question his father’s relationship with Burden. Ever since his father had started seeing Burden, Mark Ross had found it difficult to accept; he had even slammed a chocolate pudding into her face when she had arranged a dinner for the Ross family and her children from a previous marriage, Flo-Belle and Carter.
When, in 1977, Ross had insisted that the Cosmos would soon be yet another profitable part of the Warner stable, he was, for once, talking from his heart and not his head. For all the pleasure he gleaned from the games, the team was fast turning into a headache. The financial burden of running a team with a lower profile and with fewer paying supporters than it once boasted was becoming increasingly difficult to defend. At one shareholders’ meeting, Ross was asked just how much the Cosmos was costing the company. ‘About two cents a share,’ he quipped.
It was a typically astute response from Ross. Defusing a potentially awkward situation with humor, he had not only allayed his investors’ fears but cleverly concealed the fact that two cents a share actually translated into an ugly annual loss of more than $5 million a year.
Of course, the Cosmos losses were much easier to stomach given the irrepressible success of Atari. In 1979, after licensing ‘Space Invaders’ from Bally for its VCS home console, the division posted an annual profit of $6 million. In 1980, it had risen to just short of $70 million, and showed no sign of abating. Commercially and culturally, Atari had far exceeded Ross’s expectations. From the junior high schools to the back alley bars, everyone knew about Atari. Coin shortages were commonplace as people clamored to play the machines and truancy levels climbed as kids skipped class to hit the arcades. Later, Time magazine would call the period The Age of Atari’ while Thomas Tip’ O’Neill, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, termed the new crop of thrusting young congressmen ‘Atari Democrats’. What had started out as a speculative dabble in the world of computers for Steve Ross (albeit one that cost him $28 million) was fast turning into the biggest success story of his career.
Inevitably, the success of Atari and its new 2600 machine spawned imitators, most notably Mattel’s Intellivision, which featured games such as baseball, blackjack and poker as well as boasting significantly better graphics. In 1980, as well, a challenge to the hegemony of ‘Space Invaders’ arose in the shape of Namco’s ‘Pac-Man’. Originally, the game had been called ‘Puck-Man’ but was rapidly changed when vandals began altering the machine’s lettering.
Much of the credit for Atari’s rise went to Raymond Kassar. A graduate of Harvard Business School, Kassar had replaced Atari’s founder, Nolan Bushnell, as the head of the division in 1978 and had brought a more regimented approach to Atari, dividing it into two distinct parts: consumer electronics (which included home computers) and coin-operated games. It gave the company much-needed structure and a better base from which it could begin to fully exploit the fervent public interest not merely in computers and computer games but in affordable technology more generally.
As the new Golden Boy of Warner, Kassar was rewarded handsomely for his endeavors, reportedly receiving a bonus of $4 million in 1980. In time, he would also be presented with a luxury apartment in Trump Tower and be given the same kind of unhindered access to Warner’s private planes, helicopters and fleet of limousines that only the most cherished of executives (and Steve Ross’s children) received. ‘Incentive compensation,’ Ross once explained, ‘is the most important thing in business.’
While Warner wallowed in Atari’s phenomenal success, the Cosmos carried on regardless. The problem, in terms of the NASL and its future, however, was that no other franchise had Atari as a big brother, and while the Cosmos could withstand falling crowds (they were down 21 percent relative to the same time in 1979) protected by Steve Ross’s patronage, other franchises were struggling to stay afloat. ‘Maybe we’ve taken people for granted,’ said Dominick Flora, the executive assistant in charge of Cosmos marketing in 1980. That’s why we’re going back to basics. We can’t afford to become complacent. We’ve already gone back to promoting tailgating and putting Dixieland bands in the parking lots.’
Even ABC television was forced to concede that soccer had largely bypassed the nation’s viewers. Midway through the season, the television ratings for the NASL had dropped still further from those of 1979 and this despite ABC opting to run six telecasts on consecutive Sundays. As the two parties sat down to discuss the possibility of a new deal, it was painfully obvious that real cracks were now beginning to appear in the NASL. Woosnam, somewhat unrealistically, wanted more money and more live games. ABC, meanwhile, looked at the bare facts and questioned what, if anything, it had to gain from continuing to cover a sport that had failed to capture the viewing public’s imagination. ‘I don’t know whether it’ll be back or not. All you can go by is the ratings and we haven’t even seen negligible improvement this season,’ said Chet Forte, director of production creative services for the network. ‘I don’t think soccer’s really caught on yet and I’m not sure it ever will on a large scale. I don’t think Americans can associate with foreign players. We’re hurting on TV but I think the league overall is hurting, too. There are a lot of franchises floundering.’
The NASL, it seemed, had been guilty of believing its own press and, perhaps, believing that what had happened at Giants Stadium could still be replicated on a national level. As Woosnam and ABC broke off discussions, Forte told the press that the NASL needed to reassess its place in the hierarchy of American sports. ‘I think they’re living in a test tube,’ he concluded. They think they’ve got the best thing in the world. Basically, they think they’re more than they really are.’ It was a damning comment, especially from a self-confessed fan of the game.
While not yet terminal, the downturn in interest in the NASL had inevitable implications for the rest of the game in the States. Other leagues that had sprung up, like the American Soccer League and the Cosmopolitan League, were faring even worse than the NASL, primarily because they had neither the star names nor the exposure of the NASL. Moreover, it did little to assist the case of the United States Soccer Federation (USSF), which was in the preliminary stages of attempting to bring the World Cup to America. In a bid to convince the world governing body, FIFA, that they were more than capable of hosting the game’s premier tournament, the USSF had announced that a youth competition involving nineteen of the twenty-three nations that comprised CONCACAF (Confederation of North, Central American and Caribbean Association Football) would be held in cities across the United States during August. ‘If we can prove to FIFA we can handle this tournament well,’ said the USSF president, Gene Edwards, ‘We can consider it a dry run for the Youth World Cup in 1983 or 1985 and maybe we can ask to host the big one in 1990.’ It would be 1994 before the USSF finally got its chance to host the World Cup Finals.
That youth tournament would represent a chance for the new star of the Cosmos team, nineteen-year-old rookie Jeff Durgan, to prove himself on an international stage. Having been signed in the 1979 amateur draft (coming out of Stadium High School in Tacoma, Washington), Durgan had been given his chance at center-back just four games into the 1980 season following injuries to the Brazilian defender Oscar and the Dutchman Wim Rijsbergen. After some resilient displays, coach Weisweiler had been so impressed by his poise at the heart of the Cosmos back-line that he soon became the first choice in the position.
As the season progressed and Durgan repeled the finest strikers the NASL had to offer, including the likes of Klaus Toppmoller of Dallas and Oscar Fabbiani of Tampa Bay, he would follow in the footsteps of Randy Horton (1971) and Gary Etherington (1978) and be voted Rookie of the Year by his NASL colleagues. ‘I’m honored that the other players in the league thought I was worthy of this award,’ said the defender. ‘I’m glad they think I have ability. I just hope I can continue to progress as much in the future as I have this season.’ The question was whether anyone, not just Jeff Durgan, would have a future in the NASL.
One player who had decided he didn’t have a future in America was Franz Beckenbauer. After four memorable seasons in the NASL, The Kaiser’ announced on July 1, 1980, that he had accepted a long-standing offer of a two-year contract with the Bundesliga side SV Hamburg and would be returning home to West Germany once his contract with the Cosmos expired in October. He would be thirty-five years old.
Certainly, it was clear that Warner Communications wanted the German international to stay and even issued a statement through executive vice president Rafael de la Sierra. It read: The Cosmos are very sorry to learn of Franz Beckenbauer’s decision to return to West Germany. We did everything we could to keep him here, but money was apparently not a factor in his decision.’
Yet Beckenbauer’s decision wasn’t entirely of his own volition. Throughout his playing career, he had benefited from a lucrative contract with the West German sporting goods giant Adidas. It was a deal that was due to expire at the end of 1985 and Adidas had reportedly instructed Beckenbauer that it would not be renewed unless he returned to West Germany. As long as he stayed and played in the States he was of little use to them. When Beckenbauer finally made his mind up to return, he informed Adidas and was promptly given a lifetime promotional contract with the company. ‘I was told I always had a job with Warner Communications,’ Beckenbauer said of the Cosmos’s parent company, ‘but as what? As Mickey Mouse? Or is it Bugs Bunny?’
Beckenbauer’s decision to quit the Cosmos seemed sensible. Not only was there a tangible sense that the NASL had already peaked, but Beckenbauer now had the perfect opportunity to return home to Germany and set himself and his family up for life.
In the regular season, Giorgio Chinaglia had continued to be the forward to fear in the NASL and his return of thirty-two goals in as many games represented yet another remarkable season for the striker. It seemed that regardless of whoever had the misfortune to sit in the coach’s chair, Chinaglia recognized that once he crossed that white line it was his responsibility to find the net. It was a task he performed with ruthless efficacy.
Chinaglia’s tally in the regular season may have been extraordinary but it paled in comparison to his performances in the play-offs. In the eight games (including the Soccer Bowl itself) the Italian found the net eighteen times. In one game against Tulsa, he scored seven goals in an 8–1 win. In the NASL’s fourteen years, no player had ever scored more than five goals in one game, a record shared by several players, including Chinaglia, and a feat rightly recognized by everyone who witnessed the Italian’s one-man show, even Tulsa’s shell-shocked keeper Eugene DuChateau. The man is incredible,’ he said resignedly.
Coach Weisweiler was more lavish in his praise. In the locker room after the game, the Cosmos trainer Joel Rosenstein squeezed some eye drops into Weisweiler’s left eye. ‘You see,’ joked the coach. ‘My eyes can’t believe what they just saw.’
The NASL commissioner Phil Woosnam, meanwhile, told the New York Times that Chinaglia was one of the great strikers in history.’You put him in the same category with Ferenc Puskás, Pelé and Jimmy Greaves. They are the best finishers of our time.’
At the press conference, Chinaglia was, understandably, a man in demand. As he cradled the match ball, presented to him by the referee, John Davies, he was besieged by the media and had to battle his way through to the phone to take a congratulatory call from Steve Ross, who was still recuperating from his heart attack at home in the Hamptons. When he returned to face the press, Chinaglia, a man of many words, found it difficult to put his achievement into perspective. ‘It was a beautiful night,’ he beamed.
As the soccer world united in acclamation of Chinaglia, it emerged that not everyone appreciated the Italian’s latest feat, especially Mario Mariani, (a.k.a. Bugs Bunny). ‘I would do a lap around the stadium every time a goal would be scored, that was my thing,’ explains Mariani. ‘I had to do seven laps and you know, by the fifth one the fans were thinking how the heck can this guy do [another] set of laps around the stadium in that costume in the middle of the summer here in the sweltering humidity of New Jersey.’
The Cosmos went on to a third NASL title in four seasons. Despite some initial resistance from their opponents, the Fort Lauderdale Strikers, the Soccer Bowl ended in a comprehensive 3–0 win for the Cosmos, Giorgio Chinaglia scoring twice and taking the awards for the game’s and the play-offs’ Most Valuable Player. ‘We had something to prove this season, something to prove today,’ he said. ‘I also had something to prove because unfortunately I must prove myself every game. There are many people who would like to crucify me if I make a mistake or if I fail.’
As it had for his predecessor, Pelé, the Soccer Bowl had proved to be a fitting finale to Franz Beckenbauer’s time with the Cosmos. As the game ended, he loped across the field at Washington’s RFK Stadium, keeping to himself and standing at the back of the pack as the players performed a lap of honor. Unlike Pelé, though, there were no tears, precious few hugs and nobody saw fit to carry him off the field. That, apparently, was the way The Kaiser wanted it.
The jubilation of another Soccer Bowl success was shortlived and not merely because of Beckenbauer’s imminent departure. In playing Beckenbauer in his favored position of sweeper, coach Hennes Weisweiler had been forced to drop Carlos Alberto, the NASL’s four-time Defender of the Year. Having paced the hotel corridors until 5 a.m. on the day of the game considering his lineup, Weisweiler made what he called ‘one of the hardest decisions I have ever made in soccer’, adding that ‘Carlos was a true sportsman about it. He said he understood.’
Perhaps Weisweiler’s explanation of his decision lost something in the translation. With ten minutes to go in the game, Weisweiler had ushered Alberto to warm up and prepare to take the field, but the chain-smoking Brazilian, clearly riled, waved him away. ‘Why go in with ten minutes left?’ he said later. ‘I feel very bad. I have spoken with Rafael [de la Sierra] about this. I am not sure I can play for this coach again next year. I may not be back.’
Neither the result nor the fact that it had been overshadowed by Weisweiler’s wrangle with Carlos Alberto came as much of a shock. Indeed, the row was still rumbling on when, three days after the Soccer Bowl, over 71,000—the Giants Stadium’s largest crowd of the year—turned out for Franz Beckenbauer’s farewell game, an exhibition match between the Cosmos and a Select Stars XI, cherry-picked from the rest of the NASL.
While it would have been entirely appropriate that so many supporters had turned out to show their appreciation for the German legend, the brutal truth was that they had actually shown up to see Pelé, who was making his first appearance in a Cosmos shirt since his retirement in 1977. Now forty and working for the Cosmos as a consultant, Pelé had agreed to make a guest appearance for Beckenbauer and in the forty-three minutes he played showed flashes of the transcendent talent that had taken him to the very peak of the world game. He even scored, although the Cosmos would go on to lose 3–2.
When he left the field just before halftime, the Brazilian turned to Beckenbauer and handed him his number ten shirt and as he walked off the field, waving, he received the kind of ovation that suggested it was his benefit match and not the farewell game for Franz Beckenbauer.’ When the Cosmos won the 1977 NASL championship in my last year, it was a perfect going-away present for me, and Franz Beckenbauer had a lot to do with that championship,’ said Pelé. ‘I hope that by playing in his farewell game, I can help in some way to make his going-away present just as memorable.’
When Beckenbauer first touched down in New York in 1977 he had doubted whether he could ever replicate the impact that Pelé had had on the game of soccer in the States. Although there was no doubt that he was one of the most influential players of his generation, Beckenbauer lacked the natural charisma and gregarious nature that Pelé possessed, and while he had given his all for the Cosmos, his quiet demeanor hadn’t really endeared him to the crowd in the same way they had taken to the Brazilian.
Even his perfunctory farewell speech compared badly to Pelé’s. Whereas the Brazilian had demanded that the entire crowd at Giants Stadium repeat the word ‘Love’ three times, Beckenbauer appeared on the pitch at halftime and said: ‘You are the best fans in the world. Good luck to you and good health.’
The country was buzzing. Not with the general election result that saw a sixty-nine-year-old former Hollywood actor, Ronald Reagan, chosen as the U.S.’s oldest-ever president, but with the lasting drama of who shot J. R. Ewing? CBS’s hit soap Dallas had ended its spring series with Larry Hagman’s devious oilman gunned down in his office by a mystery assailant, and everyone had an opinion as to who had carried out the attack. When the identity of the attacker was finally revealed—it was his mistress and sister-in-law Kristin—the show broke all records, registering a 53.3 rating for a 76 percent share.
What Phil Woosnam could have done with such a cliff-hanger in the NASL. Sadly, short of engineering a plot to have Giorgio Chinaglia gunned down at Giants Stadium there was little he could do to convince ABC to extend their coverage of his league. For the new season, only play-off games would feature on national television. ‘We had to make a hard decision. And we decided not to continue,’ explains Jim Spence. ‘We really hoped when we got involved that the NASL would be a long-term franchise for ABC Sports … we didn’t think it was going to be hugely successful, from a financial point of view or a ratings point of view, but we thought it could be and hoped it would be successful enough that we would be able to continue on a long-term basis.’
Soccer, the sport of the future, was fast becoming a thing of the past. Contrary to the NASL’s line, the object now was not expansion but survival. Everywhere, there were teams fighting for their existence. The Houston Hurricane, the Rochester Lancers, the Atlanta Chiefs and the Detroit Express were all on the brink of folding, and even Gordon Bradley’s Washington Diplomats, a team with Johan Cruyff and a 65 percent season increase in attendances, and which registered a 53,000 crowd for the game against the Cosmos, were battling extinction. They even mooted the idea of moving the franchise to New York but were quickly rebuffed by Warner.
The well-heeled and curious would no longer throw money at clubs in the hope that they too could find their own Pelé and magically uncover some dormant interest in the game in their area. Financiers were now realizing that buying into a franchise was not just a gamble but economic recklessness. It didn’t help that changes in the tax legislation had also made investing in a franchise less attractive (if that were possible). Previously, private individuals with no association with sport could use a loss on a soccer team as a tax write-off but now only those who made their money in sports, like Warner or Madison Square Garden (owner of the Diplomats), could claim such rebates.
The difference between Warner and MSG, though, was that the Cosmos, regardless of its deficit, still performed a useful function for its owners in that whenever the team traversed the globe (as it did in the post-season tour to Europe and Egypt in October 1980) it did so with a clear objective—to help Warner break into untapped or valuable markets.
With franchises failing and television turning its back on soccer, it had become glaringly obvious that the NASL’s rapid expansion from eighteen teams in 1977 to twenty-four teams the following year was the primary reason for what many saw as impending self-destruction. Twenty-four teams meant having to divide what little TV money there was an additional six ways. It also meant there were now an extra six stops in the schedule, which meant further expense. ‘We had eighteen clubs, six were doing OK, six were doing great, six we had to get rid of. [Then] we added six more clubs,’ recalls Clive Toye. ‘So now we are six good, six OK, twelve rubbish.’
For all its good intentions, it appeared that the NASL had mistaken the boom of the Cosmos, with its sell-out crowds, celebrity-laden stands and star-studded roster, for some wider upsurge in the game nationally. ‘Most of the people [franchise owners] who came in late were attracted by what they saw at Giants Stadium, which was a big crowd, beautiful stadium and all these celebrities,’ adds Toye. ‘[They said] for three million bucks I can buy myself into that.’
It was apparent that for as long as Warner bankrolled the Cosmos the NASL title was theirs for the taking every season. The other franchises could chase the dream, but unless they had a sugar daddy with pockets as cavernous as Steve Ross’s they were always going to be fighting a losing battle.
At the NASL’s board of directors meeting at Chicago’s O’Hare Hilton hotel in December, the vexatious issue of the Cosmos came up once more. Terry Hanson, vice president of the Atlanta Chiefs, was one of the most vocal on the subject. ‘A lot of people in the league followed the example of the Cosmos and spent money on players. I think that was a mistake,’ he maintained. ‘In Atlanta we learned that our objective was to create a sound business rather than trying to compete with the Cosmos to win the championship. I tell you, those Cosmos were the best and the worst thing that happened to this league.’