The Unnamed Press
P.O. Box 411272
Los Angeles, CA 90041
Published in North America by The Unnamed Press.
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Copyright © 2017 by Dennie Wendt
ISBN: 978-1944700386
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017934027
This book is distributed by Publishers Group West
Cover Photograph of Trevor Hockey by PA Photos Limited, London
Cover design by Meagan Tuhy and Dennie Wendt
Typeset by Jaya Nicely
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are wholly fictional or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. Permissions inquiries may be directed to [email protected].
Dedicated to my family.
The author and publisher would like to extend grateful acknowledgment to the Hockey family of Keighley, England, for allowing the use of Trevor Hockey’s likeness on the cover.
Some people believe football is a matter of life and death. I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.
— Bill Shankly, Liverpool Football Club manager, 1959–1974
I hardly even know what a soccer ball looks like.
— Dick Walsh, North American Soccer League commissioner, 1968
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
EPILOGUE
AFTERWORD
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
The New York Giganticos professional soccer team played for friends and family in the early ’70s, on a bumpy patch of grass in a high school football stadium on Long Island. By the summer of ’76 they played in the biggest stadium in the city, a baseball stadium, on a smooth, lush green lawn. And even with their big, beloved, beautiful New York home, they were too big for any one city now, too big even for Gotham. By 1976, they had ditched their “New” and their “York” and had become only the Giganticos. Like a band.
The Giganticos, defending American All-Star Soccer Association champions, weren’t just the most famous soccer team in the world in 1976—they were the most famous men in the world in 1976. Nine of the ten best players from the 1974 World Cup had been signed by the Giganticos of the eight-year-old AASSA, as were the best players from six countries who hadn’t qualified. The Giganticos had signed Zaire’s best player and the Haitian who had scored against Italy and Argentina. Their names, said together, formed a Portuguese-Dutch-Slavic-Spanish-French-Italian-Flemish-German epic poem to the heroic and creative potential of the game. Virtually everyone in the team’s lineup was in the twilight of his career, finishing up his playing days while hanging out in the Manhattan club scene with fat paychecks, lithe European models, and minimal fitness expectations.
With their expensive, decadent, almost comical roster—a confabulation of conjurers only America could assemble—the Giganticos traversed the planet like benevolent gods, vanquishing their opponents—and what opponents: The Giganticos went to Munich and Milan and Madrid... and they won! They went to Mexico and the Middle East and Africa... and won! The Giganticos went to London... and won! In ninety-minute chunks they won in Liverpool and Leeds and Manchester and Glasgow and then...and then... they circled the pitch to adoring cheers from the defeated team’s supporters. The fans stayed and sang and cheered just to be looked upon by the magicians from Brazil and Argentina and Italy and Uruguay and Holland, always Holland—how, how, how, the Russians wanted to know—and even the best from Germany, France, Belgium... and the Giganticos even had the best Liberians and Iranians who were magicians, sorcerers, geniuses too, but had never been able to prove it through their pitiable national teams. They flocked to them in the streets, surrounded their hotels, blocked their busses. They screamed for them, cried for them, clamored just to touch them, if they only could, if they only could.
The Giganticos were owned by a free-spending Manhattan media conglomerate whose European executives knew what few residents of the United States of America knew in the bicentennial year of the republic: that football—soccer—was the world’s truest, most reliable, most incendiary, most tribal passion, and that the most beloved assemblage of humanity you could cobble together was a soccer team, a football squad—an entertaining, glamorous side that you’d love whether they were yours or not. The rich European men in Manhattan spent on the Giganticos. They spent and they spent.
In between AASSA matches against the likes of the Flamingos of Florida, the Colorado Cowhands, and the Rose City Revolution, the Giganticos hosted Europe’s finest clubs at their big and beautiful New York stadium and they jetted off to Mexico, South America, and beyond for exhibitions attended by hundreds of thousands of adoring fans. The fans never rioted, they never fought. They came to watch.
Men wept. Women screamed.
The Giganticos’ game was poetry, but it was engineering too. They built it right in front of you, assembled it for their audiences to appreciate moment by moment, minute by minute. Their goals weren’t the sudden shock that they were in the pedestrian football world; they were flourishes at the conclusions of elaborate sequences of grandeur and beauty. The Giganticos were sublime.
When the Giganticos traveled they took their own airplane, purchased for them by the European executives of the media conglomerate, and they were delivered to their matches in airbrushed tour buses worthy of Fleetwood Mac. They stepped from their coach in a