It happened just over 44 years ago. A soccer team filled a Canadian city with European emotions. Victory-mad fans. An unimaginable sports parade – 100,000 strong – that may never be seen in Canada again, or at least until the Toronto Maple Leafs win the Stanley Cup.
This was Vancouver in 1979. The underdog Whitecaps had won the Soccer Bowl, as champions of North America. This weekend, a much-different reincarnation of underdog Whitecaps will try to win a much-different piece of silverware, the Anschutz Trophy, as champions of North America.
For the next eight months, starting with Friday’s World Cup draw, soccer is going to have a prominent place at Canada’s table of major sports. There will be 16 games played in Vancouver (nine) and Toronto (seven), from the first Cup game on Canadian soil (June 12, Toronto) to the one that sends a team to the quarter-finals (July 7, Vancouver).
Another Whitecaps championship, the first since 1979, would be another spark in the firestone of soccer fanatics. On that fall day in East Rutherford, New Jersey, I was geographically closer to the game than most of their fans… the exception being the 800 who paid $360 for a round-trip to New York on a red-eye charter. For me, it was a footnote. My father had died a month earlier in a car crash. Our four-year-old was still recovering from a fractured skull in another car accident. It was not a good time to care much about a soccer game.
And so, it was casually mentioned on sportscasts at the Montreal station where I worked. Four years later, at another radio station, I was the colour commentator… of Vancouver Whitecaps games.
That’s when I learned much more about the 2-1 victory over the Tampa Bay Rowdies. That it followed an enormous upset of the New York Cosmos, primed to be the Soccer Bowl home team, a shootout win which prompted ABC commentator Jim McKay to say “Vancouver must be like a deserted village right now.” His “village of Vancouver” reference still lives in infamy on the West Coast.
That’s when I discovered why somebody named Alan Ball had been the “man of the match” – soccer terminology for “most valuable player” – because he scored one of the two goals and was their 34-year-old star, who had played for England the last time the Brits won the World Cup, 13 years earlier.
That’s when I met the two remaining Whitecaps from ’79, Bobby Lenarduzzi and Carl Valentine, broadcasting about their skills like I’d watched them for years (I hadn’t). Somewhat ironically, Lenarduzzi and Valentine are both part of this Whitecaps family, 44 years later. The new “Alan Ball” is Thomas Muller, their 36-year-old star player, who has played in the last four World Cups for Germany, and scored 10 goals.
The connection between Ball and Muller isn’t lost on Carl Valentine, who said this week on TV: “When Alan came in, he was a World Cup winner and I remember [Coach] Tony Waiters saying it’s the final piece, that can take us over the hump. This feels like the same thing.”
Those Whitecaps had to overcome North American’s biggest star, Giorgio Chinaglia. For these Whitecaps, “Chinaglia” is Lionel Messi.
