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The
Portland Pythons' remaining home games are Sept. 29, Oct.
3, 17, 20 and 24, and Nov. 7. Youth tickets are $6; adult
tickets range from $10 to $18.
Check www.portland
pythons.com or call 684-KICK for more information.
The
first 2,000 fans under 14 through the gates for the Sept.
29 match against the Utah Freezz will receive limited-edition
Buffy the Vampire Slayer posters.
The
other teams in the World Indoor Soccer League are the Arizona
Thunder, Dallas Sidekicks, Houston Hotshots, Monterrey (Mexico)
La Raza, Sacramento Knights and Utah Freezz. All-star squads
from Mexico and Brazil played each team but are not eligible
for the league's playoffs.
At press
time, the Sidekicks lead the league in attendance, averaging
8,786 per game at Dallas' Reunion Arena.
The
Pythons rank last in attendance, with an average gate of
2,914. The league average is 4,642, just shy of its stated
goal of 5,000 per game.
Major
League Soccer averages 14,414 fans per game.
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Bullwinkle finally scores.
This 15-minute all-mascot soccer match has seen the hulking
forward's deft touch (well, deft by the standards of a game
in which most participants wear giant, padded boots fashioned
in the shape of cartoon animals' feet) go unrewarded. The
scoring success of Striker, the mysteriously limbed snake
representing the Portland Pythons indoor soccer team, has
no doubt deepened the antlered, furry Canadian star's frustration.
In the last seconds, Bullwinkle shakes off a lazy challenge
from the opposing sweeper (a giant loaf of Wonder Bread
with legs) and coolly slots a shot into the small goal.
Just as the ball crosses the line, the final whistle brings
an end to this exhibition, which featured a roller-skating
squirrel, the Viking of Portland State, a bucktoothed beaver
from OSU and more than a dozen other puffy-suited players.
Bullwinkle celebrates his token goal, while Striker, definitely
the vertebrate of the match, cavorts in victory with an
anthropomorphic lion.
The 3,000 or so fans gathered in the Rose Garden's air-conditioned
confines give the battling mascots a hand. Then the main
attraction returns to the floor. The Pythons, hometown indoor-soccer
heroes, continue their quest for an upset against the powerhouse
Dallas Sidekicks. Dodging bedraggled mascots, players from
both sides get their game faces on for the second half of
this pivotal World Indoor Soccer League contest.
Welcome to soccer, beyond-the-looking-glass-style. Devised
20 years ago by hustling capitalists, the indoor game pens
soccer's wide-ranging energy into a space the size of a
basketball court, stripping down strategy, amping up speed
and cranking physical contact to 11. Rock music blares.
Bodies crunch into hockey-style Plexiglas sideboards. Players
scamper on and off the miniature field with no break in
the action. Referees brandish blue cards instead of traditional
yellow and red, banishing malefactors to a penalty box.
If cricket is baseball on Quaaludes, indoor soccer is futbol
on meth. Soccer purists hate it like preachers hate sin.
Mainstream sports reporters couldn't care less. This year,
though, this spasmodic hybrid enters its third decade of
scrappy survival, and the men of the Portland Pythons fight
for some breathing room in a new, unproven league.
"It's a different game."
If Pythons head coach Ralph Black is stating the obvious,
well, that's what coaches do best. And Black, a salty character,
has honed his coachspeak to the point where he can reel
off streams of impenetrable patois when necessary. On the
subject of what it takes to play indoor soccer, though,
he couldn't be more clear.
"Not every good player can play indoor based on his outdoor
experience, and not every good indoor player translates
into a good outdoor player," Black says.
Bernie "The Bolt" Lilavois, who wandered the alphabet-soup
nether world of minor pro leagues before bringing his rapier
scoring and cool Conquistador look to Portland, elaborates.
"There's a real transition that needs to be made, conditioning-wise,"
he says. "Outdoor is an endurance test, while indoor is
all about sprinting. You're not out there for that long
at a stretch, so the emphasis is really on speed. We're
talking about radically different muscle groups here.
"With outdoor, you have a lot more time to prepare and
to see what's going on."
Indeed, raw speed is not only the key to playing pro indoor
soccer, it's essentially why the game exists. In the late
'70s, as the Pele-enhanced North American Soccer League
drove the first of America's periodic soccer booms, opportunistic
businessmen formed the Major Indoor Soccer League. The MISL
shuffled off to American soccer's crowded graveyard in 1992,
but the idea that a fast-paced, high-scoring version of
soccer could draw fans in this country survived.
In the early '90s, the Continental Indoor Soccer League
looked to fill the void left by the MISL's demise. Though
the Pythons--then known as the Portland Pride--were born
into the CISL, the club would later help kill the league
by joining a mutiny against its poorly run front office.
"They kept promising national sponsorships, but they never
came through," says Andy McNamara, the Pythons' straightforward
PR guy. "The money the clubs were paying the league was
spent in the league office on salaries, not on delivering
national deals. When the Sidekicks left, we and some other
clubs decided it was time to go, too."
Hence, the World Indoor Soccer League, in all its first-year
wackiness.
"It is a circus atmosphere," acknowledges Lilavois, whose
friendly demeanor at locker-side holds few hints of his
intense, scuffle-prone playing style. "Of course, you tune
it out to a certain extent--the music, the announcer. But
ultimately it just helps the home team. We feed off that
energy of the crowd."
Certainly, with a sizable swath of fans on the young side
of 16, Python home crowds tend to have energy to spare.
The music--which can flip from Ricky Martin directly into
James Brown--flows incessantly from the Rose Garden PA.
An over-the-top announcer narrates not only the action between
the boards but in the stands as well, going mildly nuts
every time a spectator catches an errant ball on the fly.
In the midst of this hard-sell frenzy, it'd be easy to
miss the good stuff. Although the purists' complaints about
indoor soccer--that it is essentially no-hands basketball,
lacking the wide-open creativity of "real" soccer at its
finest--have merit, the sport does have wrinkles of its
own. The sideboards add a new dimension to the game, allowing
finesse players to carom the ball to seemingly unreachable
teammates. The action is claustrophobic and relentless.
Goals flash out of nowhere.
The Pythons, currently clinging to fourth place and a playoff
slot with plenty of action left, are an uneven team. On
Aug. 7, the night of Bullwinkle's mascot soccer triumph,
they beat the skilled Sidekicks 4-3, only to fall 7-3 in
another home match against Dallas on Sept. 15. But there's
the mercurial Lilavois, who scores dazzling goals and holds
his ground in every confrontation. There's the popular,
mononymic defender Adou, who once played on the Ivory Coast's
national team and who abandoned jobs driving a cab in Manhattan
and playing for the outdoor minor-league Brooklyn Knights
to join the Pythons. Most of all, there's the simple pleasure
of watching a bunch of guys who don't get paid very much
(most need to work other jobs) sweat for their chosen game.
In an era when most sports franchises amount to little more
than color-coordinated laundry, the Pythons are nothing
if not of the people and for the people.
"Indoor's been good to me," says Lilavois. "I've made my
living more indoors than outdoors, that's for sure. That's
on the pro side. On the con side, well, there haven't been
a lot of teams that have been too stable, so I've kind of
had to become a nomad. My wife and son have sacrificed a
lot of things to help me travel for soccer jobs. But I think
in the end it's good for all of us to get to see the country
and live in different places.
"It's still early, but so far Portland has been a great
experience for us."
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Willamette Week | originally
published September 29,
1999
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