The Aztexan

AustinChronicle.com — Best of Austin 2010

Best 2010 Aztex Comeback Player: Jamie Watson — Watson’s become a big fan favorite, and his penetrating pace on the left flank is one of the big reasons for the team’s surprising success this season.

Best 2010 Aztex Newcomer: Maxwell Griffin — the Aztex’s youngest starter burst out of UCLA to become the league’s third-leading scorer at press time (and second on the team, after last year’s player of the year Eddie Johnson).

Read it all.

I wrote recently about Dave Brett’s archive of old soccer videos. I received a copy of one of Dave’s DVDs since then: the 1977 NASL Soccer Bowl, New York Cosmos vs. Seattle Sounders. This was the league championship, complete with the “bowl” name, a clear attempt to place it on par with NFL’s Super Bowl (which itself is kind of a dumb name, if you think about it).

This was the Cosmos of Pelé, Beckenbauer and Chinaglia (and Shep Messing in goal – I’m not sure he’s quite the legend that those guys are, but he’s still around American soccer today, so that’s pretty cool). It was the Sounders of, well, nobody you’ve heard of unless you were a NASL fan in the late 70s.

Which I was not. I don’t remember hearing or seeing the slightest bit of soccer of any kind back then, when I was a kid. I therefore have zero nostalgia for the original NASL. I’m interested in it, fascinated, even; I have both seen and read Once In A Lifetime. I’m not knocking NASL nostalgia, I’m just putting it out there that I have none of my own. (One bonus this afforded me: I didn’t know who won this match.)

Nevertheless, watching this DVD was an absolute blast. The soccer itself is fun to watch, and it’s certainly bizarre to see those legends play a full game. And of course it’s not “just” a regular-season game, it’s the championship, as well as Pelé’s last game as a Cosmo (excepting the farewell match vs. Santos). This is the match that Brian Phillips wrote about on Run of Play during his recent “Pelé Week”. So it’s epic, but I’ll be honest: it was the retro aspects of the broadcast, the short shorts, the big mustaches, etc., that really made it for me.

These screenshots are a bit fuzzy — they’re not exactly from an HD broadcast — but I think they’ll give you a flavor of the game.

Title Screen!

U.S. National Team Coach Walt Chyzowych, right
(yes, really, the right)

Hey, who’s that guy?

At halftime, they showed the presentation of league MVP Franz Beckenbauer with a brand new Celica liftback. He was “very happy to drive so beautiful car.”

League MVP and Celica liftback owner Franz Beckenbauer gets a yellow card

Pelé again. Beckham sure wasn’t the first to get an inordinate amount of camera attention in his U.S. games

The commentary that accompanies this game is great, too. Like the game itself, it’s pretty good overall, but has quite the retro quaintness (quaint retro-ness?). Like the announcers explaining that the player can go out of bounds but the ball can’t, for example, or just the same kind of corny chit-chat that we hear today, but rewound a few decades.

And there are commercial breaks! The actual commercials are edited out (which from a time-capsule standpoint is unfortunate), but there are clear breaks. There’s even a goal scored during one of them.

I highly recommend checking out at least one of Dave’s videos. You’ve seen clips and plays and highlights of these players on YouTube, but seeing a full game, whistle to whistle, is a whole ‘nother thing. The site is davebrett.com. You can email Dave for ordering info; I believe he charges $20 per disc. It’s worth it; chip in with a few buddies if you want to lower the cost. (And speaking of buddies, if you know me in real life, let me know if you’d like to borrow this one.)

A blog post on a not-well-respected site called MLSRumors.com today suggested that the Austin Aztex and Rochester Rhinos are considering moving to Division 3 next year, in response to the Division 2 standards recently announced by USSF.

As you might guess from a site with “rumors” in its name, and which deals mostly in headlines with question marks at the end, they should be ignored. They’re trolling for page-views, and I’m not going to contribute by linking to them. (You can Google them easily enough, though I assure you: you’re not missing anything.)

Neither I nor anyone I know has heard the slightest hints of anything like this. Further, a fellow Aztex fan (thanks, Jeff!) sent me this statement, which he received from Aztex CEO Djorn Buchholz:

“I can assure you that the rumors you heard on MLSRumors.com are just that, rumors. This club has no intention of playing D3 soccer. Yes, the new D2 standards are quite strict, but our ownership group has assisted US Soccer in setting those guidelines and we meet them. I do appreciate your email and rest assured, we will play D2 Soccer for years to come.”

Update: Brian Quarstad at Inside Minnesota Soccer has more on this: Quelling Rumors – A USSF D2 Update. He adds a statement from Rochester Rhinos owner Rob Clark, and he has a good summary of what kind of shape all the teams, current as well as possible future, look like.

The Sports007 — Goooooooal! (How Jamie Watson convinced me to check out the Austin Aztex)

From the time the first whistle was blown, I was hooked. The Aztex completed their season sweep of Miami during the July 31st contest, with a final score of 3-1. Austin goals were scored by Eddie Johnson (assisted by Leonard Griffin) ; Lawrence Olum (assisted by Jamie Watson) and Kendell McFayden (assisted by Yordany Alvarez). The game itself was exciting, but what really made the experience special was how the players interacted with the crowd. After the game concluded the team opens up the fence and allows fans to go on the field for autographs. It was really inspiring to see the athletes interacting with the children especially.

Good story by D’Ann Faught, a football and hockey fan giving soccer a shot. Read it all.

(This story was also run on the Aztex website, so I’m sure they saw this, but hint hint to the Aztex front office: read her About page, and hire her. ;-)

davebrett.com — Historic Soccer Videotapes and DVDs

I fell in love with soccer growing up in New York City in the 1970s. I was a fan of the New York Cosmos of the North American Soccer League (NASL). Fifteen years ago I started collecting videos of the original broadcasts of NASL games. I now have over 350 DVDs of NASL games, listed below.

In the late 1980s I started following the US National Soccer Team, and I now have about 250 videos of those games.

All of these games are the complete original broadcasts. I can record on DVD. I would prefer to trade for NASL matches. However, if you have nothing to trade, please e-mail me and I will send ordering instructions.

Dave has a truly amazing, one-of-a-kind archive of American soccer history. Check it out.

News 8 — Athlete of the Week: Griffin maxing out potential with the Aztex

News 8 Austin’s commendably good coverage of the Aztex continues with this nice video (1 min 39 sec). Unfortunately it’s not embeddable, so you’ll have to click the link to watch it. The charming bit at the end, about why Max and his brother Leonard both play for the Aztex, made me laugh.

ESPN MediaZone — 2010 World Cup Final on ABC: Most-Watched Men’s World Cup Game Ever

Sunday’s 2010 FIFA World Cup Final on ABC – a 1-0 victory by Spain in extra time over the Netherlands – ranks as the most-watched Men’s World Cup game ever among viewers.

The top 10 metered markets for Sunday’s four-hour telecast (including pre- and post-match programming) were:

1. San Francisco (14.7)
2. San Diego (13.6)
3. New York (13.1)
4. Miami-Ft. Lauderdale (12.0)
5. Washington, D.C. (11.9)
6. Los Angeles (11.3)
7. Austin, Texas (10.4)
8. Seattle-Tacoma (10.0)
9. Cincinnati (9.5)
10. Boston (9.1)

Again: welcome, Austin soccer fans! Now, come check out live, local soccer!

KUT 90.5: Is Austin Becoming a Soccer Town?

Phil Rawlins is the president and owner of the Austin Aztex, Austin’s only professional level soccer club. He says lately more people have been coming to watch them play.

“We’re seeing about a ten to fifteen percent increase just prior to the World Cup,” said Rawlins, “and then post the World Cup we’re definitely seeing a spike in interest.”

And next door at Soccer USA, the manager Bill Tripplet said business is booming. The store sold out of USA jerseys and has been doing a brisk business in Dutch jersey’s since that team’s victory against Brazil.

Read it all.

Austin’s Pizza email: Our new specialty pizza: The Aztex Special

We are also launching a new specialty pizza this weekend in honor of World Cup and our partnership with the Austin Aztex. Pepperoni, jalapeño, & crushed red pepper. Just ask for the Aztex Special. It’s a hot one!

Check out that picture. That’s a flyer that was left on the windshield of my car during Wednesday night’s Aztex-Timbers game. The significance, if you’ll allow me: scant months after my fellow Aztex fans and I wondered whether there were any bars other than Cuatro’s where we wouldn’t be treated like second-class citizens, here is this (baseball-named!) chain of sports bars actually spamming me with paper flyers about how soccer-friendly they are.

That, my friends, is the World Cup for you.

It can’t help but make me think of the question that comes up so often in American soccer. It comes in different forms, but it boils down to: will soccer “make it” in the U.S., and if so, when? I like how Steve Davis put it in this post last summer, Stupid questions about soccer:

This business of “Has soccer arrived?” and “What’s it gonna take … ” they represent the laziest of cliched, journalist default questions. Seriously, what do those questions mean?

I mean, has Thai food “arrived?” Has yoga “arrived?” Has Gabriel Garcia Marquez “arrived?”

See what I mean? It’s a silly question. Things are what they are.

Soccer? As a professional enterprise, it’s clearly not as popular in the United States in 2009 as football, baseball and basketball. It’s more popular than hockey (no matter what anybody wants you to believe.) As a participant sport, it’s widely accepted and unquestionably popular. And that’s it. Why does everyone always want to explore where soccer will go? What’s with the obsession over where soccer will land on the pop culture continuum?

From my perspective as a fan of a still-new team in a league that’s had some amount of turmoil since, well, forever, I can’t be quite that blithe about the question. To continue Davis’ Thai food analogy, I’m a big fan of this new Thai restaurant in town, and I want it to do well enough to stay in business. I want Thai food to have “arrived”, especially here in Austin, at least that much.

Now, back to the World Cup. I personally could hardly be more excited for it. I’ll be watching as many games as I can get away with without getting fired or divorced. And seeing soccer here, soccer there, soccer everywhere; having coworkers who usually couldn’t care less tell me to Google for “world cup” and look at the bottom of the page; all of that stuff, it just adds to the fun.

But at the same time, I’m sure there will be plenty of jokes at soccer’s expense, too. Like the Onion story about “the nation’s soccer fan” (note the singular, “fan”). I’m not saying that’s not funny; I love The Onion, and that is funny. But it’s based on the kind of tired old junk that U.S. soccer fans have put up with for years, so it also kind of touches a nerve. And there’s bound to be plenty more backlash where that came from, between now and July 11.

In anticipation of that negativity, here’s my resolution: I won’t care, and I won’t fight.

I love soccer. And for the next month, I’m going to unapologetically geek out on it, and have an absolute blast, and nothing anyone says will be able to put a dent in that. I’m not going to get into goofy defensive arguments, or lecture anyone about how the World Cup is the biggest sporting event in the world, blah blah blah. For the next 30 days, everyone’s going to have more than enough exposure to the game. Let them fall in love with it like I have — or not — on the game’s own merits. It has plenty of ‘em.

I’m sure my local Thai restaurant, er, soccer team (which thankfully seems to be doing good business this year already) will pick up some new fans this summer, which will be fantastic. But some people will try what’s on the menu and not care for it; others, who decided long ago that they hate it, won’t even taste it (but will keep on hating it). That’s okay, too. To each their own.

As for me, I’ll be pigging out.

Groupon: Today’s Deal: $15 for Two Tickets to an Austin Aztex FC Soccer Game ($30 Value)

Soccer, like the metric system, is full of merit and is immensely popular abroad. Witness a global phenomenon without needing a ruler thanks to today’s Groupon: for $15, you get two adult tickets to an Austin Aztex FC soccer game (a $30 value). Visitors will receive tickets for general-admission seating—claimed on a first-come, first-served basis—while enjoying the unobstructed views of the 6,500-person-capacity House Park. There is no purchase limit, so Groupon holders may attend both games and buy multiple Groupons as gifts. Choose from the following games:

• Puerto Rico Islanders on Saturday, June 5, at 7:30 p.m.
• Portland Timbers on Wednesday, June 9, at 7:30 p.m.

Read it all.

Groupon (“group” + “coupon”) is one of the first and probably the biggest of a number of daily, city-specific social-network discount sites. It relies on people spreading the word, and the daily deals require a minimum number of people to buy before they’re truly activated (the Aztex ticket deal requires 50, and as of 6:10 AM has 9 already). This deal is available all weekend, until midnight on Monday, May 31.

Austin Examiner: Aztex help “Keep Austin Weird”:

As nice as all that may be, the tip of the hat must really go to the Aztex booster section. They are a well-oiled machine of enthusiastic, border-line psychopathic aficionados, fueled by opponents’ fear and loathing. They command the attention of fans and players alike with their bilingual chants, myriad of noise-makers, and well-rehearsed drum line. Yeah, you read right. Representing the true spirit of Austin, the Aztex are Spanish language friendly and even their soccer games have live music.

Read it all.

Read this good interview of Aztex owner Phil Rawlins by Arch Bell of Yanks Abroad (and Austin’s own Futbol En Vivo weekly radio show). The first part doesn’t have much new for most Aztex fans, but Phil gives some juicy comments toward the end.

“If I’m looking at it as a business person, it doesn’t make a lot sense for a European club to have a relationship with a MLS club as a source of talent,” Rawlins discussed.

“You’re much better off doing it with a USL or NASL club because of the contract requirements in MLS. We have control over our own players and registration rights. MLS teams don’t. And even with a relationship, you won’t necessarily get a player because of MLS contract restrictions.”

Building off of that argument, the Stoke City director already has his sights set on other major upstream relationships all over Europe.

“The one that is most on the cards is Italy,” he said of his next overseas venture. “We recently met with a president of a Serie A team and we are looking at formalizing a relationship.

Read it all.