I was baptized into the sport of soccer during the raucous days of the North American Soccer League (NASL) when my dad, Gary Smith, was the head athletic trainer of the Minnesota Kicks. In the late seventies, the NASL was a traveling circus. Fans went to rowdy, beer-soaked tailgates and postgame rock-and-roll concerts. The players were primarily foreign born, with the United Kingdom being particularly well represented, and because of this, I was immersed as a child in British football culture.Article continues after advertisement
I would tag along with my dad to work and roam freely through locker rooms and practices. I picked up slang like “dodgy” and “cheeky.” Places like Blackpool and Nottingham Forest and Stoke-on-Trent that I’d read about in the Minneapolis library were brought to life by the players talking about their former professional clubs. When the Kicks went to England for training and exhibition, I went, too, visiting the old grounds of English football—great fortresses of steel and concrete and fencing, where the matches were sodden and scrappy and my dad’s training room came to look like a wartime triage tent.
My favorite Kicks player was a gent from Cambridgeshire named Mike Bailey. Bailey wasn’t as popular as some of the starrier NASL imports like Pelé, Franz Beckenbauer, Johan Cruyff, and George Best, but he was a legend in his own right, a bruising midfielder with the roguish good looks—heavy muttonchops included—of a swashbuckling pirate. Known as “a hard man,” a tough tackling butcher who patrolled the midfield looking for legs to chop down, he’d been the championship-winning captain of the Wolverhampton Wanderers back in England in 1974. Bailey was Robert Plant’s favorite player, and during a Led Zeppelin concert at the Kicks’ stadium in 1977, the singer shouted him out. In my impressionable eyes, no one was cooler than Mike Bailey. Because of him, I became a Wolverhampton fan early on in life and have stayed that way ever since.
