Alexi Lalas is one of the best-known American soccer players of all time, but even he didn’t watch his first World Cup until he was 16 years old.
It was 1986, and Lalas was playing with his travel soccer team at the Pikes Peak Invitational Tournament in Colorado.
“In between the 700 games that you play over the course of four days or whatever, they brought in a television set to the lobby of the Holiday Inn, with the rabbit ears and everything like that, and set it up, and we were just sitting there and watching this,” Lalas recalls.
The U.S. wasn’t even in the event, but having grown up in Michigan, Lalas embraced team Canada, and was transfixed by the spectacle, even though he noted it seemed “so far away.”
“It’s rather late for someone at 16 to see their first World Cup, but it just gives you an idea of where we were back then,” he added. “As the saying goes, you’ve come a long way, baby, and we certainly have.”
