An MLS History Project: 1997, The First Great Roster Build

Drawing your attention to the two dumb, squat trophies in the foreground...

Dang. It’s already getting harder to keep shit straight. I’ve got a thin prompt for one – mostly a table of standings, a handful of names (specifically, top goal scorers, players of the week/month), and who finished where – and digging much more than that violates the spirit of the project (started with 1996). So, I won’t…

Fortunately, I have a ready-made theme for 1997 – one based on the simple, accidental reality that I moved from Portland, OR to Washington DC in early ’97 (by Amtrak; I can’t recommend the method enough, young people). As noted in the post on 1996 (link up there), the first MLS Cup churned my loins into a passionate froth, so I was already in the tank for DC United when the logic of moving there made enough sense to get me there. The season had started before I arrived, but I still bought season tickets and spent the year going to RFK. Alone, too. I had company for a couple games, and I was lucky to have some close friends in the area at the time, but I still went to and watched* the overwhelming majority of games all on my lonesome.

To share one memory from those games at RFK, one that really stuck with me, there was a concourse between the set of seats in the field and the one immediately behind it, and my tickets were in that second tier of seats. Just about every game there, some very young woman in summer dress (e.g., tube-top, tank-top and short shorts, it hardly mattered) would walk that concourse to a chorus of cat-calls, whistles, and other unmentionable sounds. Genuinely icky, obviously, and that’s just 25 years ago people and that chorus was loud.

To turn to a happier memory, I also saw DC host Chivas de Guadalajara that year in an early iteration of the CONCACAF Champions League. The game ended in a draw, and DC looked all right doing it too. To be clear, this was an American team, with a couple Bolivian ringers (Marco Etcheverry and Jaime Moreno) playing mighty Chivas to a draw. Sure, it was in DC – probably helped it was August, and I remember the tournament rules somehow bending in MLS’s favor as well – but I was so used to watching DC win by then that it all made sense.

And that’s the theme of this 1997 post: I’ve seen plenty (which, here, means some) acknowledgement of the DC United dynasty that dominated the first four seasons of Major League Soccer’s history; what I’ve never seen is anyone call it what it is: the first, great roster-build in league history. At the end of the day, that’s all that happened in their 1996-97 championship seasons: DC built the best roster first, period. Oh, and it helped more than a little that they had Bruce Arena organizing it on the field.

I suspect I won’t be able to capture just how ho-hum it felt watching DC United run away with the league that season – not least because most fans’ brains don’t work that way. (I mean, who doesn’t like a season on cruise control when everything’s coming up aces? As I finished typing that sentence, I timidly raised my hand.) Even DC taking the Supporters’ Shield that year doesn’t do justice to the reality of just straight-up knowing they’d raise that (sensing a theme with the gimmicks) comically ill-advised orb they handed out as MLS Cup in the league’s earliest days (seriously, it looked fucking stupid (see above)). They dropped points here and there, like any team during any season, but they finished 17-11 when all was said and done (because no ties, because that would break Americans). The deeper reality was, they could win every game they played, it was just sometimes they didn’t. Losing once means a whole lot less when you can win the next one, as they often did. If DC had a losing streak in ’97, it wasn’t worth remembering [Note: My memory didn't hold up here; see link below.]

That doesn’t mean a certain, are you fucking kidding vibe didn’t get loose when the Colorado Rapids shook out as DC’s opponent in MLS Cup Final. I worked in a bar at the time (The Big Hunt, on the downtown side of Dupont Circle), and I can report first-hand that local, non-soccer people noticed DC’s run. Anyone who knew I followed MLS asked me about their chances, whether Colorado really called its team “the Rapids” (still mildly shocking to this day), how hard it was to get tickets, all the usual things you’d expect from a bunch of bandwagoners…and I use the word with respect, because that means there was a fucking bandwagon, in an MLS market, in the league’s second season. It didn’t hurt that the final was played at RFK (in front of a damned good crowd, too), but people publicly announced they were going all week.

DC beat the Rapids in the end…and it’s only just now occurred to me that the ’97 season started my sticky fascination with Colorado; maybe that’s how they became the permanent stand-in for “don’t sleep on this team in [insert year].” The Rapids even put up a fight, but the 1997 MLS Cup was DC’s trophy from start to finish – and by that I mean the season. What I remember most about the ’97 MLS season was that lack of suspense. I’d backed the right horse, but somehow didn’t really care. I still can’t account for that, beyond acknowledging that, at the end of it, maybe DC was never really my team. With that least important possible comment out of the way, let’s move on…

The thing to really appreciate was the jaw-dropping construction of DC’s roster. Three of the four players on the back-line – Jeff Agoos, Carlos Llamosa and Eddie Pope – played for the U.S. Men’s National Team at or around this time. The same went for Tony Sanneh in midfield, who got capped some unknown number of times (fine, 43), and, to a lesser extent, Richie Williams; John Harkes, meanwhile, would captain the USMNT, at least until he got caught schtuppping Eric Wynalda’s wife right before the ’98 World Cup. With Marco Etcheverry as a play-maker, and with Raul Diaz Arce and Jaime Moreno first and second in scoring in 1997, why the hell would one bother worrying about David Vaudreuil (remember that guy)? Even to the extent any and all of that happened before and after the 1997 MLS Cup, this team was fucking stacked, which made it the exact opposite of surprising when they won the league.

That only makes the team they beat more remarkable. I’d call only…five names on that roster memorable: Marcus Hahnemann (who I used to drunkenly badger when he was a Sounder), Steve Trittshuh (anyone?), Peter Vermes (yeah, everyone), Marcelo Balboa, and probably Chris Henderson and Paul Bravo, and probably in that order. And yet that same team – fronted by a forward named Steve Rammel and with a Jamaican forward named Wolde Harris waiting in the wings – stepped over the Western-Conference-winning Wizards (the “Wiz” rebrand is coming…wait for it) and the Dallas Burn (who had a great rivalry with the Rapids back when) to make the MLS Cup final against the first great team in the league.

It definitely bears noting that Colorado finished fourth in the West that season. Well clear of the San Jose Clash, but also 17 points behind DC and even 11 points behind the Wizards. “Peaking at the right time” goes far enough back in MLS history as to be defining. All the same, not enough time had passed in league history to provide any grounds for calling this “weird” or not. One year, DC United upset the Los Angeles Galaxy to win MLS Cup in a Nor’easter, and the next year they stomped everyone else on their way to a trophy, and in a way I’m not sure has happened before or since….then again, that’s why I’m doing this grand retracing of steps – well, that and the damned lack of new, live games on the TV.

As in 1996, just 10 teams competed in 1997. It’s also worth looking at the attendance numbers for all those playoff games because that was the norm back then. Some teams did steadily…all right, but teams like the Dallas Burn, the Rapids, and KC rarely cracked five digits; I still remember seeing attendance just over 5K and cringing out how bad it looked (I also recall people at the countless, random bars where I’d watch the games laughing at the empty stadiums). And attendance really did dive in the post-season, and pretty reliably, for years. Domestic soccer falling off the map just as the games started to matter was the disturbing norm.

It’s fair to say that neither the soccer, nor the aesthetics were great back then. If memory serves (Christ, who knows?), DC still shared RFK with the Washington Racists back then, and football lines took over most MLS fields every time fall rolled around. Sure, you got used to it, but that didn’t stop it from looking like shit. The play rarely looked better, but it remained compelling enough – and that’s despite DC’s essential coronation that year.

Still, it’s fun/funny to pick through the names I see in all those charts and to roll over what’s coming and what might have been. The player who stands out there is Dante Washington, a forward for the Dallas Burn in ’97, and I swear to God, he looked promising enough to break into the USMNT line-up for a couple cycles. He, along with a player like Wolde Harris, continued the story from the first MLS Cup: they were players, attacking players, too, that you’d never heard of, who looked like they had something. Washington looked like a fairly compete forward, able to run on goal, with a decent shot, and he did pretty well with his head; in the vein of a Bradley Wright-Phillips, but with…like, one-third(?) the talent. Basically, Washington was a flexible forward who could make things happen on his own, but only in the context of MLS circa-late-90s. Wolde Harris was the same and – I. can’t. place. it. – but, I had a thing for him that came about somewhere before or after ’97, because he could dribble and create his own shot, that kind of thing. He might have torn ass through a lower league (yep, this) and arrived MLS, but there was something that kept me wanting to see him level-up till he found his ceiling.

Like a lot of these early players (Steve Rammel among them), both Harris and Washington hit their ceiling in MLS: good enough to get one’s hopes up, but never great, even in MLS. Like countless players who come into the league, attacking players, especially, they’d hit streaks that talked you into believing again only to trip over his shoes for the next six games after. The truly good players reveal themselves by having those streaks season after season, and MLS worked, and works, the same as any league in the world. If you’re good week after week after week, just about everyone sees it. Then they bitch about it on twitter when you don’t…now that I think of it, it’s funny to think of soccer without twitter at this point. (How they hell did I promote this stuff? Seriously, I don’t even remember anymore…)

To get back on track, and wrap this up, figuring out who was legit and who fell short got easier with every season. To give one example that eclipsed many, Preki Radosavljevic, Preki for short, started his run to league dominance and/or USMNT relevance (up to and including the game-winning goal against Brazil for the U.S.'s first-ever win over Brazil) in 1997. I still hear people refer to his left foot and with good reason, because he could write the fate of a game with it. The real story happened closer to the ground – e.g., with players like Mark Chung, who would become one of the league’s better attacking utility players (in Preki’s mold, I’d argue), or with Chris Henderson, who became one of the league’s best, early wingers. Hell, even Ross Paule had a two, three-year stint as the next big thing, only he never really got there as the good ones do.

Given all the above, I think the best way to wrap up the second season is to talk about the U.S. Men’s team players who never quite mattered in MLS. For what it’s worth, Tab Ramos strikes me as the biggest miss – especially given he was the first ever signed MLS player. He wasn’t remotely alone, though, so let’s talk about the USMNT players who never made a lasting impact in MLS. Those include:

Colorado Rapids: Dominic Kinnear and Roy Wegerle
Dallas Burn (stop it!): Mark Santel
NY/NJ MetroStars: Ramos and Damian Silvera
New England Revolution: Jim St. Andre
San Jose Earthquakes: Eric Wynalda (this one could be foggy memory)
Tampa Bay Mutiny: Cle Kooiman

That’s a short list, obviously – just eight players from a class of 23 – but the sharper question is, who among the 23 original USMNT players left a lasting legacy, and as a player (hence no Dom Kinnear), in MLS? The list shortens almost immediately:

Columbus Crew: Brian Maisonneuve, an American who can actually play
DC United: John Harkes and Jeff Agoos
KC Wizards: Preki
Los Angeles Galaxy: Dan Calichman
NY/NJ MetroStars: Tony Meola
New England Revolution: Mike Burns, Alexi Lalas
San Jose Clash: John Doyle (if only for the bubble-perm mullet)
Tampa Bay Mutiny: Roy Lassiter and Martin Vasquez, probably

In raw numbers, that’s 8 misses versus 12 hits (the two I’m conflicted over are Mike Sorber and Brian Bliss, probably because that’s a d-mid and a defender), and that’s a positive hit-rate mathematically. If I want to just neg the whole thing, I’d argue that just 5-6 six of the 12 positive players made any kind of long-term difference (submit your guesses in the comments; no wrong answer), but I guess the deeper point is that I just shrunk the role of “the best America has to offer” from 12 players to 5-6 in the space of a sentence, and, even if you consider that in the context of a 10 teams with just 18 players on the roster (fwiw, I saw that number as the size of the rosters back in the day, and didn’t care to follow up because that number no longer means anything, right?), that’s still, at best 12 players of 180 who came from the U.S. Men’s National Team, saw, and conquered. In numerical terms, that’s just 0.07% of the total. I wouldn’t call that part of the USMNT/MLS experiment failed, so much as I’d call it a case of moving on.

To return the post to MLS itself, DC United and Bruce Arena deserve a lot of credit for setting the bar high in American club soccer. Those teams weren’t boring to watch. The larger point is that it was pretty damn clear, and pretty early in, that regardless of what happened with the U.S. Men’s team, something else was taking over. For good, ill…or does it really matter(?), MLS was its own creature from the beginning.

I’m going to really, really close with an ode to Jaime Moreno, a player I labeled as MLS’s first OG GOAT. I’m pretty sure he was a student of Bolivia’s Tahuichi Academy – and that was hot in the late 90s – but, more than that, he was the forward you’d bleed syrup to have on your team. He could run onto a through-ball, drop back and combine, run onto a cross; Moreno did it all and that’s why he held the all-time goal scoring record from 1996 to 2011, 133 from start to finish. I have no idea what brought Moreno to Major League Soccer, but he walked into that blind-spot and into the history books. It’s weird accidents like that that made this league work for as long as it did.

It made more sense to take a chance on MLS in Moreno’s day that it did from, say, the contraction season (which was…2002?) to…as season to be named later. But that’s why I’m doing this. Till 1998! (Which, thankfully, has an equally easy theme…)