"Hot Winter Nights" - Chapter 3--The Other Guys

This time in my not-so-little tribute to the Kansas City Comets of the original Major Indoor Soccer League, I'll discuss (and sometimes decry) a few old foes they faced back in the '80s and my memories thereof...

St. Louis Steamers  The Comets’ most heated rivalry was with their Missouri counterparts in St. Louis.  The Steamers—whose logo was eerily similar to that of Boatmen’s Bank, a former employer of mine—were a dominant MISL franchise the early ‘80s and pretty much owned the Comets through the first four seasons they played each other.  Many Comet-Steamer contests were ugly affairs, fraught with lots of chippy play, rough stuff and out-and-out fist fights that even drew blood sometimes.  This rivalry made Yankees-Red Sox, Ohio St.-Michigan and Chiefs-Raiders seem like pillow fights in comparison.  Kansas City met with much frustration in both the regular season and playoffs against Team Steam, especially when St. Lou won a best-of-five series 3-2 in 1984 that the Comets could’ve/should’ve won, had it not been for some poor officiating that turned a blind eye to some major Steamer transgressions.

The following year, the teams met again in the postseason, and the Comets won Game 1 of a best-of-three in St. Louis on an overtime goal by my boy Damir Haramina (@ 2:16 of this video).  Game 2 took place here at Kemper Arena on Friday, April 19, 1985—a date I’ll take to the grave with me.  All 10,241 of us in attendance were in full-goose Twisted Sister We’re-Not-Gonna-Take-It-Anymore mode and this turned out to be the most intense sporting event I’ve ever witnessed in person—THIS WAS WAR!  The crowd was into every little thing that happened in this game, and it was like we were going to will this team to victory even if it was the last thing we did.  I remember there was a lot of pushing and shoving on the field, but surprisingly few penalties considering the bad vibes between the two squads.  Things were looking dire late in the 4th quarter as St. Louis maintained their 3-2 halftime lead until Angelo DiBernardo tied things up with 2:13 left in regulation.  Then a buck-22 into overtime, midfielder Tasso Koutsoukos rammed home a feed from Laurie Abrahams past goalie Slobo Ilijevski to clinch the Comets’ first playoff series win, thus sending me and 10,240 other souls into a frenzy.  I remember raising my hands and looking at the Kemper ceiling and half-yelling/half-screaming an orgasmic “YEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!!!!!!”  It felt like demons were being exorcised that night, and in a way, they were, because the Comets dominated the St. Louis from that point onward, and the Steamers began a rapid decline and were out of the league altogether a mere three years later.

The Kansas City Royals won the World Series six months later against that other St. Louis team, which was awesome, but I look back even more fondly on this victory.  I had no real quarrel with the Cardinals, and it just seemed so much sweeter that the Comets finally took out those freakin' Steamers!  It didn’t even matter that San Diego swept the Comets in the subsequent playoff series that spring—we’d FINALLY gotten over the Steamer hump, and anything else would’ve been anti-climactic.  That game was also so exciting that I couldn’t get enough Comets soccer, thus afterward I only missed attending two Comets home games throughout the remainder of their existence until 1991.  And both of those absences were because I had to work, yet during even one of those, I still got to run the game broadcast thereof on the board during my KKJC radio gig in Blue Springs, MO for the home opener of the 1987-88 season—against the Steamers, naturally. 

The Steamers had four players I truly despised in those early years:  defenders Carl Rose and Steve Pecher, forward Don Ebert and goalkeeper Slobo Ilijevski.  Rose, Pecher and Ebert were agitators, always instigating skirmishes and then complaining to the officials that someone else started them.  Pecher later played for the Comets, so we had to learn to tolerate him, but I saw Rose and Ebert (elbowing Val Tuksa in this pic) as pure evil. I do remember one of the Comets getting the best of Rose one night, leaving his nose and face bloodied.  What made Ebert even more infuriating was that he was a good scorer in addition to being a goon.  You can also watch Pecher totally lose it against the Wichita Wings in a legendary 1982 playoff game at the very beginning of this video.



And then there was Slobo.  We just loved to hurl invective at Mr. Ilijevski (pronounced illy-EV-ski) the most because he was one of the great whiners of all-time.  I also seem to remember an on-field spitting incident at Kemper Arena that inspired many Comets fans to call him “Slobbo”.  Having said all that, this man was also one of the greatest goalies in MISL history.  The “ageless wonder” was the Dominik Hasek of indoor soccer, seemingly getting better the older he got, and Slobo played well into his ‘40s.  As good as Slobo was, he did have a penchant for wandering too far from his goal (wanting to be part of the offense, usually) and he'd get burned by allowing a cheap goal, like the one at the tail end of this video.  He was usually good for one of these at least once per game.  From everything I’ve read, he was a very nice man off the field, and Slobo Ilijevski was to the St. Louis soccer community what Gino Schiraldi is to the K.C. soccer landscape, making his unexpected death in 2008 all the more shocking and saddening.  Slobo was a great warrior and a worthy (albeit whiny!) opponent indeed.  Rest in peace…

In spite of the numerous nasty things I write about the Steamers, I do respect them as people and as competitors. St. Louis was/is a fertile breeding ground for soccer talent, especially amongst the numerous Catholic schools in the area, and the team preferred to employ homegrown players as opposed to stocking their roster with foreign-born players like most MISL teams did.  Thus, native St. Louisans like Jeff Cacciatore, Steve Pecher, Don Ebert, Ty Keough, Greg Makowski, Sam Bick, Tony Bellinger, Ed Gettemeier, Mark Frederickson and Daryl Doran, as well as other U.S.-born players like Ricky “Captain America” Davis, were all mainstays on the Steamer roster for years.  This is not to say the Streamers were totally devoid of foreigners—stalwarts like wee Scots Tony Glavin and Duncan MacEwan, London’s Carl Rose, Irishman Redmond Lane, and Yugoslavians Nebo Bandovic, Njego Pesa and the late Slobo rounded out the squad, and they were a formidable force for several years beginning in 1979.  Over time, though, it seemed like the St. Louis and Kansas City rosters were interchangeable, as players like Pecher, Frederickson, MacEwen, Gettemeier, Makowski, Bandovic, Keough and Glavin all shuffled back and forth across I-70 and played for both teams over the years.

Team Steam (which was partially owned by baseball's Stan Musial and Joe Garagiola at one time) was quite a phenomenon in the early ‘80s at the venerable St. Louis Arena on Oakland Avenue, then known shamefully as “The Checkerdome” when Ralston-Purina owned the NHL’s St. Louis Blues.  Amazingly, the Steamers outdrew the Blues in average attendance five years in a row, thanks in large part to having so many local boys on the squad.  At one point in the winter of 1981-82, the Steamers were the 2nd-best drawing indoor pro sports team in North America, just behind the NHL's Edmonton Oilers, and it's hard to fathom now how names like Slobo, Glavin, Bellinger and Ebert were just as prominent in the St. Louis sports scene as Whitey Herzog, Vince Coleman, Willie McGee and Ozzie Smith were back then.  However, the “St. Louis vs. The World” mentality that initially won over the Gateway City faithful would ultimately be the franchise’s downfall—that, and a revolving-door ownership situation.  St. Louis was always a bridesmaid but never the bride when it came to championships in the MISL, and while the homegrown talent on the team was good, it wasn’t quite good enough to get them over the hump.  Sadly, the novelty of the team wore off by 1985 or so, and Steamer crowds dwindled as the Blues began to reassert themselves during their 1986 “Monday Night Miracle” playoff run and puck fans in St. Louis rediscovered their team.  The Steamers suddenly started hemorrhaging money and folded after the 1987-88 season.  It figured—as soon as the Comets had finally mastered them, they crapped out!  The Steamers were replaced by the St. Louis Storm in 1989-90, and featured several familiar players (Doran, Slobo, et al) and a cool logo, but it just wasn’t the same.  Oh, how the mighty had fallen…

Wichita Wings  Apart from the Kansas City Wizards, the Wichita Wings were the only Major League professional sports franchise that ever called the state of Kansas home, and they were the “Little Engine That Could” of indoor soccer, if you will.  Although they competed with Wichita State Shockers basketball for sports $$, the Wings were pretty much the only game in town, and the city supported them avidly during the ‘80s.  The success and longevity of the Wings in small-market Wichita was remarkable, and we Comets fans had a fun and almost-friendly rivalry with their rabid following, the “Orange Army” (or “Wing-A-Lings”, as I preferred to call them).  The Wings played their home games at Kansas Coliseum out in the boonies north of town off I-135.  The Coliseum, also known as Britt Brown Arena, seated just a skosh under 10,000 and had outstanding sightlines for indoor soccer and a flat, low-slung roof that created a cacophony of noise when the crowds got loud, not to mention wide, comfortable seats.  My friends and I made several trips down the Turnpike when the Comets played there, and the Wing-A-Lings certainly traveled well, as we’d often encounter several hundred Wichita crazies at Kemper Arena—many with orange hair—clanking cowbells and popping balloons every time the Wings scored a goal.  The rivalry between Wichita and the Comets wasn’t quite as nasty as Comets-Steamers, I think because the Wings (and their fans) had just as many issues with St. Louis as we did (as this video attests), but it was fun all the same, and very evenly-matched.  So much so, in fact, that the Comets trailed their head-to-head regular season series with Wichita pretty much throughout their entire existence until the Comets’ very last regular season home game ever, when they defeated the Wings to win the all-time series 32-31.

The Wings debuted two years before the Comets in 1979, and were competitive right away, finishing either first or second in their division in each of their first five seasons.  Instead of loading their roster with local talent like the Steamers did, Wichita imported many of their players form Denmark and fielded a squad built around the “Danish Connection” of Kim Roentved, Erik Rasmussen, Keld Bordinggaard, Jan Oleson, Frank Rasmussen (no relation to Erik) and Jorgen Kristensen, along with stalwart goaltender Mike Dowler, defender Kevin Kewley and forwards Chico Borja. Norman Piper and Andy Chapman, among others. Roentved, Kristensen, Dowler and Frank Rasmussen all later played for the Comets, as well.  Erik Rasmussen (aka, "The Wizard") was an asbolute sniper of a goal scorer, and I firmly believe that if he'd had a longer tenure in the league, he would be the "Lord Of All Indoors" instead of all-time MISL leading scorer Steve Zungul--the Wizard was THAT good.  Borja was also a fan favorite in Wichita, a very likeable guy off the field, and he won my eternal respect when he and fellow Wing Dale Ervine assisted in the rescue efforts immediately after the tragic tornado that struck the Wichita/Andover area barely a week after the Wings were eliminated by the Comets in the 1991 playoffs.  However, on the field, Chico was every bit as volatile as Carlos Zambrano of the Chicago Cubs is today.  Once when Borja played for the L.A. Lazers, the ref called a questionable foul on him right in front of me and Tom in our front row seats (3:43 of this video), and I swear, I thought Borja’s eyes were going to explode when he reacted!  I can’t help but wonder if the dudes who created “Ren And Stimpy” were in the crowd that night, because Borja resembled Ren in “YOU EEEEDIOT!!” mode when he went ballistic.  I can't resist this:  "Chico, don't be discouraged..."

For the 1988-89 season, the Wings sported the goofiest sports uniforms I’ve ever seen.  They came out for pre-game warm-ups one night wearing these vertically-striped blue-and-orange shirts (modeled by Pedro DeBrito here) and Tom and I started laughing. At first we thought these were just for warm-ups, but when they came out again for the game we were like, “Those are their actual uniforms?!?”  They looked like something clowns would wear.  Anyway, after several trips to Wichita to see the Comets play some close-but-no-cigar matches with the Wings over the years, Tom and I finally got a winner in our final visit there in 1991.  We were being smart-asses with the Wing-A-Lings near the end, and I said, “Y’all can go home—we’ll turn out the lights for you!”  The Comets players, to their credit, made sure to make their way in our direction and acknowledge us and the rest of the K.C. contingent who had assembled, and they waved to us and applauded in thanks for our support.  Total class.

The Wings survived the demise of the MISL in 1992 and landed (get it? wings/plane landed!) in the NPSL and the rivalry continued (tepidly, anyway) with the Kansas City Attack for a few more years in the ‘90s before being grounded for good in 2001 when the NPSL morphed into the MISL Mach II and the Wings finally folded.  The Kansas Coliseum (at left) is now closed as well and awaits the wrecking ball, having given way to the fancy new downtown Wichita arena last year.  I’m cautiously optimistic that the current MISL may well place a new Wings franchise in the fancy new downtown arena someday soon so we can “Go back, Jack—do it again” and resurrect the rivalry with the Wing-A-Lings and the new Comets.  If you want a very succinct synopsis of Wings history, I highly recommend all five parts of this YouseTube video.  I think I actually like it better than the Comets video that's out there...

San Diego Sockers  Those natural geographical rivalries with St. Louis and Wichita were certainly intense and exciting, but the MISL opponent I loathed and despised the most was the San Diego Sockers—much moreso than the Steamers and Wings.  To me, the Suckers (as I preferred to call them) were like the Oakland Raiders of the MISL—pure evil!  I almost dreaded watching those late-night game telecasts from San Diego because the Comets rarely ever won out there (especially in the early years), and struggled mightily to defeat SD here at home.  The playoffs were particularly frustrating, as San Diego knocked the Comets out no less than four times in five years, the most painful loss being in 1988 when the Comets had San Diego by the throat with a 3-1 series lead, then proceeded to get hammered in the final three games by scores of 7-1, 6-1 and 8-5.  The ’87 playoffs were similar, as the Comets led SD 2-1 in a best-of-five series and couldn’t finish them off then either.

Other incidents over the years gave me cause to revile the San Di-EGO Suckers from time to time, as well.  The most egregious to me was the time in 1985 when Sockers head coach Ron Newman pulled his goalkeeper in favor of a sixth attacker with three seconds left in the match when they had the lead!  Newman justified this Bush League maneuver by claiming that he wanted his offense to practice a particular set piece, to which Comets head coach Rick Benben responded with something to the effect of, “If he wants to practice, next time we’ll move off the field so they can have more room.”  Ironically, I was later forced to accept Mr. Newman when he was named the first head coach of our mighty Kansas City Wiz(ards) of Major League Soccer in 1996.  I still don’t like the horse's patoot, tho!

Speaking of horse's patoots, San Diego forward Juli Veee didn’t endear himself to K.C. fans in the aftermath of the worst beating the Comets ever took, a 13-3 drubbing by the Sockers in early 1986, during which SD poured it on with six goals in the 4th quarter, four of which came after they already led 9-3.  Veee proceeded to call our players “tired old war horses...the worst team I've ever played" and accused them of quitting.  Not to make excuses, but undoubtedly not everyone’s minds were into the game that night because of what happened earlier that day—the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster.  Oh what sweet revenge it was a mere ten months later when the Comets made Veeeeeeeeee eat his words as Jan Goossens (assisted by Damir Haramina) jammed in the game-winner in OT at Kemper 4-3 to snap the Comets’ 15-game losing streak against SD.  From that point onward, the SD-KC rivalry was much more competitive and evenly-contested.  In Game 3 of the 1988 playoffs, the Comets staged the greatest single-game comeback in team history, as they trailed SD 5-1 and 6-2, and roared back to tie the game on a goal by Barry Wallace with about 5:00 left in regulation, followed by Dale Mitchell’s OT goal to win it, 7-6 (2:48 of this video).  By the way, I thought Juli was a girl's name...

Aside from Veee and Newman, the San Diego Evil Empire was also comprised of cretins like Paul Dougherty, Cha Cha Namdar, Brian Schmetzer, Zoltan Toth, Waad Hirmez, Ade Coker, Kaz Deyna, Kevin Crow, Brian Quinn, Jean Willrich, Jacques Ladouceur, Hugo Perez, Branko Segota, Fernando Clavijo and Steve Zungul, as well as future Comets Gary Collier and Jim Gorsek, and numerous others.  I remember during a late-night TV broadcast from SD, an open microphone picked up someone on the Comets bench shouting, “Crow, you c---sucker!”  Thereinafter I always referred to Kevin Crow as “Crow the C---sucker”.  It seemed to fit, anyway...

Twenty years ago, I would’ve gladly pissed in any of the San Diego players' Cheerios, but the passage of time has given me cause to step back and see what a truly fine body of men that team was back in the day.  The Sockers won ten championships between the NASL and MISL from 1981-92, thus making them the New York Yankees/Montreal Canadiens/Boston Celtics of indoor soccer, and like them or not, you at least have to respect their accomplishments.  You would think the most successful sports entity in San Diego history would rate a nice exhibit in the San Diego Sports Hall of Fame museum, wouldn’t you?  Guess again.  I was quite taken aback when I visited the museum in 2008 and the only mention of the Sockers’ existence in the whole place was Juli Veee and Ron Newman being members of the SD Ring of Honor.  Made me almost feel sorry for the team in general.  Almost, that is…

For you movie buffs out there, the late Kazimir "Kaz" Deyna of the San Diego Sockers appeared in the 1980 Sylvester Stallone film Escape to Victory as one of Sly’s teammates on the soccer field.  Sadly, Deyna was a knucklehead on the night of September 1, 1989 when he got drunk off his arse (blood alcohol level .20) and was killed instantly at age 41 when he drove his a car into the back of a parked truck on Interstate 15 in San Diego. 

Los Angeles Lazers  The MISL team I actually DID feel sorry for was the Los Angeles Lazers, an expansion franchise owned by Lakers president Jerry Buss, who joined the year after the Comets.  You’d think in a metro area as big as L.A., you could get a few folks to come out to see your games, no matter what sport, but for some reason, the Lazers never caught on out there.  It was almost comical to watch Comets games on TV from a three-fourths-empty Fabulous Forum, as the Lazers would routinely have crowds in the 3,000-4,000 range.  It didn’t help that they went 8-40 in their inaugural season, but the Lazers improved to .500 and actually finished ahead of the Comets the next two seasons, then plummeted back to last place for two more seasons, in spite of having some star-quality players like Poli Garcia, Willie Molano, Gus Mokalis, Greg Ion, Doug Neely, Lee Cornwell (shown below, playing in front of a typical Lazer home crowd), David Brcic and the single-named killer B’s, Batata (aka, Nilton DaSilva) and Beto (aka, Roberto Dos Santos).  The Lazers were involved in a rather infamous incident in 1986 in St. Louis when head coach Keith Tozer was so incensed at the officiating that he instructed his players to just stand still and let the Steamers score at will, for which the league fined and reprimanded him later.  By the time they finally put a really competitive team together, Buss pulled the plug on the Lazers in 1989.  The Comets were beneficiaries of the Lazers’ demise, nabbing Ion, Neely and goalie Jim Gorsek in the dispersal draft.  Tozer later was head coach of the Kansas City Attack before moving on to the Milwaukee Wave, winning several NPSL titles there in the ‘90s, and Batata’s son, Nino DaSilva, was a star and fan favorite with the Attack for a time.

It’s a shame the Lazer thing didn’t work out, because I think success in the L.A. market would’ve been a boon to the MISL in terms of media exposure, especially if some Hollywood-types like Jack Nicholson would’ve made attending Lazer games fashionable.  Similarly, the league could never get a foothold in the New York City area, as four different franchises—the New York Arrows, Cosmos and Express on Long Island as well as the New Jersey Rockets at the Meadowlands—all came and went between 1978 and 1987 without any New Yorkers noticing, even when the Arrows dominated the league in the early years.  Even worse, neither the Cosmos or Express were able to complete a full year in the MISL, each folding ignominiously midway their respective inaugural seasons.

Best Of The Rest  There were a few oddities in Comets history. In the seven years the Comets faced the Cleveland Force, each team only won one game in the other’s home arena.  However, the Comets were a bit more successful at Cleveland’s Richfield Coliseum against the Force’s replacement, the Cleveland Crunch…Similarly, the Comets only won once against the Minnesota Strikers at the Met Center in Bloomington, and the Strikers had one lone victory at Kemper against the Comets…Games with the Dallas Sidekicks always seemed to be decided by 1-goal for the longest time, and during a stretch in 1987 four straight Comets-Sidekicks games were decided in overtime, including two of the longest games in Comets history—a triple-OT marathon in Dallas and a double-OT thriller in K.C. (the Jan Goossens shirt game @ 2:36 of this video), both won by K.C.

Other individual player memories:
Cleveland’s high-scoring midfeidler Kai Haaskivi was a perennial all-star for both the Force and Crunch, serving as head coach for the latter as well, but my friend Tom and I always made fun of the man because of his startling resemblance to this nerdy guy we went to junior high school with!  A classic judging-book-by-cover scenario, you might say…The late Stan Stamenkovic of Memphis and Baltimore was nicknamed “The Magician” for his remarkable footwork and ball-control skills, and you’d swear that damn ball had a string attached to it, the way he was able to draw it back to himself at will.  Because of his stocky and pudgy build, we also called him “The Weeble”—he wobbled a lot, but never fell down on the field!  Sadly and ironically, Stamenkovic died of a head injury in 1996 after falling on an icy sidewalk.  Check The Magician out in the 1983 MISL All-Star Game, right here at Kemper…In those last couple seasons, the Comets had to deal with the Dastardly Duo of Hector Marinaro and Zoran Karic with the Cleveland Crunch.  These two seemingly scored at will against us, no matter how well we defended them. Karic was especially annoying because he was a career dive-taker and whiner, pissing and moaning that he’d been fouled after nearly every play, which made it really hard to root for him when he joined the Kansas City Attack in the late ‘90s…My favorite MISL player nickname belonged to Tacoma’s Neil Megson, who as known as the “Elegant Assassin”.  I’m sure he preferred that over “Meggy”…Speaking of nicknames, South Africa’s David Byrne (not to be confused with the head Talking Head) was known as “The Man With The Red Shoes” in honor of his crimson footwear.  That worked out fine in Baltimore, since red was one of the Blast’s colors, but looked kinda funny when he was traded to Wichita and their orange and blue ensembles.  He also sported one of the mightier mullets in the MISL…Perhaps the MISL’s biggest star was Tatu of the Dallas Sidekicks.  His real name was Antonio Carlos Pecorari, and facially, he reminded me of a cross between actor Tony Danza and the late Freddie Mercury of Queen (w/o the dreaded moustache).  Tatu’s trademark was removing his game uniform after every goal he scored (home or away) and tossing the sweaty garment into the crowd.  A bit of a showboat, yes, but not nearly as arrogant as say, Terrell Owens or Chad Ocho-Stinko, and thankfully, Tatu never took his shorts off and threw them into the crowd!...One of my favorite opponents was goalkeeper Tino Lettieri of the Minnesota Strikers.  Tino was a colorful dude who was known for his equally-colorful stuffed parrot/good-luck charm, Ozzie, whom he always kept in the back of the goal he was tending.  What I liked about Lettieri was his reckless, scrappy playing style, although it sometimes got out of hand, like at the 6:30 mark of this video, where clearly the Bird was NOT the word!  Like Slobo before him, Tino was known to go astray and get toasted on a "gimme" goal now and then.  And just like our man, Gino Schiraldi, Tino went into the pizza bidness up in Minnesota after he retired as a player.

I guess I better say something about the “Lord of All Indoors”, Steve Zungul, the MISL’s all-time leading scorer.  While I respect his accomplishments, I was never particularly enamored with him, as Zungul came across as an arrogant Reggie Jackson/Barry Bonds-type—i.e., he was good and he knew it.  The guy scored 108 goals in a 40-game season in 1980-81 and 103 in 40 games in 1981-82—that’s damn near a hat trick every game!  Some players are lucky to get one hat trick in their entire lives.  The S.O.B. was good, no question, but I just can’t shake the horse’s ass image I have of Zungul…

One last person of note is Willy Roy. Little Willy was the fiery head coach of the Chicago Sting, and he was fit to be tied following a 1986 game at Kemper when Comets midfielder John Bain scored four goals, including the game-winner (at 2:27 of this video) with precisely one second left in regulation in a 6-5 victory.  Roy claimed that the winning goal shouldn’t have counted because the clock expired before the ball crossed the goal line (even though the above TV replay clearly indicates otherwise) and he called the Comets a “Mickey Mouse organization”, among other things.  This was obviously a mere case of sour grapes that I think had more to do with his team giving up four goals to the same guy than issues with the game clock operator.  Comets fans didn’t forget things like that, so next time the Stink, er uh, Sting came to town about a month later, the entire crowd proceeded to serenade Willy with, “M-I-C…K-E-Y…M-O-U-S-E…Willy Roy…Willy Roy!”  Ironically, Chicago won that game in OT by the score of—you guessed it, 6-5!

The Refs  And finally, no discussion of the Comets/MISL would be complete without mentioning the abysmal officiating that plagued the league throughout its existence.  Picture this year’s putrid World Cup officiating (on steroids) and you’ll get a pretty good idea of how piss-poor it truly was.  It seemed like Comets games were always officiated by the usual suspects, Bill Maxwell, Esse Baharmast, Ermanno Ritschl, Herb Silva, Kelly Mock, Brian Hall and the worst of the bunch, Gino D'Ipollito.  “Dippo” was a roly-poly man who bore a slight resemblance to Mr. DeFazio on “Laverne & Shirley”, and he lived up to his nickname with some of most blatantly horrid calls (both for and against the Comets) that I’ve ever seen in any sport.  Some of Dippo’s gems made Don Denkinger’s 1985 World Series gaffe seem accurate.  According to one of the league media guides, D'Ipollito worked as a carpenter during the off-season.  If he carpentered anything like the way he reffed, one can only surmise that his houses resembled Early Cuyler’s place on “Squidbillies”.  In addition to their general ineptitude, these guys always seemed to molly-coddle superstar players like Zungul, Tatu, Vee, Haaskivi and Karl-Heinz Granitza, et al, especially when they took dives, which was more than a little bit.  I swear, there were some nights when I really wondered if MISL games were fixed, given the appallingly bad refereeing that was taking place.

Just to give an idea how poor the officiating was in the MISL, a 1987 incident that went in favor of the Comets gives a good illustration.  During the off-season, the league made a rule change that eliminated the three-line violation when a team has a two-man advantage.  Similar to how icing becomes legal in hockey during a power play, the goalkeeper was now allowed to throw the ball over the three lines on the field (think the red line and two blue lines in hockey) without infraction while down two men on a penalty-kill, but on this particular night in St. Louis, one of the refs nailed Steamers ‘keeper Pat Baker for a three-line violation anyway while the Comets had the two-man advantage.  The Steamers got hosed because the Comets subsequently scored on that power play.  And who was one of the refs on the field that night?  None other than Herb Silva, former MISL Director of Officials!  How could the league maintain any credibility when one of the senior referees didn’t even know the freakin’ rules?  Yes, I realize these guys were/are human and make mistakes, but geez Louise, it was soooo frustrating, especially during important playoff games.  There was a brief time when the MISL's headquarters were housed in the same New York City office building as the World Wrestling Federation, and I couldn't help but wonder sometimes if their "refs" were on the same payroll...