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.
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…
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. 
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.
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.
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...
