Book Review: “Long-Range Goals” by Beau Dure
Posted by: Sirk // Category: General News, Media Matters
In 2009, Major League Soccer found itself on the best seller lists thanks to “The Beckham Experiment”, written by Sports Illustrated’s Grant Wahl, who played storm chaser to the inevitable tornado of avarice, duplicity, hubris, stupidity, and good-intentions-turned-Satan’s-pavement that accompanied the insertion of a global celebrity into a typical MLS team circa 2007 and 2008. Each line of text was the track on which the train wreck unfolded, and the tome was a rubbernecker’s delight.
Beau Dure, the longtime USA Today journalist and editor, has written an entirely different book. Rather than immersing itself in a single topic, Dure’s “Long-Range Goals: The Success Story of Major League Soccer” serves as the league’s first general history volume. From the soccer-less soup from which MLS emerged, to the present day, and even a speculative glimpse into the issues of the future, Dure expertly leads readers through the first decade and a half of Major League’s Soccer’s existence.
“This league has fans. This league has players. And this league has history,” Dure emphatically writes in the preface. And he also admits, “In 14 short years, too much has happened to compile into one book” and that “telling the stories of the many great characters on the field and in the offices would take many books, not one.” This is undoubtedly true, but Dure handles those limitations well. The history tour that he offers briskly moves the time line along, offering a Cliff’s Notes recapping of teams and seasons, but then strategically pauses to delve deeper into meatier subjects, always with the help of extensive interview excerpts from the pertinent parties.
It’s on these in-depth detours that the book truly shines, even for someone already familiar with the league’s general history. For example, not only do we learn of assemblage of Major League Soccer and its single entity structure, but Dure looks back on the entire process of awarding the rights to a first division league. One of the three entities vying for that status was League One America, which proposed to offer an unconventional hybridization of the sport that purported be more appealing to American tastes. Dure caught up with League One America’s head honcho, Jim Paglia, and it’s fascinating to hear him explain his motivations and rational for altering the game, as well as the reception he claims that his version of the game had received from those around the world who had given it a chance. Over a decade later, Paglia still sounds like a man convinced that he had built a better mouse trap. Obviously, Paglia’s proposed league is now nothing but a footnote, but it’s the kind of kooky footnote that demonstrates the environment from which MLS had sprung. For fans who loathed MLS’ initial flirtation with countdown clocks and shootouts, the record shows that it could have been worse. A lot worse.
It was Derek Smalls of Spinal Tap who once said, “In hindsight, retrospect is always 20/20, isn’t it?” That thought came to mind when reading the chapter on the MLS Players’ Association’s anti-trust lawsuit against the league in the late 90s. In the space of 24 pages, Dure not only does an excellent job recapping the pivotal case that would preserve the league’s single-entity structure, but he speaks with many of the principals involved, who shed light on their thoughts at the time and also engage in some Monday morning quarterbacking all these years later. (Given that some of the second-guessing surrounds the involvement of the NFL Players’ Association, perhaps “Monday morning quarterbacking” was not the best term for me to use.)
The lawsuit is the lengthiest detour, but Dure pauses at other critical junctures along the way, be it the successful inaugural season, stadium building, the hiring of Don Garber, contraction, Freddy Mania, the shrewd creation of Soccer United Marketing, or the obligatory look at Beckham, Blanco and the designated player rule.
The chronological season-by-season history flies by in between these and other examinations. The seasonal recaps are slight enough to breeze through, but meaty enough to nudge the memory of the longtime observer and to provide a basic historical foundation for the new generation of MLS fans.
And that breeziness has its advantages. When recapping the 2004 season, Dure mercifully boils down the horrific nightmare of October 31, 2004, into this single paragraph: “Disaster struck in Columbus, where intimidating New England goalkeeper Matt Reis stopped two penalty kicks. Taylor Twellman then staked the Revs to a late 1-0 lead. Edson Buddle scored in stoppage time, but it wasn’t enough– New England knocked out the Supporters’ Shield winners on 2-1 aggregate.”
See? That’s it! Three tiny sentences! He didn’t even mention that one guy’s name, or how, when taking his disgraceful penalty kick, he had made it appear as if he had kicked a bowling ball using only his pinky toe. Nor did Dure mention that, intimidating or not, Matt Reis didn’t even technically have to stop that particular penalty kick as that task was largely accomplished by individual blades of short-cut grass. So I, for one, am thankful for Beau’s brevity.
With “Long-Range Goals”, Dure has successfully provided a brisk but revelatory chronology of Major League Soccer’s first decade and a half. Informative for diehards and newbies alike, Dure’s tome is a welcome addition to the small (but thankfully growing) MLS bookshelf. One can only hope that if “Long-Range Goals” moves quantity commensurate with its quality, Dure will be asked to get to work on the next of those “many books” that are waiting to be written about the league we love.
PS– For the impulsive, here’s a convenient link to the Amazon order page for “Long-Range Goals.”