![]() We were the first American team to make it through the qualifying to the Olympic Games. I definitely broke curfew and was never on time in the hotel. Goalkeepers all over the world – whether it is Peter Schmeichel or Fabien Barthez – are little characters and I was a bad boy. You considered the last game against West-Germany as some sort of a punishment. You were suspended for the first two games for not cutting your sideburns and marching in the opening ceremony. The US qualified for the very first time and played Morocco and Malaysia before losing heavily against West-Germany. The whole world changed for soccer in America. I was a little bit lazy about studying law and took a leave of absence to play one or two years and then I’d go back to school, but all of a sudden Pelé came. I was in law school when I got back from the Olympics and the New York Cosmos wanted to offer me a little bit of money to play soccer. Living the dream, studying law was not really an option? At sixteen years old I started to play soccer and at eighteen years old I was an All-American soccer player at Harvard and on the US Olympic team. I had never seen a soccer game before and the soccer coach asked who the best athlete was in high school! He knew it was me and he asked if I’d play as a goalkeeper. When I was sixteen, my high school cancelled the American football program. I was a running-back in American football, a shortstop in baseball and a point guard in basketball. ![]() Then I moved to Long Island and if you were an American at the time, you played basketball, baseball and American football. I was an athlete, but I didn’t see a soccer ball until I was sixteen. It is as crazy as a story you would ever hear – to play as a goalkeeper for the New York Cosmos with Pelé, Franz Beckenbauer and Carlos Alberto? Not one chance in a million from where I came from! I was born in The Bronx, a tough area of New York, and I grew up with gangs and guns. My career in soccer is a fantasy, a dream. You were not predisposed to be a soccer player, let alone be a goalkeeper? You were born in The Bronx in 1949 and grew up on Long Island, where you went to Wheatley School in Old Westbury.
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