{"id":1057,"date":"2006-06-26T11:32:47","date_gmt":"2006-06-26T18:32:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/?p=1057"},"modified":"2006-06-26T11:32:47","modified_gmt":"2006-06-26T18:32:47","slug":"pele-cosmos-held-court-as-americas-first-soccer-kings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/2006\/06\/26\/pele-cosmos-held-court-as-americas-first-soccer-kings\/","title":{"rendered":"Pel\u00c3\u00a9, Cosmos held court as America&#8217;s first soccer kings"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.powells.com\/cgi-bin\/imageDB.cgi?isbn=0871139413\" border=0 align=\"left\" class=\"left\" vspace=7 hspace=7\/> My <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sfgate.com\/cgi-bin\/article.cgi?f=\/c\/a\/2006\/06\/26\/DDGO0JJJIP1.DTL&#038;hw=gavin+newsham&#038;sn=001&#038;sc=1000\">review<\/a> of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.powells.com\/cgi-bin\/biblio?inkey=62-0871139413-0\"><i>Once In A Lifetime<\/i><\/a> is in today&#8217;s <i>San Francisco Chronicle<\/i>. <\/p>\n<p><i><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>While most soccer fans are enjoying the World Cup, probably only the aficionados among them will remember when Brazilian superstar Pel\u00c3\u00a9 took his place as part of a short-lived soccer team in the United States. &#8220;Once in a Lifetime: The Incredible Story of the New York Cosmos&#8221; tells how that team, made up of all-stars, the likes of which have never been seen since on an American soccer field, dominated the New York sports scene during the 1970s and early 1980s.<\/p>\n<p>In addition to Pel\u00c3\u00a9, the team boasted soccer giants Franz Beckenbauer, Carlos Alberto and Giorgio Chinaglia, who all drove the Cosmos to utter domination of the North American Soccer League during the league&#8217;s 14-year tenure.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Once in a Lifetime&#8221; describes the business brilliance of Steve Ross, the chairman of Warner Bros. and founder of the Cosmos, who knew nothing about soccer before he started the team. In the book&#8217;s opening sentence, Newsham writes that Ross &#8220;didn&#8217;t know a goalkeeper from a zookeeper&#8221; and that he would have preferred ownership of the NFL&#8217;s New York Giants. Ross&#8217; nose for business was what led him to sign Pel\u00c3\u00a9 and the other legendary footballers. Pel\u00c3\u00a9&#8217;s signing tripled attendance at Cosmos games nearly overnight, to 21,000, and soon the team filled its stadium and was forced to turn tens of thousands away. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My review of Once In A Lifetime is in today&#8217;s San Francisco Chronicle. While most soccer fans are enjoying the World Cup, probably only the aficionados among them will remember when Brazilian superstar Pel\u00c3\u00a9 took his place as part of a short-lived soccer team in the United States. &#8220;Once in a Lifetime: The Incredible Story of the New York Cosmos&#8221; tells how that team, made up of all-stars, the likes of which have never been seen since on an American&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"aside","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[103],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1057","post","type-post","status-publish","format-aside","hentry","category-journalism","post_format-post-format-aside"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4uks-h3","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1057","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1057"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1057\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}